| DEEP TIME (what is this?) The Journey of a Particle from the Moment of Creation to the Death of the Universe and Beyond David Darling 
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We are the music-makers, and the dreamers of dreams.
—William Shakespeare
There were no landmarks. No galaxies. No stars. Only a heartbeat ago the universe itself had seemed to erupt, gushing forth all the matter and energy there would ever be. One second old was the universe, and it teemed with the fecund brew of creation.
Out of that brew, in due course, would emerge minds, fashioned of stardust. Minds that presently would learn of their amazing origins. Would begin to see that they were, literally, starchildren, the awesome product of 18 billion years of cosmic evolution – the universe, at last, able to reflect upon itself, to marvel at itself. And they would read these words, conceived in stardust, printed in stardust, with their stardust eyes and brains. And for one exhilarating moment they would forget their small cares and share in the certain knowledge that each particle of which they were made had been forged in the genesis fire, had seen the slow, majestic birth of galaxies and the bright, dawn quasars, and then had ventured on, across eons and light-millennia to meet and fuse in the substance of a human form. Even as other particles had come together, from all reaches of the cosmos, to make sea gulls or solar flares. Or spaceships.
And how quickly in the end it had culminated. For even as Voyager 2 fled the Earth in 1977 there were those still alive who could recall the first mechanically powered flight at Kitty Hawk just seventy-four years before. Meteoric though man's biological development had been over the previous few million years, still more spectacular were the social and cultural explosions that followed. Yet these were as nothing compared with the speed of technological change.
With the harnessing of steam in the mid-eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution this triggered, man's control and dominion over nature had begun to spread at a fabulous, unprecedented rate. Often it seemed that technological change was far outstripping the human capacity to adjust at a social or personal level. There were those wanted to slow, or stop, or even reverse the dizzying spiral of automation and innovation.
And of course it was clear – frighteningly clear – that not all the new devices of man were being put to benign use. In the thermonuclear bomb, in the range of other exotic weaponry hung in threatening array at the edge of space , in the toxin-gushing factories and cars, and in the dancing, mind-manipulating images of television there was ever perceived the specter of Armageddon. Despite its lofty accomplishments and still loftier ambitions, mankind seemed on the very brink destroying itself and the natural world that had nurtured it.
And yet, just as obviously, man was an intrinsic part of nature. man-made meant nature-made. For whence had the human race come if not from the soil and the sun and, billions of years earlier, from the scattered remnants of more ancient stars? And billions of years before that, from the elementary particle brew of creation? Humans were fashioned of the same raw stuff as the trees and the rocks and the spray of the sea, whether they cared to contemplate it or not. Even their sleekest contrivances, their cold glass-and-steel skyscrapers, whose soaring forms belied the stunted aspirations of those who worked antlike inside them. And their elegantly spun clothes hiding the animal within. And their anodyne shopping malls and push-button, air-conditioned homes. All these pretentious trappings were packaged stardust and sunlight, no less natural, no less perverse for all the fastidious attentions of man.
Of course there was immaturity here. But it had to be seen in cosmic context. Man the technologist was not apart from the universe, a virus that had it had invaded somehow from outside. In every sense man was the universe, learning how to grow, exploring its newfound self-awareness.
As yet that awareness was still dull and highly fragmented, scattered across billions of small, individual minds on Earth and who could guess how many myriad more alien minds throughout the rest of space. At this stage in their growth minds were still atomic, still the property of individuals. Only gradually would they merge to form a more unified and coherent whole, just as only by slow degrees had the separate subatomic particles of the primitive universe come together to make gas clouds and planets and prebiotic soups.
It was to be expected – was inevitable – that these island-minds should have different thoughts and opinions, even as in the early universe particles had darted about independently, helter-skelter, exploring all physical options. Some minds played a full and energetic part in developing the new technology. Others, the majority, were simply swept along by it. And yet others resisted it vehemently, and so also played a crucial role in what was to come. These latter-day Luddites who rebelled against technology often did so because they believed that man was harming nature, ravaging in a few decades the complex, fragile ecosystem that had taken billions of years for the Earth to create. And it was true: The human race was affecting its surroundings, often adversely, more than any other living creature had done before. It was exterminating whole species of animals and plants, polluting the seas, poisoning the atmosphere, cremating the virgin jungles.
But man was the Earth . . . and the universe. And it was no more "unnatural" that men and women should hunt the black rhino to extinction, or tear the heart out of the Brazilian rain forest, than it was for a volcano to erupt. Or for an ape-man to step out onto the savannah. If the Earth was being hurt, then it was hurting itself. And so it would have to learn. Just as a child learns when it scrapes its knee or becomes sick through eating poison berries.
Not only was mankind a child of the universe, it was the child-universe. And when, in 1997, it shot dead the last wild black rhino, and when, in 2018, it had turned all of the Amazon Basin into a scorched, sterile wilderness, it learned a hard lesson. The rhino and tens of thousands of other species had died for that lesson, and much of what was held beautiful had gone. But now the universe would not forget. And in time, in Deep Time, it would make good the violence it had done itself.
Just twelve years it had taken Voyager to reach Neptune, but already much had happened back on its creators' world. More than ever Earth's fate and that of mankind seemed to hang in the balance. Homo sapiens, self-styled "wise man," held a nuclear shotgun to its head and cried aloud across the continents and oceans it had despoiled, "I do this to protect myself from you!"
And yet, even amid the rubble of such folly, science and technology had continued to bloom. In biochemistry, in robotics, in the physics of semiconductors and superconductors, and in a score of other fields, new possibilities had emerged the mere thought of which would have been ridiculed only half a century before.
At the same time the ranks of the environmentally concerned had swelled. For at last it was becoming transparent to all that much of what humans had done over the previous few centuries had been self-harming. In the end it was not pity or magnanimity to its fellow species that spurred mankind to change its ways but the stark, imminent threat of extermination. Survival of the collective self was the driving force now, as it had been since the dawn of life on Earth, since the dawn of the universe itself.
Above and beyond its parochial planetary mission, Voyager was a calling card for terrestrial intelligence. But more even than that it was a symbol that mankind stood at the threshold of its greatest transformation.
Biologically the human race had all but ceased to evolve. That, despite the popular, fanciful notion that people of the future would steadily acquire bigger brains and smaller, weaker bodies – eggheads whose limbs had atrophied and become useless through inactivity.
In fact, the human brain, in size and structure had reached its ultimate state of development perhaps 100,000 years earlier. A man or woman of the twentieth century, for all their cultured sophistication, had no more intellectual potential than their counterparts who painted on cave walls or stalked woolly mammoths in the ice ages of the late Pleistocene. Once there ceased to be an evolutionary premium of intelligence, the selective pressure to produce bigger brains had disappeared. And that had happened tens of thousands of years before, when humans began to dwell in semisettled groups and cooperate and pool their skills. Then brain power, like muscle power. became a shared property, benefiting both the lowest and the highest intellects within a community. In consequence, not only the brightest individuals stood to pass on their genes. So, too, with equal likelihood, did those of lesser mentality. With mankind's mastery over its niche, albeit a global niche, its gene pool became effectively frozen, as that of the chimpanzee, the dolphin, and countless other species already had.
Yet there was one decisive difference. Before it ceased to evolve the mind of man had surged past some invisible barrier, had attained some critical mass or level of complexity. And as part of this development the brain had lost its ancient symmetry. Only within the man's right hemisphere was the old, holistic mode of thinking perpetuated. The right brain continued to make no separation in nature, to invent no labels. Its perception, as it had always been, was of a timeless whole, a perpetual now, the universe in its simultaneous glory, unquestioned.
Not without reason would humans come to view other animals as being more at one with nature than themselves. In the mind of the cat, or of the eagle, or even of other primates there could be only the nebulous feeling of "is," consciousness without self-consciousness, observed without observer.
But for the early hominids that was not enough. These otherwise ill-equipped bipeds would have to become analysts and logicians to survive. They would have to begin to separate themselves, mentally, from the outside. To evolve further, to become truly human, the ape-men would have to construct a boundary between themselves and the rest of creation. And so, for the first time on Earth, there emerged a life-form that was conscious of itself as an individual, as an independent ego. And, further, a life-form that with the bright pencil beam of its newly developed self-awareness could isolate parts of the world – discrete objects and events – and then represent these by symbols, both within itself and without.
Thus did man the rationalist – the linguist, the scientist – awaken. Now there was a tiny part of the universe that called itself "I" and that with insatiable curiosity questioned the workings of everything around itself. Why did objects move, and how? What, ultimately, was matter? And time? And life? How far away the sun and stars? And what made them shine in the untouchable heights of the sky? Whence the universe itself? And where, in relation to all this awesome vastness, stood man?
Even as its first fragile craft broke ties with the sun, man conjectured what its descendants – should there be any – might be like in millions or billions of years to come. Genetic engineering and microelectronics and other such mushrooming fields already suggested staggering, almost limitless possibilities. Within a century after Voyager's launch it could be that new animals – or humans – were being manufactured, gene by gene, to suit any purpose. Computers, self-replicating and with intellects ultrahigh, might be emerging as parallel, rival, or superior species. Who was to say that what once had been human intelligence would not soon be encapsulated, then hugely amplified – a blend of the biological and electronic? Without known precedent, Man hurled toward an uncertain future.
Maybe man would fuse with machine. Then living spacecraft, virtually immortal, might flit from star to star, forever learning and exploring. Or humans might more conventionally spread across the galaxy, restructuring planets, capturing sunlight with star-girdling rings or spheres as they went – yet still changing in disturbing ways. Adapting to local conditions, each colonizing group might develop its own "alien" culture, ethics, science, and art. Always there would be the chance of encounter with intelligent creatures. And who dared guess what that might bring? In time Homo sapiens could branch out along many strange and novel lines, altering much physically and intellectually.
A million years after stepping into space man might no longer recognize man – or what it had become. And yet still there could be a kinship, a warm feeling that here was a distant, half-remembered cousin. Even if someday all trace of humanity were erased, it might be reassuring to know that at least some sort of intelligence could live on. But, in Deep Time, was that possible?
There might be undreamed-of forms of life and mentality. With DNA alone the potential for variety was dizzying. And who could say what other types of matter might not also supply a suitable organic foundation? Yet, whatever its makeup, one thing it seemed life and intelligence had to have – a source of energy. Like stars.
While stars burned there was no fear of energy shortage. With billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies to choose from, life in all its manifestations could thrive.
But when all the stars had died, leaving only big black holes set against a backdrop of subatomic particles, what then? In such an unpromising environment how could even the most adaptable of sentient species fill its energy needs?
Perhaps by the Penrose mechanism — by ingeniously using black holes as garbage disposals. The method: An advanced civilization living close to a black hole would regularly fire projectiles at it. Each projectile would follow a carefully charted course to the fringe of the black hole's event horizon – the boundary from beyond which not even light could return. Here it would jettison a load of waste matter. Tumbling into the gravity vortex, the surplus material would be lost forever. Its rest mass energy, though, would be transferred to the parent projectile, plus an extra contribution from spin energy lost by the black hole. The projectile's gained energy could then be converted into a form suitable to supply the civilization's needs. Simple. How accommodating of twentieth-century man to find a solution to the energy crunch one million trillion trillion years or more in the future!
And yet, once all the black holes had boiled away, around A.D. 10100, what then? With the entropy of the cosmos almost total, how could intelligence of any kind survive?
Consciousness or intelligence, it seemed, was linked ultimately to complexity. Sentient beings in Deep Time could continue only if there were some way to retain local pools of complexity or organization. And how to achieve that? Through lengthening periods of hibernation punctuated by bursts of energy-using activity? Or by escape altogether from that dismal future night, down a space-time tunnel, into a friendlier, parallel universe (should such exist) or a more energy-rich phase of this cosmos?
And what if the universe were not open but closed? Could life or mind endure as the walls of space-time drew in and in, until the cosmos, once again, was far smaller than a proton? Could it survive a Big Crunch and reemerge in a new phase of the universe to continue its evolution? Might there even be archaic beings now, inside this cosmos, that had passed through previous cosmic cycles? Perhaps.
But if man and its technology were to progress unchecked even over a billion years, what would it really be like? Magical? Beyond perception or description? And if it were to survive for 10100 years? In the end even man's most farsighted prophecies were bound to prove hopelessly myopic. No more could a Neanderthal have foreseen holograms or Jupiter probes. No more could an infant have conceived its own adult thoughts.
For 18 billion years the particle had journeyed. Unconsciously. Unseen. In concert with all of the other particles that now made up the Earth, and the sun, and the beckoning stars beyond. Countless trillions of subatomic specks – dimensionless foci of energy – born in chaos, scattered by the eruption of genesis, each making their own fabulous, convoluted way through space and time. Particles unaware of each other's presence. Yet, despite that unawareness, cooperating exquisitely still.
And so, aided by cosmic string, and by dark matter, and by its own innate propensity to come together, matter grew in complexity, by slow stages: nuclei, atoms, stars, planets. Organic broth. And then, in quickening succession, through higher forms of life.
There grew the first neural swellings that foreshadowed the brain. Consciousness and self-consciousness appeared on Earth – not in order that creatures might enjoy these extraordinary self-reflective powers but so that they should be better equipped for survival. And so, in time, came the monkeys, and the apes, and the first man-apes.
Almost overnight, revolution seemed to build upon dizzying revolution. First the lightning-fast physical change that took man's line from apelike Australopithecus in 3.5 million BC to modern Homo sapiens. Then the dramatic spread of culture from about 10,000 BC on. And finally the still more rampant growth of technology after the taming of steam.
Somehow bits of the universe had contrived to assemble themselves intricately upon the skin of an 8,000-mile-wide planet. They became thinking, self-aware organisms. And now these tiny ornate receptacles of stardust wanted to know about themselves, about the universe of which they were a part. Thus the universe scrutinized itself. And built instruments to study its farthest galaxies. And dispatched probes, made also of old star matter, to learn what they might. Probes like Voyager.
Did it see the irony? Did it see that in sending Voyager it was questing more deeply into itself – with an organized fragment of itself? Of course it saw. The words are written here. And now, at this moment, we share them.
Interconnections, always.
Nothing stands alone. That much, at least, twentieth-century man now dimly began to perceive. Every event in the universe was intimately linked to every other. So that, in truth, there really was only one, multiform, unfolding event – man. Or Voyager. Or the universe. Call it what you will. One event, indivisible.
And how could it have been otherwise? You are the Earth. And the sun. Interacting with each continuously. You are every particle in the universe, because every particle of the personal, the fictitious "you" communes by subatomic reactions continually with all matter and energy everywhere. You and I are everything. And only by the deceptive but all-crucial persuadings of the left brain were we ever convinced otherwise: that perhaps we ended at the boundary of our skin; that perhaps we were pathetically trivial motes of unusually complex matter clinging momentarily to a tiny rock in the vastness of space and time – with the cruel misfortune to be aware of it. And yet there is no beginning to you-I. No end, no true boundary. We are, in every way, the universe itself. When you-I think, the cosmos thinks. And when the cosmos thinks . . .
Already some had glimpsed part of the final truth, had felt it instinctively.
Some like Heindrich Hertz: "One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put in."
Werner Heisenberg: "The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer, body and soul, is no longer adequate."
Niels Bohr: "Physics tells us what we can know about the universe, not what it is."
Albert Einstein: "What interests me is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all."
John Wheeler: "Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness, and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past – even in a past so remote that life did not exist, and shows even more, that observership is a prerequisite for any useful version of reality."
Steven Weinberg, echoing Hertz a century later: "This is often the way in physics – our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world."
And, bridging the gulf between mysticism and science, Alan Watts: "Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air, which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions isolate us from the entirely indefinable something which is everything."
So, at last, the universe began to comprehend itself. Billions of years it had taken until there were minds such as these with the power to vaguely discern nature's scheme and their own remarkable place within it. Life's purpose, the origin and destiny of everything – with these tremendous issues the corporate mentality of man now strove. Why was it here? On this small ball of rock, circling an inconsequential star, in an average galaxy, in a macrocosm vast beyond deranged imagining?
Like all else, mankind had evolved, it realized now, with the talent to sense only what was needed for survival, to focus specifically on those aspects of the environment essential for staying alive. The sense, the brain, and the nervous system had developed to help discriminate between "safe" stimuli and survival-related ones. Which explained why no human (or other life-form) was ever consciously aware of each photon reaching it or of each subatomic particle it came into contact with. Even so, man – uniquely on Earth – would eventually learn of photons and electrons and the strange goings-on in the quantum world that were forever beyond conventional perception. For, through natural selection, man's brain had also evolved a left hemisphere that was analytical. Capable of symbolic reasoning, of verbal thinking. A left hemisphere that set up a boundary between its own contrived ego – its personal identity – and the rest of the universe. And that now wanted to know how the world around it was made.
To begin with, man's window on the cosmos was that furnished only by its own limited, biological senses. Through this narrow portal the early scientists glimpsed a universe ruled, apparently, by deterministic laws and in which humans were insignificant. The more the classicists learned of their cold clockwork cosmos, the more they themselves – as passive observers – seemed to shrink in stature and relevance. Further, in the West at least, the dominance of left-brain thinking convinced men and women that they were just that – individuals, sealed off from their surroundings. The power of words and of labels by which humans conventionally identified themselves as independent creatures had blinded man to the truth. Thus did man begin to feel, like the word, static and detached, cut off from the the real, frontierless world of nature. And thus, also, did humans convince themselves that they were small, discrete, organic forms, bounded by a membrane in space and by birth and death in time. Conventions! Mere social conventions were these, conjured up by the left brain. And yet they were so persuasive that people – those portions of the cosmos that called themselves "people" – spent their whole lives agonizing over their eventual death. Hungering for the perpetuity of a thing that never was. Failing to see that, in truth, they were smoothly flowing processes – no, a single flowing process – without definable beginning or end.
And yet, though the left brain beguiled with these conventions, it also was the means by which man eventually would break through to a greater understanding. As science – child of the rational mind – progressed, so it revealed new aspects of the universe that previously had been hidden to man's five "natural" senses. With penetrating instruments that its burgeoning knowledge helped to devise, man began to probe the strange, unfamiliar realm of the atom. Began to discover that, on levels inaccessible to normal perceptions, reality behaved in ways that defied common sense. And so, in time, man learned (incredulously at first) of the bond between observership – its own role as self-aware observer – and the universe as a whole. Nothing existed "out there" until it had been consciously observed.
Even as Voyager, with the particle hero aboard, began its endless flight, man's mind grappled with this extraordinary new thought. That there had to be self-awareness, human or otherwise, to summon reality, this reality, into being.
And, at the same time, other pieces of the great puzzle began to fall more neatly into place. For it seemed also that the universe was fantastically, almost unbelievably, contrived. Only minute differences in the laws of nature or in the values of the fundamental constants would have resulted in a cosmos in which intelligent life of any kind could not have evolved. Had the Big Bag been slightly less violent than it was, then space-time would have collapsed before stars could have formed. A more vigorous blast and matter would have dispersed too quickly for any organized structures to coalesce. Then, too, if space had emerged from genesis with fewer than three dimensions, nothing as complex or interconnected as a human brain could ever have evolved. While in a space of four dimensions or more, the orbits of planets around stars would have been unstable. The requirements for life – intelligent life in particular – were many and specific. And the universe it transpired, against all the odds, satisfied every one.
Now, finally, man began to see why.
Observership, quantum science showed, was a prerequisite for the selection of reality. Reality, cosmology showed, was finely tuned so as to inevitably spawn observership. Necessarily, imperatively, the two went together, for only in this way could there be a universe at all.
And yet, to begin with at least, it was too much for many to grasp. Men and women, caught up in the treadmill of daily life, paid little heed to the gradually dawning solution to everything. Why should they when there were so many more immediate thoughts to occupy them? So many apparently larger issues like bank accounts and shopping trips and job prospects and pension plans? Compared with these, of what relevance was genesis, or the evolution of the universe, or the relationship of mind to matter?
But, in time, awareness would come. And then man would turn away forever from the womb of parochialism and the trivial, transient cares of individuals and communities and nations –conventions all without substance. And would look with new, clearer vision, both inward and outward, at the universe of which it was the essential, cumulative product.
How much like a human being the cosmos as whole had developed. And by the same token how true had proved the suspicion of the mystics, with their primal, right-brain awareness, that man was a microcosm of nature. Both infant human and infant cosmos began apparently from states simple and symmetric, from a featureless genesis egg offering no clue as to what it might become. From early oblivion both progressed steadily, in accord with some hidden, inner code, to consciousness, waking up gradually to the tremendous fact of their own existence. And then questioning: Why were they here and how had they been created? Why, against every expectation, could they understand the laws that governed their smallest action? What was their purpose? And where were they bound?
"As above, so below," the mystic would conclude. And there was much truth in that. For by turning within, the mystic read the selfsame laws that operated in the world of physics, though from a different perspective. Whereas science surveyed the microcosm outside the seeker, mysticism gazed within at the seeker itself, until the seeker merged with the sought. Science was outer empiricism, province of the left brain; mysticism strove instead, by quieting the left brain in meditation, to directly experience nature with the right. And now, even as Voyager took to the boundless skies, it seemed that these two very different approaches were converging fast upon their common ancient goal.
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature," proclaimed Max Planck, one of the twentieth-century fathers of quantum mechanics. "And that is because in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature, and, therefore, part of the mystery we are trying to solve."
As Voyager plunged into the ebony night beyond Neptune, particle physicists and cosmologists on Earth consummated an unexpected alliance out of which was born the Theory of Everything. For a long time science had sought it, the Physicist's Stone, the all-encompassing set of equations that would unify every physical phenomenon in nature. That would embrace every subatomic particle and every force within a single, stunningly beautiful, mathematical model.
And now the last piece of the cosmic puzzle slipped quietly, almost unnoticed, into place. For as Voyager left the solar system, bound for the high interstellar seas, scientists finally answered the question that Einstein and others had posed years before. Yes, there was indeed, beyond doubt now, only one possible mathematical description of the universe. Only one description that provided for the eventual emergence of intelligent life and yet was self-consistent in all its detail. The Theory of Everything.
Time passed. And mankind, driven as ever by its need to explore, pursued its robot craft to the stars. To Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti and Ross 248 and a score of other suns in the solar neighborhood. And then, in ever faster ships, miles in length, men and women ventured, to build cities on worlds unimagined. And then, from these remote outposts, other expeditions set out in all directions to penetrate still deeper into unknown tracts of the galaxy – and beyond.
A million years had passed since Sputnik was hurled into Earth orbit. A million years in which Voyager had traveled forty light-years from home. And in which its creators had been transformed past all recognition. No longer was man identifiably a single species. Or a species at all. No longer was it constrained by its old organic body and brain. Those long eons of patient biological evolution on Earth, it was clear now, had been merely the precursor, the preparation, for an incomparably more dramatic phase of technological growth. The boundary between human and human-made was no longer discernable. What had been computers were now continuous extensions of the brain. What had been spacecraft were now adjuncts to the living forms of creatures who flitted from star to star, even from galaxy to galaxy, like butterflies among flowers.
For now man more fully understood its cosmic role. And in its growing enlightenment it had shrugged off its pupal shell – its earthly incubus and limited human form – and reached outward to the greater universe beyond. The universe which it alone had created and which, in turn, had created it. The universe which, simultaneously, it was, and of which it was the most essential part.
Now, with all aspects of the Theory of Everything at its disposal, man could aspire to technologies that were truly godlike. Whole stars and planetary systems it dismantled and toyed with and reassembled at will. Entire galaxies and groups of galaxies, in time, it won control over and landscaped at its pleasure. And yet such stupendous feats of cosmic engineering were but a preface. For eventually this thing that the human race had become gained mastery over space and time itself, so that it could communicate or travel instantaneously over any distance. Could marshal even the energy of the vacuum and the residual blast of the Big Bang for its disquietingly grand schemes.
For more than a hundred billion years Voyager had endured. While space-time expanded and the galaxies aged. And the star-making machinery of the Milky Way . . .
Was redesigned.
Now bright pulsating rivers of energy coursed this way and that across the Milky Way, purposefully supplying the needs of a galaxy with one mind. A galactic being that already had begun to absorb and assimilate other star cities around it and that in a mesmerizing blend encompassed as-yet-unconscious matter, intelligence, and hyperadvanced technology. That embraced all of what once had been humanity. But that was now far, far greater – and becoming greater still.
Ages ago the metamorphosis had begun – the melding of individual human minds (together with those of other sentient beings) into a single consciousness. Through brain-computer links and knowledge repositories, man had come to share its most intimate thoughts, to reconcile even the smallest differences in opinion. So that eventually whether there were many separate nodes of awareness or just one collective mind was hard to discern. In the end, indeed, it made no difference. Man had long since broken free of the shackles of petty labels and conventions. If it so wished, it could still conceive of itself as an individual, and so enjoy the privilege and private identity of the observer. And, in so doing, it retained the focused, rational powers of the left brain, but now awesomely enlarged. At the same time, though, it was aware, without a doubt, through right-brain perception, that it was the single, undivided universe, still evolving toward a state that even now it could not fully comprehend.
Of this much it was certain. There ere not many possible forms that the cosmos could have taken. In the final reckoning there was only one. Of all the feasible mathematical descriptions of reality, only one was self-consistent, self-sustaining. Only one could make the essential jump from potentiality to actuality – the one that could spawn intelligent observership. And why? Because only through observership could the universe become, by progressive stages, conscious of itself, comprehending of itself, and, ultimately, selective and creative of itself. Only as mind emerged could fire be breathed into the one global mathematical model of reality that could yield mind! As mind matured and, by intimate association of aware observership and mathematical theory, came to understand rationally the cosmos of which it was a part, so it began to draw the cosmos into being. Presently it astonished itself by realizing that it had this power – that it was the self-creating universe. That it was inevitably so.
Thus was the terrific conception revealed. That mind was what transformed the abstract mathematical relationships of the world into perceived reality, gave substance to the equations. That there was nothing concrete outside the mind. That mind created reality – inner and outer – and, at the same time, allowed the underlying mathematical relationships, to be symbolized and better understood.
Of course. It seemed so plain, so self-evident to man now. The rules governing the universe could only be made manifest – be expressed and given tangible essence – by the coming together of a real cosmos with real space, time, energy, matter, and forces. The play demanded the players. By the same token, the physical universe was delivered to the threshold of reality by those rules – just as the pieces in chess are made potential by the rules of the game. The final crossing of the threshold came, as quantum science had conclusively shown, with intelligent observation. Thus did mind, matter, and mathematics each subtend and make possible the others.
And genesis? That was never in truth the source of the cosmic stream. For the stream began, not on the ground, but as rain from the sky, which came from the sea, which was fed by the stream. Which is to say that genesis – the Big Bang – was not the beginning but merely the point from which the universe had seemed to come. Matter and energy and the rules governing them could spring into existence only through the medium of mind. So that before genesis came mind. And before mind came genesis. Both joined in a closed cycle of time stretching from past to future and back again.
And of course for man there had to be a future. Of that the minded galaxy was absolutely sure. For the only way in which it was being sustained and made real now was through observership by some yet greater intelligence to come. Awesomely powerful though man had become, it was still far, it knew, from being fully aware. Still it had not yet penetrated back to see the finest nuances of the Big Bang, nor did it even understand in every detail how its own thought processes worked. There was much yet to learn, much of reality yet to observe – and hence be created. So that man's present existed demanded that intelligence continue to exist. And more, that this intelligence, this self-awareness, continue to spread throughout space until it had gained control over all matter and all forces. Ultimately, every part of the universe had to evolve to sentience, to become a single, eternal mind.
This was the covenant of nature. And it had been realized, however vaguely, long, long before man inherited the galaxy. Before the Theory of Everything had been fully revealed, before humans had claimed Mars or Ganymede for their own, before even Voyager had felt the gravitic lure of Prospero, the astounding conclusion of quantum philosophy had begun to filter through. Man and mind had to continue to exist and grow for all time. There could be no end to intelligence once it had come into being.
Even now, at the close of the twentieth century, we sense it. You and I are the infant cosmos, still only dimly aware, still only conscious of things immediately around the reality generators that are our minds. We perceive only dully, over a small range of wavelengths of light and sound, and we comprehend structure over only a narrow range in space and time. But, eventually. we will see X rays and gamma rays, radio waves and gravitational waves. And subatomic particles. And whole galaxies in their most intimate detail. We shall see and understand all that there is to know. What we are today will evolve to become a single universe-wide mind, so that every particle in space will be within this cosmic consciousness – free, but aware. Every particle of which you-I are made will ultimately be reconstituted in this universal mind, along with everything else. Given such a prospect, we need hardly fear our own personal deaths. For nothing ever dies. And in Deep Time we shall be as one.And so to the resolution, the stunning climax of it all. The answer to the mystery of life and being. The Fugue in C. In C Major. Or in creation. A Bach fugue. How very appropriate. Bach, the most mathematical of composers and the most subtle. Lover of hidden meaning, of theme and variation, of endless cycles.
And how very appropriate, too, that this Fugue in C should rise up through the scale until it returned, surprisingly, to its starting note – but now shifted up by one octave. Like the universe itself which began on the note of creation. Then progressed through various ascending stages, until it became conscious. And then self-conscious. And, finally, self-creating. So that, in Deep Time, it looped back to its origin again, and yet along the way had elevated itself somehow, from chaos to cosmic consciousness – evolved to the awesome stage where it could create itself.
Still it was hard to comprehend, to accept. If the universe could only be created in its own future, then how could it ever have had a past? Surely there had to have been some special point of origin? But no. What was needed was a more panoramic view in which the universe, past, present, and future, was seen as having always been there – a permanent, all-encompassing space-time entity.
Of course it was natural for man, whose left-brain consciousness produced the illusion of "passing" time to think of past and future as somehow being different in status. To dwell, moreover, on that elusive moment called now which transformed the potentiality of future events into the actuality of the past. But "now" was, in truth, only a chimera. Every point in space and time coexisted with equal importance. The future was there from the beginning as surely as was the past. So that the means to reach back in time to summon the cosmos into being was ever present.
Across the farthest intergalactic gulfs man's maturing mind spread. Annexing more of the universe. Bathing previously dull corners of space with the searing light of its intelligence. Now each galaxy was like the neuron of a cosmos-filling brain, while the voids between galaxies were latticed with the pulsing currents of inconceivable thoughts and ideas.
What once had been Voyager was now incorporated within this superconsciousness. The spacecraft's subatomic frame, long since dispersed, had become part of the very means by which cosmic man thought. Everything that had been was included in the universal mind: the particles of the ancient sun and Earth. And of the reader. And of the ink and paper of these pages in which such prophecies were made.
In Deep Time we shall be as one.
What once had been the particle was now the whole. Had it ever been otherwise? In the universe there was no – could be no – isolated parts. Only a whole. And now this holistic thing that was everything looked in upon itself. Saw that it had evolved to become, at every point, a living, sentient organism, a cosmos-wide being. Mind had become one with all of nature. So that no longer was mind peering out on the rest of the universe and mapping it and trying to understand it symbolically. The physical reality had become coincident with its own symbolic mapping. The thoughts of this all-embracing cosmic mind were no longer an abstraction of reality, they were reality. So that when the cosmos thought, its thoughts sprang spontaneously into physical being. At last mathematics and physics, God and man had become one.
And now God surveyed all of space and time, all of matter and energy, all that it once had been and was now. God, man, the universe – this awakened mind – strove to gather into its consciousness every remaining fragment of the wealth of existence. Strove to perceive every event at the minutest level so that reality, everywhere, everywhen, would be focused to crisp perfection by retroactive causation.
And then God turned to its ultimate project. To create within itself the genesis event – the Big Bang.
There were no landmarks. No galaxies. No stars. No elaborations of matter of any kind.
Yet somewhere across the stupendous ravine of Deep Time that lay ahead there was a mind. With piercing, all-seeing intelligence it gazed at a single point in space and time – in no way different from any other – and thought. Because it already existed in the time-to-come, it had to be created. And since it was all there would ever be, it had, inevitably, to create itself. Simply by being and by observing, it summoned up its own existence, its own embryonic reality. A reality whose rules permitted creation by observation and that was so contrived as to lead necessarily to observership. A reality that had to be underpinned by one very special set of rules – that unique set which, 18 billion years later, humans would begin to decipher as the so-called Theory of Everything.
Out of nothingness there arose a stir – an eddy, a flicker, a something inconceivably small. And the mind of man watched. And saw that it was good. That genesis, once again, was under way. And that presently, within itself, man would bear new havens, new stars and planets, a sun, and an Earth under whose blue skies men and women would renew their quest for Deep Time.
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