Another gorgeous wintery sunset over Barneveld Prairie at the end of a day filled with turbulent weather. It wasn't so much the amount of snow, but the drifting and dangerous windchills dipping down to -35d Fahrenheit that was potentially serious. I see this winter storm has been responsible for several dozen deaths; people stranded in the cold, accidents, etc. Seasons greetings, right? Though a couple of former US presidents offered holiday missives via social media, I want to share Donald J. Trump's in the event you missed his self-aggrandizing psychopathic gem:
"Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is illegally coercing & paying Social and LameStream Media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant, and USA LOVING Donald J. Trump, and, of course, The Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special "Prosecutor" who, together with his wife and family, HATES "Trump" more than any other person on earth. LOVE TO ALL!"
The universe as we presently understand it is around 14 billion years old. Its age is derived from a number of methods via direct observation, cosmological measurements, and various theoretical models which I won't describe here for brevity's sake. It could be older or younger, but the number is billions and not several thousands as some contemporary myths continue to proffer. To be sure, our puny primate minds experience tremendous difficulty imagining deep time at such a scale.
In the context of an ancient universe, it's interesting to contemplate the enormity of existence through the window of our comparatively minuscule lifespans. And yet from one's lifetime all of the preceding time of non-existence is nothing. Upon death, you might take the view that what happens next isn't all that different from the time prior to your birth. Once again billions of years pass until the end of our sun, the Earth, all life, and perhaps the universe itself also dies (cold death, zero thermodynamic energy) or is reborn in a Big Crunch. The point is from our personal timeframe the universe begins with our birth and ends with our death. Of course, all of that dimensional time does actually pass, just as it did prior to your birth, but it can't be experienced as there is no mind (yours) to experience it with. But other minds will ... at least for a little while.
Well, that isn't so scary, is it … nothingness? Mark Twain commented on this very notion: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Technically he wasn't literally dead, for death requires being alive at some prior point. But being dead isn't a state of being at all, it's a state of not being or not existing. Still, from our personal perspectives this non-state is the same: nothingness. It's kind of creepy to think about, and yet Twain's point is clear: it's really no inconvenience whatsoever.
It's challenging to imagine having never been born that all of this stuff would go on existing anyway. The ticket to The Big Show is birth, out of millions of potentials your biological father's genetic contribution combined with your mother's was you. How fortunate! Yet it easily could have been someone else instead of you; a non-existent brother or sister who will never be. It's as Richard Dawkins wrote in Unweaving the Rainbow:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
Let's speculate that the end of the known universe ends in a Big Crunch, followed by another Big Bang, and further hypothesize that this oscillates ad infinitum. Wouldn't it be uncanny as all hell that the laws of physics (ignoring quantum fluctuations) occur precisely and exactly the same way, resulting in your eventual birth, life, and death, over and over without end? With no conceivable way of knowing one of our many lives to the next having ever existed, would this model be any different from what we experience at the present moment? You're in one life now, and you can only ever know just one. All you ever experience is you, for all time, and time beyond time, as a recurring dimension, one universe after another.
What if instead of oscillating universes coming and going in a linear fashion that they coexist with differential timeframes of big bangs, big crunches ― this wouldn't be too different from the multiverse concept of spacetime/existence. That's to say that what we consider the universe to be is just another type of cosmological phenomenon within a larger context. Just as Edwin Hubble discovered the existence of other galaxies in 1929, perhaps the universe shell is just the next level container, so to speak. This begs the question: Well, what might be beyond that? No one can say and much of this is speculative, merely a thought experiment.
Cogito, ergo sum. We can't really doubt our own existence and there is at least this one universe that we presently find ourselves in. Though this seems indisputable, a Matrix-like existence is a possibility (minds in vats or virtual reality simulation), but I hold that its plausibility is extremely weak or veridically worthless. What life appears to be is how I should treat it and interact with it and not what it might be ― the Matrix might is untenable.
And so here we are in the vastness of the Cosmos, aboard a diminutive blue-green planet that's part of a solar system tucked away in the western spiral arm of a galaxy ― a planet teeming with incredible biodiversity and opportunities to observe Nature at its finest splendor of what it can render given enough time. In a way I actually feel a little sorry for Mr. Trump and those like him. I'm sure his life is meaningful to him, but I can't help think all he has missed and will continue miss out on. I wouldn't trade it for whatever monetary fortunes he may possess.
2023? Don't waste your precious time.
Barneveld Prairie Image © 2022 Mike McDowell