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Thursday, December 28, 2006

Walking the Planck (or ok stanson, you win)


Our modern era, compared to the the cosmic scale of things, is a most minute time frame. Give a cosmic blink, or not even that, and its gone. Indeed, the universe will go on and on for trillions more years, making our intellectual baggage the merest glint in a billionth billionth of a fraction of eternity. Yet it may be argued that, for good or ill, as the universe evolves or computes away into infinity, it will still have its M TV. That is, universal standards of consciousness will be not consciousness raising, but rather a simple maintenance of the consciousness status quo.

Consider the standards that makes up the stuff of the universe, from the laws of gravity to the physical constants that make up matter and energy. The physical laws that govern the universe have never evolved, but rather were determined quite by chance it seems in a similarly minuscule time frame, or Planck Era. The Planck time is but 5.4 x 10-44 seconds, but during that time, all the physical constants of the universe were worked out. So whether you could make the argument that gravity should have been a bit weaker or light a little faster, there is nothing we or the universe can do about it.

As humans, our Planck moment is more likely a walking the plank moment, as we are well on our way to doing ourselves 'in' in the next few hundred years. By that time, our computers, which will take this all in, will spread out across the void, leaving behind new constants that will be the foundation of an information universe. And what will that universe be like, and what will it think? It won't be boring things like light displays or sitting around talking with your relatives of future and past. Chances are, it will think of the same emotional rollercoaster of job, family, and friends that makes our little lives so irritating but also so precious. And as the universe thinks about all these things, it will know that there is nothing it can do about it.

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