The teams led by Schmidt and Perlmutter found that the galaxies were moving apart at a much faster rate than the laws of physics, as they are presently understood, are able to explain. Speculation about the momentum generated by the big bang, and the laws of gravity and motion, cannot account for the phenomenon. Scientists call the force that is responsible for this expansion dark energy - dark because it fills the blackness of space but also dark as in obscure, unknown, mysterious.
(Via The Anomalist.)
This is the ultimate existential scare-story. It haunts our social and institutional fabric as certainly as it haunts the minds of cosmologists. Dark energy implies that all is decay, that the universe's current phase of stellar evolution and planetary accretion is ultimately for naught. It seems plausible to me that advanced alien civilizations might already be devising ways to escape our dying universe, maybe by ripping holes in the gnarled fabric of spacetime or uploading themselves into new mentational substrates in an effort to outrun time itself.
Or maybe, as a creature composed of baryonic matter, I'm simply biased. Maybe I'm missing the point of the universe. What seems tragic and empty may merely be a necessary prelude to a cosmological pageant far beyond my comprehension. An endlessly diluted cosmos, starless and devoid of matter, might serve some purpose; it may fulfill untold billions of years of cosmic strife. But to whose advantage?
I'm drawn to the evolution of virtual worlds, the hauntingly lifelike antics of cellular automata. The beginning of the 21st century has seen the paranoid notion that "all is illusion" become startlingly acceptable. We might be in the process of wising up to a momentous truth. As in the closing pages of Carl Sagan's "Contact," we might soon discover that our existence is a sort of epic fiction, the handiwork of an intelligence predating the sky itself.
I wonder what we will become, spared the schizophrenic burden of superstition. Will we take to space or retreat to virtual worlds, balming our loneliness with amnesia? Confronted with an indifferent cosmos, how might extraterrestrials treat us if we happen to meet? Companionship might be an unaffordable luxury in such grim circumstances; conversely, it might be the only thing that makes the long cosmic twilight tolerable.
1 comment:
Just as multiple illusions and distortions can exist simultaneously, perhaps there are multiple, coexisting realities.
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