Where do we come from, where do we go?
The contents of this small article deal with the nature of our universe, and where it’s heading. As odd as it might sound, this theory was popularized by a mobster in the 1980’s in Mumbai. Much of this article is directly inspired from his words, immortalized in the book, Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts.
The history of our Universe is one where motion is constant. It started with the Big Bang, where the rate of expansion was on an incomprehensible level. We can talk about it, we can pretend to understand it, but it is truly beyond the scope of our consciousness. Matter kept moving outward, eventually compressing into gas, which became the early stars, and many billion years later, we arrived at the Universe we see around us now.
Throughout this entire process, motion was a constant. As the Universe expanded, it also evolved. It created you, me, and trillions of other things, both living and non-living. Things in the early Universe came together and formed other things which came together too. But none of these processes were random. The Universe has a certain nature just as humans do.
Its nature is to combine, to build, and to become more complex. If the circumstances are right, even quarks can combine and eventually reach a level where it can create such complex life forms as humans. Since the dawn of time, everything in existence has been becoming more and more complex, evolution on a grand scale. The Universe itself is becoming complex. And humans are just the most developed expression of this complexity in this pocket of the Universe.
Humans are primitive, carbon-based life forms that have evolved from even more primitive unicellular organisms. Over the course of our existence, humans might even pass the carbon-based stage. Just as we look back on Neanderthals as primitive today, tomorrow we will be looked at as primitive by our descendants. It might take thousands or even millions of years, but it will undoubtedly happen. If Earth was decimated by an asteroid or, more likely, at the hand of humanity, our level of complexity which is conscious and able to comprehend this process would be duplicated. It is likely happening across millions of planets across the Universe as you read this sentence.
Not just humans, but every single thing we observe in our Universe is a more complex form of what it was billions of years ago. And most scientists do believe that the Universe will eventually end in another singularity, often referred to as “The Big Crunch”. If that is indeed true, then it means that final singularity will be the most complex thing to ever exist. Dozens of billions of years of complex growth, of building, of evolution, all leading to a single complexity. That complexity might be the closest thing to God to ever exist. Call it God or call it the Ultimate Complexity. Like most things, it doesn’t matter. Everything is moving towards that point in space and time.
We won’t be around to see it, but it will undoubtedly be the single most amazing and beautiful thing to behold.
– Siddhant Shrivastava, Kothari International School, Noida
I like this!