Song 1: The Mysterious Ground from which our Story springs.

The deep primordial secrets of existence come sprouting forth in the form of a Cosmic garden. The ‘seeds’ of our reality materialize and sprout as if by magic out of a seemingly immaterial ground; but none of this is magic. It’s all common sense and pretty easy to understand once you know the right way to look at it.

The Song of Everything is here to show you where to look, and the comfortable path to get there. You’re invited to discover it with us—perhaps from the vantage point of a nice hilltop vista on a clear night, or even from the comforts of your own sofa in your living room!

It kind of goes without saying that every story needs to have a starting point. And yet, when the story we’re talking about is the *real* one that we’re actually living, deciding on where and how to start the narrative is a super tough call. And yet there’s no story whose starting point matters more.

How did Everything start? What forces came together to form this great big complex universe that we find ourselves in? This is our ‘Origin Story’—our ‘Creation Myth,’ as it used to be called.

The image with its caption above is the way we choose to begin ours—the start of our Comfortable Universe’s story that we’re calling the ‘Song of Everything.’

Everybody is going to have their own favorite way of presenting this story, and they should, because ultimately, it’s a personal story.

Should the story be personalized and customized, or institutionalized and standardized?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer—we’ll be arguing that the individual takes precedence over any establishment, consensus, or institution. You’ll have to read on to find that discussion, but it means that we favor the special individual twists … and our version has plenty of them.

The institutional version of the Creation Story that your host grew up with is the Judeo-Christian one. It starts with the “In the beginning …” that readers encounter when they open the foundational text to page 1, line 1.

In the Bible, before there was a garden, the world was a Formless Void over which the restless breath of God began to stir. That part works for us, or at least we’re going to keep it in mind. It’s short and to the point. There is no consideration of God’s prior gigs. The story quickly homes in on his big seven-day project—the garden of Eden.

Johann Wenzel Peter (1745 – 1829) painting “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.”. Peter was a notable painter of realistic representations of animals. Well over 200 species appear in this painting. This must have been one of his favorites, because he never sold it. It was in his workshop at the time of his death and was then purchased by Pope Gregory XVI for the Papal collection. It still resides at the Vatican today.

Our Song of Everything doesn’t stick with that tradition or any other. It takes cues from Western thinking and the Judeo-Christian Creation Myth because they’re your host’s cultural background, but we also tap into many other sources.

We find it convenient, however, to start with that garden metaphor. And that Biblical Formless Void features as well. It is the source of the ‘ground’—the ‘magic’ soil out of which our particular garden sprouts, but without the need for a creator being to make it happen.

Mind you, we do allow that a Creator-being *could* be the first thing, or one of the first things, that sprouts. Not a supernatural being—we see no need for miracles or magic in the creation—but a far more powerful being than any human, and with the basic personality and capabilities of your favorite god or goddess. Such paths are certainly not ruled out.

But are they the most likely—the most reasonable—the path with the fewest hurdles? Our goal here at Comfortable Universe HQ is to identify the most basic, underlying garden soil—the place from which all the World’s diverse Creation Myths might have emerged. In previous work, we’ve called this venue “Eden’s Womb”—the sheltered, comfortable mammalian-style “nest” where all creation stories could be conceived.

Before we delve further into how we generalize the story, we first share a quick (biased) sampler of three more favorite highly abridged ancient Creation Myths from cultures far and wide, and then one ‘non-Myth’, highlighting a few points that have relevance to our story:

One: Egypt

One of the very oldest Creation Myths on record comes from Egypt, where, in one version, the term zp tpj (“the first time”) is used to denote a moment of transition from primordial chaos to the world in existence. Nu was that chaotic sea of lifeless waters. In it Atum began to consolidate as an inert potential being (closely associated with the more familiar sun god Ra). He became a functioning self-engendered god, who, being alone, resorted to a procreative form of masturbation to produce all the elements of reality.

Many of the oldest Creation Myths depict gods who created things via various forms of human bodily functions, such as sneezing, spitting, even vomiting.

Two: The Māori Creation Myth

The Māori (New Zealand Polynesian) description of the development of the universe is expressed in a patient, step-by-step genealogical form: In the beginning, there was Te Kore (The Nothing; the Void) which became Te Korematua (The Parentless Void) in its search for procreation. From it came Te Pō (The Night), becoming Te Pōroa (The Long Night), and then becoming Te Pōnui (The Great Night). Gradually Te Ao (The Light) glimmered into existence, stretching to all corners of the universe to become Te Aotūroa (The Long-Standing Light). Next came Te Ata (The Dawn), from which came Te Mākū (The Moisture), and Mahoranuiatea (Cloud of the Dawn). Te Mākū and Mahoranuiatea wed to form Rangi, the Sky Father, who, in turn wed Papa, the Earth Mother, and together they produced the gods, and eventually all the familiar things in the world.

Three: Norse Mythology

“Odin the Wanderer”, adapted from the 1886 Georg von Rosen black and white drawing. Note his left eye is missing. The story goes that he sacrificed it in order to gain wisdom.

The Norse Creation Myth is one that has mostly survived by repeated retelling of now lost versions, both written and oral.

Odin seems to get the most press. He was a creator being, but he was several steps down from the original creation. The story begins in a great void called Ginnungagap, flanked by the icy realm of Niflheim and the fiery realm of Muspelheim. When hot air and freezing ice met in the void, they created the primordial frost giant Ymir. Long story short, Ymir was a cruel creature, and Odin, along with his two brothers, who were actually grandsons of the first god Buri, slayed Ymir and built the physical world from his body. Later, Odin created the first humans, named Ask and Embla, from two trees, an ash and an elm, which he found on the beach.

We haven’t even mentioned the great central World Tree, Ygdrasil in whose branches Odin spent some very important ‘entanglement’ time. It’s a complicated mythology, made up of many separate but interwoven stories passed down by word of mouth for countless generations, as are many of the world’s great origin tales.

In this case, most of what survives is reconstructed from written narratives called the Prose and Poetic Eddas, the oldest of which was recorded around the thirteenth Century AD. The most famous of these, the Völuspá, is presented as mystical Seeress recounting ancient tales from memory, with her audience being none other than Odin himself.

Now, the “non-Myth”—Science

Science’s current mainstream Creation Story is called “The Standard Model of Cosmology”. It goes something like this:

“Suddenly, 13.8 billion years ago, there was a Big Bang. That wasn’t the first thing. It’s the first thing we have direct evidence for. The cooling remnants of that hot primordial explosion, or fireball, is all around us. It is a bath of radiation called the ‘Cosmic Microwave Background’ that has now cooled to just 2.7255 degrees above absolute zero.”

The fact that we’re immersed inside this ongoing event, and not outside observers, the way we are for most scientific experiments, is an underappreciated and critically fundamental distinction, which we’ll be exploring quite a lot more in coming songs.

Science avoids storytelling that it cannot back up with solid evidence. Nevertheless, if you ask scientists what happened before the Big Bang, you’ll find that there are plenty of theories, and here at the Song of Everything, we be picking through those to glean clues from what is known. Then we’ll venture to tell a far more complete story than rigorous science admits. It might be wrong, but it will be our sincere best stab at what seems sensible. We’ll back our version up with evidence, including new discoveries as they become available, and we’ll share our sources and our reasoning; but we’ll also acknowledge that this is just one choice among many.

So, what’s with this Cosmic garden appearing in the sky?

It’s a sort of metaphor, of course. It starts with that “Formless Void” which could be described as a substrate, kind of like a ‘soil,’ that is the simplest possible place for things to ‘sprout’.

Let’s give it a different name, though. In fact, let’s give it a pair of names. One is dry and technical—precise but bland—and the other is a ‘pet name’ and has plenty of personality.

We name it the “Uncaused Continuum”, a description as much as a name, really. And more whimsically, we’ll describe her as a Mama Pink Easter Bunny called “Little Miss Nothingness.” Though these are new names, the underlying idea should already be a familiar thing to most average folk.

Little Miss Nothingness and her irrepressible Minions.

Start by thinking of a vacuum—plain-old emptiness. Emptiness is a wonderfully mysterious thing to contemplate, because whatever you think it does—that’s exactly what it doesn’t do!

Try to tell her what to do, or how to be, and Li’l Miss Nothing scoffs at you. She obeys no rules.

As soon as you try to give this bizarre entity a rule (any form of description), you’ve destroyed it—it’s no longer the nothingness you started with. Yet, because it has no rules, you can divide it up into parts!

What? Of course you can. It lacks any rules to prevent you!

That’s right. Little Miss Nothingness has babies! Hordes of them! This is our ‘soil’ with its seeds ready to sprout.

We won’t go much further down this philosophical/conceptual Rabbit Hole for now.

But we do want to add a few more introductory points:

Studying Nothingness in the lab.

Scientific study of the vacuum (of empty space) has been most productive not in the large-scale astrophysical or cosmological sense, but in the close-up examination given to it in the study of the smallest particles. Turns out that the closer you look at this wonderfully mysterious thing (i.e., when you chop off a very little part of it and study it), the more complicated and interesting it gets. No details yet. This is just a teaser.

The vacuum that Science can observe from our vantage point (our reference frame in this universe) hints at, or naturally generalizes into, the presence of that more fundamental precursor origin-ground (Womb) that is ‘on the outside’—independent of any vantage point.

One of our less Comfortable (brain-twisting) excursions beyond what Science can tell us.

One might wonder about a concept that is supposed to be the precursor to the first stuff that we can observe and know about: How do we demonstrate that this prior ‘state’ exists?

We don’t!

Put perfectly bluntly: It does NOT exist. At least not in the conventional sense, because ‘existence’ is a rule, or a descriptive attribute; and the ‘Uncaused Continuum’ has no rules at all—full dead stop.

But that does not make it irrelevant!

How? Well, first of all, here we are talking about it! What in the *bleep* would be the point of talking about something if it does not exist and has no relevance to our story?

It’s not irrelevant because neither does it not NOT exist. That would be a rule too. There simply is no ‘truth’ about the matter of whether it exists or not.

The philosophical blur that we’re focusing in on can be resolved by specifying a *threshold*—a boundary where we cross from not being useful or relevant, to being the Spark—the seed—that gets our story started. More on that in a minute.

Those little Minions are on a mission!

It boils down to this: The Uncaused Continuum is very much like a fertile soil where particular seeds (little pieces of the Continuum) that have the right stuff can “sprout,” by which we mean “establish a useful, self-consistent structure.”

The role of the soil is to accommodate this growth by letting the germinating seed try out within its own self-description, different properties that we Humans (who are not entirely neutral observers) would describe as “real”—physical, ‘tangible’ characteristics.

The seeds can do this magic (and the Continuum fails to prevent it) because, of course, the Continuum harbors no rules to govern which ‘ideas’ little bits of it might explore.

We’re not neutral because every one of us has some notion of what existence or reality is, but those ideas are biases based on our experience.

The Many Names of Nothingness

Okay. Now we’ve wandered down several more seriously important philosophical/conceptual Rabbit Holes. Sorry, but this “In the beginning …” stuff is an amazingly stubborn Gordian Knot. We’ll be coming back to talk about it several more times before we have our descriptive ‘sword’ sharp enough that we can play ‘Alexander the Great’ and cut cleanly through it.

Speaking of which … as we composed the earlier versions of this story (See PART ONE), we started our discussion by calling this Nothingness—this Beginning Thing—the ‘Portal to the 0th Dimension’, then we styled it as the ‘Great Empty Everything,’ and later we began regularly referring to it as the ‘Vacuum with a capital V—the Big-V Vacuum.’

This barely scratches the surface of the names that are out there. Throughout history, poets, philosophers, and prophets great and small in cultures worldwide have given it many other names, and we’ll be discussing some of them.

But, for the moment, the “Uncaused Continuum” is the serious (technical) name that we prefer, because we think it is the simplest, most basic starting point.

Why we think this is at the core of EVERY origin story

In fact, we wonder: is there actually any alternative? If one delves into the other options that have been offered in the literature, it seems possible to find roots for them right here, in this same enigmatic, lawless, chaotic, and yet wonderfully unrestricted COMFORTABLE place.

For example: other stories might insist that ‘there is no beginning.’ They would portray an eternal universe or an eternally existing deity.

But that doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny.

What is the relevance of something physical that is infinitely far away or infinitely removed in the past, or both?

If it has those properties, it is only the ‘closer’ parts of its *continuum* of existence, that become relevant. This ‘becoming relevant’ is described by some intrinsically arbitrary threshold that gets crossed, in which the first demonstrable (useful to an origin story) *cause* and its effect can be identified.

There you go. Anything prior to the place and/or time where the threshold is crossed is … an amorphous blur—an effectively Uncaused Continuum!

Narrowing the focus, Part One.

In our telling of the Origin Story—our Song of Everything—the goal is to seek a generalization of the foundational ground. But, from there, it is not possible to consider every ‘Minion’ that sprouts a functioning reality. The possibilities seem illimitable!

The story-tellers abound. Ask Google AI how many cultures have documented Creation Myths and … Well, it told me that there is no count, but that virtually every culture has one. We celebrate them and encourage them all.

But just as every story needs a starting point, every story needs a path—a waymarked route from A to B, as we touched on in Song 0.

And so, we reduce the illimitable options, and focus on just three specific sprouts, or branches to our “tree of existence.”

These three, and only these, are the pathways that we are going to keep tabs on and play with as we go along:

One: A Traditional CREATOR BEING

E.g. Odin, or Brahman, or the Islamic-Judeo-Christian God/Yahweh/Allah, etc. In this telling, whatever our Creator Being of choice happens to be, he/she/it is a sophisticated form of “Boltzmann Brain,” which could, at least in theory, have been the first useful thing that randomly fluctuated into existence—the first seed that sprouted from the Cosmic soil.

 

Two: Pink Easter Bunnies.

We’ve already introduced our cute little Miss Nothingness.

She and her babies are a useful construct, as you’ll see. Our Bunnies take the “complex being fluctuating into existence” story (sprouting out of the Uncaused Continuum or anywhere else) to neutral ground. We’ll be picking one of these bright-eyed little minions and following his/her adventures in detail.

Three: the ‘bare-bones’ Uncaused Continuum.

Our serious one—our simplest emergent particle construction, or sprouting seed, which we argue is most probable because it has the fewest moving parts to start with—perhaps just two.

This is what Physicists call a Feynman Diagram. This particular diagram shows an example from a calculation applied our universe. In it, two electrons come into the picture from the bottom, moving toward the top and toward each other. They ‘collide’ and bounce off each other, both changing direction (the two solid lines at left and right changing direction).

Quantum Mechanics tells us that what is actually happening is not a direct ‘collision,’ the way two billiard balls might collide, but an exchange of a calculable but not observable (the term used is “virtual”) energy packet (in this case a ‘Photon’—a particle of light). The path of the Photon is represented by the wavy horizontal line labeled with the symbol ‘γ.’

In some cases, further *virtual* complications can occur. In fact, Quantum Mechanics tells us that an infinite number of further complications *do* inevitably occur. This is the ‘interesting’ stuff that happens when you home in on a small piece of the vacuum in the space between the two electrons, or in the Big-V Vacuum where there’s just nothing at all ... until, suddenly … The light beam (or the emptiness of the Uncaused Continuum) momentarily ‘sprouts’ a pair of ‘virtual particles’—In the case of the above diagram, what sprouts is an electron and its anti-matter counterpart, the positron. These things flicker at the fringes of existence and then disappear by annihilating each other in such a short fraction of a second that they aren’t even observable.

That sprout (the appearance of particles that weren’t there before) is represented by the circular part of the drawing in the middle, and if you take away the two ‘colliding’ electrons, you still have a valid process, which is called a Vacuum Diagram or Bubble Diagram.

Here, we’re fading out the external stuff, and we’ve colored the interior of the Vacuum Bubble lavender. That lavender Bubble is the ‘soil’ that starts our story!

Inside the bubble, while the virtual electron and its positron partner are doing their thing, they can, and inevitably do, sprout further virtual entities. Here, we show the electron sprouting another photon, which then produces a new bubble made of a Quark-Antiquark pair. Then, inside that smaller bubble, more things can and do sprout, including, sometimes, more complicated combinations of things that all appear together.

Hopefully, you get the basic idea. Looking really closely at a tiny piece of the ‘Uncaused Continuum,’ these ‘Vacuum Bubbles’ are forever springing into existence; and within them, further, more complicated stuff can sprout. Including some useful and interesting stuff.

We won’t go much farther for now. This is just the introduction—a teaser. These Vacuum Bubbles are the Minions, the seeds—the tiny bits of the soil that sprout any imaginable (really just any possible) sort of complex stuff within its bubble.

Where to learn more (Cited Sources), and a first reveal of our distinctive twist on the Origin Story.

For further study, ask your favorite AI to tell you about Vacuum Bubble Feynman Diagrams. Choose an AI such as Google AI, which will cite the sources of its information:

Our new outside-the-box innovation—our completely fresh take on the Origin Story, which (we believe) is an entirely new proposal, is what we’re calling “Space-Time Inversion Symmetry.”

The Concept boils down to this: If you’re inside that little mischievous lavender circle in the Feynman Diagram, and if you’re a *complex* virtual entity that we’ll call “I” that has flickered into a useful (to you) existence inside that Vacuum Bubble, then there is a perspective in which that emergent entity “I” is not virtual at all, but entirely physically real, and there is no way to distinguish between that physically relevant “I” and the fleeting equivalent virtual entity “U” that an external agent (like a scientist in a lab) observes when studying the Vacuum … no difference of any kind other than the *perspective*. The “I” uses your internal perspective as its reference frame. And, of course, you’re not ‘virtual’ at all, because there you are living it!

The Inversion is first and foremost an inversion of observer and observed. What appears virtual and fleeting from the outside, is Space-Time Inverted ‘actual’ reality from an observer’s perspective on the inside, seemingly surrounded by and encased in those (not necessarily observable, thanks to various ‘censorship limits’ on your perspective) wider shells of supporting/originating processes.

Pioneering female mathematician Emmy Noether’s famous 1918 Theorem demonstrates that Momentum and Energy are scrupulously conserved during Space-Time Inversion. No matter whether we’re on the inside looking out, or outside-the-box looking in with Space-Time reference frames that are the inverse of one another, the physical picture appears the same to any observer. Yes, reality (Existence) really is all about perspective!

And we’re just one of the Minions!

“Plain and simple” wins the argument

It took us nearly 4000 words to get around to finally being ready to properly start our story. But then it takes just 51 magical words to actually do it:

The Uncaused Continuum prevails. In it, virtual Vacuum Bubbles constantly appear. Within one, a complex combination of virtual entities fluctuated into a fleeting moment of coherence, forming a self-sustaining self-useful structure. And from that emergent object’s perspective, a physical world sprouted—none other than our whole crazy, complex, Comfortable Universe!

“I am You (U) as viewed from the Inside Out!”
A depiction of the emergence of Space-Time Inversion Symmetry. We’ll be returning to this idea later for a more in-depth look.

We choose this third—this more generalized ‘garden ground’ as the serious basis of our story, with the other two stories playing supporting roles where they are useful (as in the illustration above). THE ONLY REASONABLE JUSTIFICATION for rejecting the other two, or any of a vast variety of entities that could sprout in the garden and be the basis for an intriguing tale, is its simplicity.

As we’ll be striving to demonstrate, the Uncaused Continuum has the very minimum qualities or attributes needed to build a universe—i.e., to act as a ‘Creator Being’. It’s ‘God’ without any of his unexplainable (and/or anthropomorphic) baggage. It’s Easter Bunnies without the Glitz and Bling.

Narrowing the focus, Part Two.

Thus, our story begins—with a piece of chosen ground. We plant our seed and see how it grows. We’ll now highlight THREE further limitations to the story we choose to tell, which narrow the focus.

One: The Individual perspective takes precedence.

Here, we’re talking not just the big picture, but getting very personal. Precedence (preference or priority, preferred status) is unequivocally granted to *you,* the Individual over any collective consensus …

… when there is a conflict (they do not always conflict).

But when they do clash, we demand that NO INSTITUTION supersedes the individual.

And we offer this warning advice: ***The individual gives up his/her authority to any institution or collective at their peril!***

There are two key reasons for why the Individual is granted this priority status:

First is the origin itself, in the form we’ve just introduced it: the Uncaused Continuum.

We have made a case that a Vacuum Bubble sprouting in the Uncaused Continuum is the simplest possible starting point (or ground) on which to build an origin story.

We’ve also noted that the U.C. has the mysterious property of having no properties—containing no rules, obeying no rules.

It is not even random, because randomness would be a defining property.

And most importantly: It is NOT the so-called “FIRST CAUSE”! This is critical. The Uncaused Continuum causes nothing!

Rather, each entity that emerges from the Uncaused Continuum must work out its own causal structure (its rules for causation or lack thereof), and THIS is the basis (the fact that each individual entity does all its own work from scratch) for ELEVATING (granting predominance to) that individual. They were there from the very onset (of their own emergent perspective.) And so, we must, by rights, defer.

Second is the role the distinctive individual plays in virtually all breakthrough changes. Evolution and emergence are achieved by the individual outliers or anomalies. The consensus, the collective, represent the stodgy, inflexible forces that resist change—that insist that the status quo ‘ain’t broke’ so why change it. The individual’s new idea may or may not work, but when it does, it is the agent of revolution.

In the realm of science (and physics, in particular), this is considered a controversial stance. The status of ‘observers’ (in quantum mechanics in particular), remains a subject of hot debate. Science seeks to define an observer-independent reality. Yet every scientist who ever considered this reality is an independent individual observer. There is nothing else, inside-out, or outside in. We’ll leave it there for now. Just another teaser.

Two: We adhere to the tight constraints of Physicalism

This means that anything that appears to be supernatural, magical, or paranormal, has to have a physical basis, even if we don’t know what it is yet; and that severely restricts such things.

For example, as we have already touched on, in all practical ways of describing an entirely Physical World there are no physical things that are Infinite. In general, we see a clear distinction between Absolutes and physical things.

This means that any universe that we perceive must have had an effective beginning (great – that justifies the whole function of this here Song 1!) and it also has an effective end, beyond which it no longer functions in any useful way.

Absolutes are the bailiwick of Mathematics. The following is a CRUCIAL philosophical underpinning of our Song of Everything: In the physical world, all mathematics is approximate, and the appropriate approximate formulation (one prominent example is the ‘trick’ that Particle Physicists call ‘Renormalization’) is actually the very most accurate representation of our observed physical world. We’ll claim that nature renormalized its processes long before physicists worked out the math.

Let’s repeat. All Math in our down-to-Earth physical world is APPROXIMATE. Even the Number ‘1’ is an approximation. What could be more basic than that? One way of expressing that is that the number ‘1’ does not and cannot have an infinite precision—carried out to unlimited decimal places. A much more entertaining and Comfortable and way of looking at it is by picking up a stick, contemplating it … “look, here we have one stick” … and then breaking it in two.

We’ll leave it there (for the moment); but the underlying consequences of that are profound. In quantum physics, ‘Unitarity’—the proposition that the probability of all outcomes sums to *exactly* one—is one of the most basic. On a human level, the significance is that even the Individual, who we’ve granted precedence and priority over the choices of how to describe the world, is inevitably never a perfect (absolute) reporter.

We’re hinting, here, at a profound quagmire that surrounds the root of our sprouting seedling. We’ve already touched on this in the Prologue.  Our ‘soil’ is NOT solid ground. It is, in fact a strong equivalent to ‘quicksand’, in which the more you struggle with it, the more quickly you sink in and drown. The individual is best served by maintaining a balance between deep penetrating thought (the struggle to explain our world) and the pursuit of productive enterprise, experiences, and relationships—elements of the living experience that are far more important than thought.

And this directly leads us to the third constraint, or focus, that we impose on our particular telling of the story.

Three: We aim for BALANCE!

How can we say this gracefully?

Human thought is a biological junk pile—a vastly overrated tool.

It is prone to any number of distortions, biases, and unchecked excesses.

In constructing our Song of Everything, we are heavily relying on this tool, of course. But we’re marching forward with eyes wide open.

The discipline that pursues human thought to its maximum potential is called ‘Philosophy’. But there is far more to life than thought. Indeed, three aspects of physical experience, perhaps gilded with a carefully curated frosting of thought, are far more fundamental to the story of Human Existence.

The three-layer cake.

Our lives are mostly about three things that are more basic than thought (though they often employ thought as a tool).

The first is primal—our ancient in-the-moment alertness. (Stalking prey, searching for edible tidbits.) We’re still hunter-gatherers at our core.

The second is Human interaction: Communication, sex, competition/politics, (what else?). Again, agile alertness is at a premium.

Third. Sleep! Down-time is a built-in essential.

Then comes the frosting: Thought—that cobbled-together biological junk pile: planning, analysis, constructing mental models of our world, solving problems. These are luxuries that we can afford to devote time to only when there is no pressing physical business. This is actually (in my experience) most compatible with the primal parts of life—out foraging in nature or on the fringes of that essential sleep time.

But it’s the physical business that gets the results. A well-lived life keeps us ‘in the moment’ and not ‘lost in thought’ most of the time …

… and so, a well-told balanced story of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” shouldn’t be smothered by ‘ideas and theorizing’ even though thought is the tool we most often depend on when we’re ready to stand up and tell our story.

A little Guidance from one of humanity’s greatest thinkers.

Sir Isaac Newton, writing in 1704 in the Twenty-eighth Query of his treatise called Opticks tells us:

“The main business of Natural Philosophy is to argue from Phenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects...”

He called it Natural Philosophy.

It’s kind of an antiquated term, but in this case, we believe the older way of thinking about the World is better, because it is broader and more balanced.

For our Song of Everything, we want to do “philosophy”—to employ this discipline to the maximum extent possible—while sticking close to Nature, i.e., without becoming ‘Lost in Thought.’

The mission is to stay ‘Natural’—to avoid made-up ideas (feigning hypotheses), and yet we thrive on the use of (creative) thought to propose fact-based but outside-the-box hypotheses that build on the most current knowledge. These aren’t agenda-driven efforts to attain pre-determined targets. They aren’t supernatural or mystical ‘fantasies.’ In general, they’re not disingenuous proposals of the sort that (I think) Newton had in mind.

We at Comfortable Universe Headquarters are working very hard to assimilate the latest scientific knowledge while retaining a wider, more balanced focus. In this information saturated age, people far too often dismiss other people’s stories before they even giving them any serious consideration. It’s a sad state of affairs. It takes experience and focus, and, most of all, patience, to delve deeply enough into a story to properly evaluate it.

Should we promote our story? Advertise? Work to build a following? It’s a matter of priority. At this point in the telling of our story, we’re still more interested in exploring the ideas than in convincing others. By the very nature of this wide-ranging, highly interdisciplinary story, nobody’s going to be entirely satisfied with what they find here. We take seriously our own rule that the Individual takes precedence. Our Song of Everything is one individual’s sometimes radical excursions from the collective mindscape.

We do want our story to stand out—to have new things to say. And we want to keep from getting ‘Lost in the Weeds.’ Nuance has an important place in this discussion, but Nuance for its own sake is … well … it’s often how philosophers make their mark in today’s crowded and competitive ‘marketplace’ of ideas.

But it can lead to over-specialization and, sometimes, ‘Paralysis by Analysis.’

Have philosophers ‘lost the plot?’ Well, I think they’ll tell you it’s like ‘basic research’ or like the pursuit of branches of mathematics that have no known physical application. (Or like some readers’ perspective on our Comfortable Universe Song of Everything!) You never know how, when, or where a radical excursion from the collective mindscape might turn out to be useful.

But yes. It’s largely frosting on the cake. Let time be the arbiter. Useful new perspectives will find their place in a balanced approach to existence … but meanwhile, let’s get out there and explore some more of that exciting and mysterious garden!

Song 0: Your introduction to *THE* Essential Story …

… It’s the story Everyone wants told; and nearly everyone has their own ideas about it.

This is the story of Creation—the story of our Origin, Purpose, and ultimate Fate.

Our unique take on this story focuses on something that most other Origin stories and Creation Myths miss or just take for granted—the astounding degree of preparation that has been set in place in order to allow us to exist.  Layer upon layer of fundamental physical law, then chemistry, and then biology, have been laid out on the universe’s enormous lab bench and relentlessly tested and honed before we could blink open our young eyes and peer out to recognize the World and our place in it.

The majority of these layers of experimentation have not even been identified yet, let alone understood, (especially in the early phases, between the Big Bang or its precursor states and the formation of protons and neutrons, as we’ll be explaining in detail) and most of the stuff that science does have some grasp on (about the first atoms and how they needed stars to get Chemistry started, and then how the stars needed to explode to allow life to get started) represent extremely improbable processes that are far from adequately explained (as to why they happen at all) and/or are grossly under-appreciated.

Despite the stunning complexity of the arrangement we are born into, we argue that none of it required active ‘management’.  It could have happened purely by trial and error.  How?  Because of the unfathomably long time and vast space available for random trial and error to pick and choose things that work.  Something that might happen only once in a billion years in only one place in all the universe is no big deal for the system we live in to have produced, allowed to multiply, and eventually to dominate the landscape.  The human mind simply cannot grasp the depth and breadth of time and space that has been available for these experiments.  Trillions and quadrillions of particle interactions happen simultaneously, over and over, millisecond-by-millisecond, across a laboratory that is billions of light-years across. And these experiments have been continuously running for billions of years!  It just seems easier to believe, for many of us, that there must have been a design and a designer.  Maybe so, but it’s not necessary.  And, in any case, the bottom line of our Song of Everything does not depend on resolution of the designer question.  It only depends on the result:

The Vast Preparation that preceded our individual appearance in this World means that each of us is granted a profound, truly outrageous gift — if we pay attention, if we play our cards right, then nearly every one of us has a damn good chance of living a Comfortable life!

* * *

  The image above is the “Cover” for this break-out, cross-genre, multi-media interdisciplinary story. It looks like a “book” cover, but it’s meant to be far more than just a book. The full presentation is ideally a dynamic, evolving thing, prepared afresh with each telling, presented live and in person by one or more of our community’s ‘wise ones’—Elder Shaman-sages in an updated modernization of the ancient story-telling tradition that long preceded human written language.

The content of our Song of Everything defies categorization into any specific genre, though the greater part of it contains three basic elements. It is part instructional (non-fiction), part spiritual guide, and part personal narrative.

The non-fiction element encompasses all that today’s Science has discovered (updated as new discoveries are made), while also exploring deep into the often neglected and unrecognized clues and hints that the frontiers of current knowledge are pointing to.

Secondly, the Inspirational part taps into the deep wisdom of ancient faith traditions where they still resonate with the truths that the universe is revealing.

And lastly the story is partly Aspirational—the considered expression of one inquisitive mind (your host and author here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters)—not quite fiction, but, rather, following the author’s keen sense of direction as he pursues the available clues down a path toward a broad, coherent, understanding of the Biggest Picture of what our world is all about.

As said, this is a story that is best told in the (up to) 300-thousand-year tradition of oral and visual ‘enactment’ around the Homo sapiens hunter-gatherer’s tribal campfire. The participants bring the story to life using language, song, dance, even gymnastics. They’re dressed in elaborate and colorful costumes (with special emphasis on exotic masks). They use props like flaming batons or juggling; and they invite the audience to actively participate. In today’s world there can be video clips and immersive CGI animation. Virtual reality, however, is NOT the aim. This is AI’s fail-zone.  This is *real* reality—meant to be an intense, live-in-the-moment, fully interactive physical experience.

Because always, built into the story’s core, is living fire—a riveting personal emotional intensity meant to inspire awe, wonder, raw excitement, sometimes even fear, but with an exquisitely controlled purpose—to engage the audience, capture their imagination, and take them on a fantastical journey into the depths of their own souls.

  Here is a form of unceasingly restless, dynamic narrative that evokes the hunter-gatherer’s hearth-fire itself with its vaulting flames, its dangerous crackling chaos, its deep burning core, yet always carefully contained within its ring of stones.

 

Interview with the staunchest, most prominent defender of the Oral Tradition that I know—historian, scholar, and UNESCO executive council member Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901-1991).

This interview (in French with English subtitles) was recorded in 1969. It was back in about 1960 when, while addressing the United Nations, Bâ first offered his famous quote that the death of the traditional Elder story-teller is equivalent to the burning of a library—an underexploited cultural resource that, if it is not preserved, is lost forever.

* * *

Here begins a fire that cannot be quenched. It is the burning story of the all-pervasive experience we call “life.”

How can a raging fire be captured in words on a page? Not well. What we present here is merely a basic sketch—just a skeletal outline—far from complete fulfillment of the fantastical experience that the caption under the opening image suggests.

Yet even in such a simple static text form, this story is literally “to die for”—it is the essential greatest blockbuster of all time!

How could it not be? The subject matter is the stuff of humanity’s profoundest mysteries—the stuff that keeps more people awake at night than anything else. Yet when it’s revealed in the careful, balanced, natural and comfortable way that it should be, it is the stuff of inspiration—evoking our deepest wonder and awe.

And so, we introduce our Origin Story: the most cross-cultural, most deeply embedded story that humans have ever tried to tell—the story of all of us—our roots, our relationship with everything around us, our purpose, our dreams, and our ultimate destination.

The goal of such a story, when done right, is to satisfy the audience’s needs in balanced, accessible terms—sharing the best available, most reasonable, widest-ranging explanation of what happened to get this thing we call reality started, why we exist at all, what our presence in this universe is all about, how we achieved such a special privilege, and what we could do with this precious gift.

Diverse versions, but with common purpose

We are not all going to agree on the way such a story should be told, of course. Yet most of us would agree that it is a story meant to unify us—to keep our tribe, however we define that, working as one in purpose and vision.

Each and every tribe, and each and every tribal member within said tribe, will ultimately trust only their own unique perspective on this story. Yet there is a vital unifying theme across all cultures—the quest for certainty in an uncertain world—the desire to encircle the raging, chaotic fire with a solid and secure ring of stones—the hope that, when the story is well-told, the members of the tribe will have absorbed the essence of it, and will come away ready to settle down for a comfortable night’s sleep.

Yes, it’s Comfortable! You actually know *much* more than you think you know.

To look at a helpless newborn baby, you may not recognize this unexpected truth:

From our very day of conception, we are endowed with 99.99 percent of the knowledge we need to successfully function in this crazy, chaotic world.

The ‘book of knowledge’ that contains this amazing treasure trove of guidance has been 4.3 billion years in the making!

It’s called our DNA; and here on this blog, we have devoted a post to its essential importance and its largely unrecognized value.

This is our ‘Sense’—our deepest internal intuition—an understanding of each one of the billions to trillions of routine tasks that we do every second of every minute of every hour of our lives—tasks that each and every one of the thirty trillion individual cells in our bodies are busy accomplishing second-by-second, even though we never realized that we needed to know all this mundane stuff in order to survive.

But we damn well do.  It didn't happen by accident.

Somebody (usually a single-celled organism living a very, VERY long time ago) had to work out how to choose the right chemical reactions—ones that could work for it—and how to take advantage of every single one of them—how those processes would cooperate and integrate into the collective mission of our thirty-trillion cell human body collective, in order to sustain life and thrive.

Not a single one of these chemical and biological processes can be taken for granted; and yet modern science has identified, categorized, and described only a paltry few of these essential tasks.

Never thought about this before? Few have.

It’s just a small part of the incredible depth of preparation that we talked about in the opening caption.  This is where our Comfortable Universe project stands out from all the rest of the Stories that you’ve ever heard.

This kind of ‘outside-the-box’ perspective is just the first taste of the deeply creative thinking that our Song of Everything will be striving to emphasize as we present our version of this essential universal tale.

We’ll give you another quick sample of our craft, also hinted at in the opening caption—a perspective that everybody seems to take completely for granted *without justification*, because it almost certainly required uncountable trial-and-error attempts to accomplish: the fact that the vast majority of the (ordinary – “baryonic”) matter that our universe generated as it emerged from the inscrutable chaos of the Big Bang turns out to be HIGH OCTANE FUEL, capable of initiating a super-specialized three-step process that is essential to the successful resolution of the story of us:

• (1) making stars and solar systems,
• (2) while, at the same time, producing all the essential elements for life, and
• (3) providing a reliable mechanism (super-nova explosions) to release these elements back into the general environment where they could gather in chaotic ‘Goldilocks’ habitable zones where the conditions are right for the chemical experiments needed to produce life to take place.

Any one of these achievements separately—stars lighting up the primordial sky, the manufacture of 92 complex atomic elements from the primordial fuel of just two abundant elements (Hydrogen and Helium), and the convenient release of these 92 elements back into the general environment when stars self-destruct in just the right way—would have profound consequences to the evolution of the universe. All three of them achieved in a choreographed dance? No way! This is far, FAR beyond any believable claim that it was just a lucky break—a statistical fluke. The laws of physics had to be EXQUISITELY TUNED, through trial and error, we argue, to achieve this crucial configuration.

What to expect as you read on

This post is a rewrite of what we called the ‘Introduction’ in the Song of Everything, Part 1 post.

Presented in the many (currently 30) “Songs” under this title you will find your host’s always-evolving best current working version of this collective Origin Story of ours.

It is a dynamic narrative—always evolving.  It is meant to be a complete story, starting with how the Universe formed, and ending by making a projection of how humans and life might evolve far into the future.

We’re talking about trillions of years here, at least. Our sun won’t be around. Our universe won’t even be around by then. But we will—a ‘collective we’ in the form of … wait … no spoilers here!

Always our particular version of the “Song of Everything” is working at the frontier of human understanding—trying to piece together the unexplained ‘loose ends’ and missing puzzle pieces that science has exposed. This is a job that few people are doing. There’s a whole lot of big-picture, outside-the-box thinking possible in that realm; but few thinkers work on it because it’s not a pursuit that pays well. In part, that’s because we do not shy away from critical subject areas where there can be more than one explanation—more than one answer—more than one path that leads to where we find ourselves. The pejorative science term for this is that such theories are “not falsifiable.”

So?!?

If a thing can’t be demonstrated to be false, then it’s a potential path to truth.

Think.  Which path did the putative traveler, who witnessed our world-realm’s evolution from the very start, take to get here?  Can it be described as a journey from point A to point B? What if we don’t even know where ‘point A’ is (which we definitely don't)? Could there be more than one reasonable ‘point A’ that can be shown to be her valid starting point? These questions DO, inherently, have multiple answers. That doesn’t diminish the value of the answers, as science might want to try to have you believe.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, for Chrissake! We don’t all take the same ones.

To be sure, for closure at the end of the day, each of us does have to choose a path … that is, if we want to tell a coherent story to ourselves and others. Faced with multiple reasonable stories, we here at Comfortable Universe HQ are choosing a common-sense one that relies on simple steps down one of the more comfortable, reasonable paths leading from our detailed thought-model that describes the universe’s origin to its present state.

And, for our presentation, the very diversity of possible paths is actually a key part of the story. We’re arguing that there is *inherently* no single possible story—no objective “right” answer to how we came to be, any more than there can be a right answer to why you, the inestimably brilliant current reader of this article, are the person you are rather than having been born as a cockroach in the sewers of Cleveland in 1890.

The Balanced Trinity: Sense, Spirit, Science

Here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, we take a far wider view of our universe than just the hard facts. Our story, our “Song of Everything,” always strives to maintain a balanced mix of three elements of the dynamic trinity of the ‘ways of understanding’ the world:

1.) Sense: We introduced this above. The deeply ingrained intuitive understanding that we have inherited, augmented by our human physical senses and cultural background, significantly filtered through our life experience. This is the kind of story that an average person who could be your neighbor might tell, and you’d probably mostly agree with it.

2.) Spirit: The element of the story that is distinctive to each individual, vitally dependent on the first-person perspective and its unavoidable uniqueness. Each of us has our personal point of view, and we cultivate it throughout our lives. If we take that job of cultivating our perspective seriously, the result can be a spectacularly rich and far-reaching vision …

Wait ... a vision? ... What the ... ?

Be patient. Let us double-down on this and explain. But first we have to complete our trilogy of components to the story.

3.) The icing on the cake is the newest of man’s tools for understanding the world: the enterprise of Science. The scientist’s gleaned knowledge is meant to be repeatable (that’s where the issue of falsifiability raises its ugly head), and as objective as possible, meaning that it is supposed to be independent of the biases of any individual, any culture, any time in history.

Our four billion years of intuitive understanding, our particular species’ 300 thousand years of cultural heritage, now have to face up to the rigorous, disciplined scrutiny of experimental testing … where this is possible.

It is not possible, however, in many, many important situations.

The best stories go far beyond what science can tell

Science deliberately limits its scope. If something cannot be observed, then science stands silent.

It is an important and vastly underappreciated feature of nature that we live within a comfortable cocoon of time and space, with tight restrictions on what can be observed. The speed of light restricts our view of the biggest things that surround us, and what’s called the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle strictly limits what we can say about the smallest things.  There are boundaries called the ‘Compton Limit’ and ‘Event Horizons’ that impose further censorship rules (or, in a more positive view, guardrails) that restrict what science can observe and talk about.

These are the limits that box in the field of science.  Well, our Song of Everything is not staying inside that box

Consider the vast array of profound and critical questions that are veiled behind these barriers. These include all the early steps describing how our Universe formed and how life got its start. And they include, of course, visions of where life and the universe might go in the deep future.

Our Song of Everything does not shy away from exploring best answers, or one set of consistent ones, that extend well beyond the boundaries, barriers, and censorship limits that restrict science. This is where the idea of a well-formulated *vision* becomes important.

In modern scientific parlance, it’s called a hypothesis, which distinguishes it from the mysticism associated with, say, the visions that are thickly strewn throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible and most other religious faiths going back to Shamanic traditions.

The seven ‘C’s of a Useful, Practical telling of the Story

What makes a good modern-day “vision”? First and foremost, it has to be a story that others can relate to. It has to Connect with its audience. Vision becomes Visionary—it draws in an audience.

To do so, it faces the task of finding a balance between being Concise yet Complete (not compromising any known facts). The presentation must be Coherent and well-organized. The factual content needs to be verifiable—Citations from public, researchable sources must be included to assure trust and reliability.

And most important of all, coming back to that first “C”, the final product needs to be Comfortable—easy for its intended audience to absorb, while at the same time holding their interest and attention. To that end, it requires Creativity to carry the audience to unexpected exciting and appealing new destinations.

In today’s world, a good ‘vision’ distinguishes itself from the drab, entirely unimaginative AI-generated rehashing of already published information. Real humans re-imagine the best known ‘facts’ in unique and original ways—we build structures (mental models) that even the best AI algorithms entirely lack. Only the quirks of a real human being are capable of pulling off a story with true ‘sparkle’ and ‘zing’. And the best of that comes by telling the tale in person, live, using the full repertoire of gestures, expressions, body language, and intonations.

The Magic and Power of Escaping the Box!

What starts as a seeming supernatural mystery, takes focus with clear vision, becomes a hypothesis, and, with further work, can become established part of our understanding of existence.

Einstein could be said to have had this kind of vision—viewing the world in a new way that led to his theories of Relativity—Special Relativity in 1905, then General Relativity ten years later.

In ancient times people with such vision were deemed ‘Prophets;’ and the ones that got it right (or the ones that had good PR—Public Relations) are the ones that are remembered.

This old way of talking about the process of developing hypotheses, which are truly nothing but ‘visions,’ has real power.

The stories/theories/hypotheses – the ‘Songs’ that are offered in this series of posts explore ideas beyond the limits of current knowledge, both on the smallest and largest spatial scales and on the distant past and distant future time scales. It’s really an attempt to cover Everything.

That is the Spirit part of the magic ‘trinity’ of a good story; and it is, of course personal to the teller. That’s the part that makes any story robust and complete—the telling, with a speaker and an audience—the part that gives life to words and information—puts it on a living substrate!

Do not be shy. Stand up and tell your story!

Imagine a closed book sitting on a dusty shelf high in the stacks of some forgotten library. What does that book say? Nothing … until somebody takes it off the shelf, dusts it off, and reads it. Suddenly, an inert collection of atoms organized in the form of symbols becomes a ‘vision,’ simply because of a choice to ‘observe’ the atoms made by a person who has had some training in the interpretation of those symbols. Sounds a lot like magic. Or quantum mechanics.

Taking the magic and turning it inside out: that ‘training in the interpretation of those symbols’ exists in another library—the observer’s mind. And that brings us full circle, back to Amadou Hampâté Bâ.

“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns, an entire library disappears, without the need for the flames to destroy the paper.”

In this story, your host aims to use the terms ‘observer’ and ‘mind’ in the broadest sense. Single particles can act as observers and can be argued to have individual points of view.  As particles gather into interactive groups, new properties emerge, such that these groups of particles can be thought of as having perspectives of their own.  Molecules are an example.  And when molecules aggregate into living things, yet more complex emergent properties appear.  We’re going to eventually be talking about a vast Intergalactic Empire that could very well be established right here in our real universe, right under our noses, so to speak, run by single celled interstellar space travelers, who we call the Twees. Do single-celled microbes have minds? Stay tuned for the arguments and the discussion! That’s the sort of outside-the-box magic that we love revealing ... and reveling in!

Open your books, people! Share them, just as we’ll be doing here! As the prophet Muhammad was told (Forcefully!  Three times!) by the Archangel Gabriel in his seminal vision in the cave of Hira in 610AD: 

“Iqra!”

“Read!” “Recite!” “Proclaim!”

Imagine if Muhammad had gone back home, told his wife Khadija that he had just had a bunch of crazy hallucinations (which he did), and then Khadija had just passively accepted his word, rather than referring Muhammad to her wise old cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal.  What a massive turning-point in human history!

The Christian Bible speaks to this as well. Paraphrasing Matthew 5:15-16:

“Does a person light a lamp and then hide it under a bushel basket? Of course not! The lamp is set on its stand, giving light to all the world. Let your light so shine before all men ...”

If we never proclaim our stories, then what value can they possibly have?

Most importantly, there is no better way to clarify your personal take on this greatest of all possible stories than to share it with others. It forces you to organize it, to work out the kinks, to strengthen the narrative. As the old adage goes: “the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to others.” And what more important subject is there than “the meaning of life?”

And so, with that said … off we go!

Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride.

Song 30: And now we launch into Uncharted Seas

“The Captain and the Rag Doll” – a novel concept in three images.

Here is a scene on the bridge of the “Vantage Point” space station positioned at the range of the Solar Gravitational Lens (547 times the distance between Sun and Earth—75.8 light hours away from Earth).

The Vantage Point’s dual missions are to use the Sun’s Gravitational Lens as a massive natural telescope (it magnifies objects as much as 10,000,000,000 times!) to examine nearby star systems in search of habitable exoplanets, and, secondarily, to use radar to detect interstellar objects passing nearby.  Whenever an interesting object comes near enough, a small probe, and sometimes a manned ‘shuttlecraft’ is deployed to intercept it and return samples.

But there is big trouble aboard the Vantage Point.  The Twees (our Song of Everything's proposed pan-cosmic interstellar single-celled beings, which possess a depth of DNA-based genetic-level 'intelligence' that, despite being ploddingly slow, deliberate, and patient, far exceeds human understanding and capability to cope with, other than by the brute-force application of broad-spectrum antibiotics) arrived in an interstellar sample half a century ago.  Being the exquisitely adaptable life forms that they must be in order to have 'learned' to travel interstellar space and to out-compete and displace the indigenous life on virtually every planet that they encounter, they easily evaded the station’s strict sample isolation protocols.

They seemed innocuous at first, but within a few decades, they had worked their patient magic and had taken effective control of the station. As a result, human replacements were forbidden.  The last arrival and the last onboard births were supposed to have happened thirty-five years ago.  All of the remaining commissioned human crew members on the station are aged 60 and older.  The Captain is a Twee-operative Cyborg with an AI interface implant that can crudely communicate with his single-celled masters from the Twees' Great Pan-Cosmic Interstellar Empire.

In the scene shown, the Vantage Point's Captain has just discovered this little unauthorized ‘stow-away,’ Bel Patrí, illicitly born aboard the station, and an interrogation is under way.  The radiation of space that penetrates the bulk storage holds, where Bel was born and raised (not designed to be occupied by humans), resulted in little Bel being born with 13 fingers (six on the left hand, seven on the right).

Seventeen years later, with the patient Twees having now infiltrated Earth itself, the planet is in chaos.  Depicted here is the defining moment of the Song of Everything’s deliberately optimistic version of the future.  This is obviously a fictional treatment, but it represents the establishment of a Human alliance that we in our real world (or in a related universe) may find vital to our future.  It’s based on our Song of Everything’s serious proposal that there really could be some sort of Pan-Cosmic Empire of the Twees operating in ways that we don’t naturally recognize as intelligence.  But that’s our problem—a far too narrow-minded (quick-witted but unwise) interpretation of ‘intelligence’.

Call it a ‘Peace Treaty’ if you must, because the prime mission of the Twees—really just their natural instinct—is to dominate every planet that they colonize.  99.9 percent of the time, that means destruction of everything that resists or gets in their way, and this provides a frightfully chilling answer to the ‘Fermi Paradox.’ 

Shown here is a scene on an exotic habitable exoplanet orbiting a rogue star that had escaped the galaxy Andromeda and was approaching the Vantage Point space station.  The alien is named ABI (Abby) and the human is none other than our little Rag Doll, Bel Patrí, who has grown up to become the senior ambassador representing all of humanity.  ABI is a Twee-constructed “Artificial Biological Intelligence,” which acts as the representative of this newly arrived Twee culture—part of its “Central Authority.”

What’s under that huge turban that Bel is wearing? “Much and more,” as George R.R. Martin is fond of saying.  (Note the Captain's oversized hat in the first image.  He's wearing it for a reason.)

Lastly, here’s the book cover, with a look at the Vantage Point Space Station itself, taken presumably with a good night-vision camera and with a whole lot of dramatic license, because at the distance of the Solar Gravitational Lens, the light from the sun is only about 1½ times the brightness of the full moon on a clear night here on Earth.

The circular portions of the massive ship contain rings of rotating magnetically constrained habitats, where the rotation creates exactly 1-g earth-equivalent ‘gravity’ through centrifugal force.  The cosmic scene is where some liberties have been taken for dramatic effect.  I doubt if the heliosheath, the ‘cloud’ in the background, produced by the solar wind, would be visible at all.  The sun would be a pinpoint, with no resolvable width to the naked eye.  A potential habitable exoplanet (orbiting another star) that is being viewed as magnified by the gravitational lens would be much, much dimmer, in general, and would be concentrated in a ring so close to the sun’s disc that the naked eye could not see it.  Only the space station’s high-quality telescope with a coronagraph to block the sunlight, and with a long, long exposure time, could resolve the details of that distant object.  But that detail would be astounding.  The telescope can resolve objects 25km across (a modest sized city) on an exoplanet 100 light years away!

For the first 29 songs of this series, we’ve been talking about the past, constrained by what we see—from our deepest origins as a universe to the origins of life. With that story on the table, it is now time to discuss the future.

Song 30 will be focusing specifically on the human story and on our potential as citizens of a vibrant Cosmic ecosystem as outlined in Song 29.

Science’s predictions about the future of our sun, of our solar system, of our galaxy (with its imminent collision with the giant neighboring galaxy Andromeda) and of the deep future of the universe as a whole are well covered in the conventional literature. As always, Wikipedia, scrupulously citing and clearly identifying its source material, is a great starting point. This Link to the “timeline of the far future” page is pretty comprehensive and a super fun read.

Prior to the Comfortable Universe series, we took a stab on this blog at exploring the human future regarding the prospects of our species expanding out into space and even into other universes. The ideas ranged widely and sometimes drifted into the realm of fiction.

Here, our Song of Everything’s story builds on that post.  At the outset, here, we keep a reign on the speculation. Armed with additional time to contemplate (since writing that Utopia or Bust blog post linked in the previous paragraph), we are now offering a new perspective, which is this: Although we may never encounter ‘intelligence’ of a multi-cellular form that we can recognize and ‘talk to,’ maybe we just need to be a bit more humble, adjust our idea of what we mean by intelligence, and consider afresh what a different, far more patient form of intelligence may look like.

This will be a discussion without much embellishment regarding the potential radically profound accomplishments that versatile, hardy, and adaptable single cell organisms might have achieved, and where we could fit into their putative great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire.

In Song 29, we postulated that early-onset life, appearing within the first 200 million years of the universe’s existence, is nearly certain to exist out there. This is not fiction, but the most reasonable big-picture extrapolation of our available knowledge about the astrophysics and chemistry of the early phases of the universe. Because all the events on the statistical tail of the various distributions in the early universe (of matter, of its clustering into stellar nurseries, and of its metallicity—the concentration of the heavy elements required for life to develop) favor vastly earlier star formation in isolated pockets than the large-scale average picture that the Standard Model of Cosmology describes, logic tells us that life could have been able to establish far earlier than we might expect; and the ongoing discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies “too old for the universe” are providing more and more evidence corroborating this picture. In this hot early, highly chaotic regime, during which most of the universe was a laboratory for conducting long-enduring and wide-ranging chemistry experiments, it seems almost inevitable that the first hardy extremophile organisms would emerge and quickly thrive.

We have called them the Twees; and we posit that the peak of their activity (the apex of their ‘Civilization’) happened very long ago, soon after the time when the entire universe, wall-to-wall, was in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of equitable temperatures in which water was mostly liquid, between 15 and 200 million years after the Big Bang. (By contrast, the universe today is 13.8 billion years old.)

What characteristics might the Twees have evolved that would give them their survival advantage? Simple adaptability to a wide range of environments, and the ability to go into a dormant state for extended periods seem to be among the basics.

Then … the ability for World-hopping would be a revolutionary survival advantage (the term for this is ‘panspermia’) if it can be achieved. Wikipedia has this subject fully covered.

Our Twees, as pioneer interstellar travelers in a universe teeming with other life forms, would then evolve the ability to assimilate and/or displace any competitors on the worlds that they settle on.

This brings up the scary potential answer to the Fermi Paradox discussed in the caption to the opening image. Twees might have overwhelmed and either eliminated intelligent life forms, prevented them from ever developing our form of intelligence in the first place, or perhaps even parasitized them. This latter possibility could, potentially, lead to a symbiosis, which may not be all bad (for us). Perhaps the ‘smartest’ Twees ‘realize’ in their slow, patient genetic-evolutionary way of ‘thinking,’ that partnering with a civilization of super smart, quick thinking, highly structured and organized multi-trillion-cell colonies, might be a very comfy way to live.

Good. Check your gut flora, ladies and gentlemen! There you might find your Intergalactic alien invaders. Or check your mitochondria! Maybe ET is living comfortably deep inside of every one of our cells!

This is not quite fiction, we remind you, because we have a sound scientific hypothesis underlying this. We believe we’ve made a pretty strong case, in Songs 28 and 29, that panspermia is no fringe theory.

But we’re not finished. Now we *will* launch into speculative uncharted seas, and sail well beyond the ragged fringes of serious science. To wit: Is it possible that our Twees could find a way to transition through the mysterious portal/gateway that leads from parent universe into its descendants—the proposed baby universes?

Who first said: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”?  Deeply, deeply profound words.

But what a leap! Perhaps so, but even this, we claim, is not complete fiction. More to come as we elaborate.

We’ve talked at length about the Big-V Vacuum where our universe is a mere dot among a sea of dots, each with internal rules on how to interact with the other dots, all of which they must interact with continually.

Please take serious note of one key word in the last paragraph. Interact. In the lawless Vacuum, Universes *must* deal with (interact with) the other dots, albeit via employing highly controlled pathways as defined by their own internal rules, as we’ve tried to carefully describe in Song 27. And some of those other dots—likely to be the ones our universe most closely interacts with, would be its relatives—ancestors, children, cousins, etc.

We’ve talked about Flat World, which is the composite realm of the multiverse where related dots interact, perhaps in ways that can be formally described.

Flat World.  For a comprehensive tour of all of Flat World from its very edge (see image below) to the bustling civilization encircling the blinding ‘font’ of eternal inflation at its center, please refer to “The Navel of Time,” seventh novel in the “Eden’s Womb” sci-fi series.

At the very brink of Flat World, sheltered from the howling “Death Wind” by the modest home of the ancient and enigmatic being named Eeyock, sits young Azura Timberfell and Eeyock herself.

Science accepts, albeit begrudgingly, that the unobservable multiverse is likely to exist as a consequence of eternal Inflation. Individual universes are bubbles that have first cooled (perhaps by condensing into black holes of every imaginable size) and then ‘re-heated’ (perhaps via Hawking radiation). The emergence of multiple universes from the same inflaton field requires that each individual entity that appears (assuming they exist) has a common ancestor. That already implies at least a one-way interaction between these entities (which we depict as separate individual universes that populate Flat World) and it implies a set of common guiding laws, at least as a starting point.

Beyond that basic family connection, the subject of interaction between universes is such a wide-open area that it is really only possible to imagine examples of how it could happen and their consequences. (Physicists have explored wormholes and bumping universes in string theory as examples.) Beyond that, we can drift into a realm of fiction, maybe ‘science fantasy’ in which the ‘rules of magic’ by which universes talk to one another are intended to be constrained by some sort of physical system that is well beyond our ken, with constructivist-style laws that demand ‘either you must be physically possible and internally consistent or you will degenerate into useless garbage’. But it’s basically impossible to define the limits regarding how such systems could be configured. We’re just too primitive in our thinking. Imagine how a cave man would react to a device that conveys information via radio waves.

Okay. If you are willing to grant, for the purposes of a thought experiment, the idea of a Flat World in which universes can communicate and interact with one another, then we have to throw in the ‘monkey wrench.’

We have to allow the multiverse to play the powerful wild card of simulation scenarios (especially physically instantiated analog models, rather than digital) because it is in the deck.

If our whole Song of Everything story as presented in the preceding 29 songs is correct—in which an egg-within-egg-within-egg genealogy of universes can effectively manifest ‘something from nothing’ via the ‘magic’ of Inflation and by exploiting Higher Order Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, in which the eggs (the babies) gain complete autonomy without ever actually leaving the womb (“hatching”), with each generation being entirely self-sufficient, self-supporting, and robustly capable of evolving greater complexity than that from which it arose, and lacking any dependence on the ancestor/parent entity or on any external environment at all, except to be left alone sufficiently to function—then this story cannot easily prohibit ‘designer eggs/babies’ with any sort of *purpose-driven* agenda.

Here’s where even the tiniest seed of possibility for interaction between universes can potentially take root (if controllable, or degenerate into a cancerous chaos if not).

Consider: life, when successful, is all about controlling what is otherwise rampant chaos.

If life takes control, then the thought space for purpose-driven universe interaction becomes almost limitless. The possibility of being capable of creating, and then moving into, a child universe with custom-designed characteristics and with effectively unlimited resources (both of which can equal or exceed the parent’s) opens our Song of Everything to stories that just dazzle the imagination. It is life’s ultimate survival strategy.

Tell me, dear conservative and cautious scientist, that this proposed ‘pathway to practical immortality’ is categorically impossible. And please kindly provide your proof.

The Twees, being first to appear here in our universe, being far more abundant than we’ll ever be, and being far more adaptable, hardy, and resilient, would be the first to blaze this trail, and to exploit it, should it lead to the ‘promised land’.

And … *if* the Twees achieved this transcendent feat (obviously a gargantuan *if*) then here, dear reader, is unquestionably the ultimate goal of our human enterprise.

New universes await!

Shall we go on? Shall we sail on toward such exotic, remote, and unexplored horizons?

“GANDALF: The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass; and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”