Long after black holes have evaporated, if they don’t take the rest of the universe with them, the timeline becomes so incomprehensibly huge that we have to resort to powers of ten to write out the numbers. The black hole deadline that I mentioned above would be written as ten to the power of ninety-nine, or in notation, 1099. The next major event in our timeline would be during the early middle age of our universe. Trillions of years after the lights have gone out, a strange encounter might take place.
According to the mathematics of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, in 10800 years, our descendants will encounter the descendants of Homo sapiens that have arisen elsewhere in the universe. It seems Carl Sagan was a bit optimistic about the abundance of extraterrestrial beings. When this poignant meeting happens, intelligent life will be close to saturating the entire universe, though the endgame will still be trillions of years ahead.
The final years of the universe, when the temperature has dropped to absolute zero, will likely occur sometime after 101500 years, though here the timeline becomes speculative. This is indeed a long-lived universe. But if, instead of expanding, the universe begins to contract and is ultimately annihilated in the “big crunch,” there might not be so much time left. If gravity wins the tug-of-war, the universe might last only twenty to thirty billion years longer. Hardly any time at all. What is certain is that, at 13.7 billion years old, our universe is young. And still, human life has already arisen, perhaps precisely because we need the rest of this time, these potential billions or trillions of years, to expand and to occupy the universe and all parallel universes that make up the Universe.
Our history has been marked by expansion and discovery. The urge to explore oceans and cross nameless deserts has constantly spurred us on. Ultimately, it seems, we will visit the stars and the galaxies beyond, and when we do, we will become the gardeners of the universe. But the tending will be mutual, for it appears that the universe is both garden and gardener itself.
The management and use of time may turn out to be our greatest achievement, far outshadowing any giant engineering projects of the distant future. Time is the final resource, and the universe, railing against the end of time, has put all its chips into our eventual ability to cheat death, not just for our heirs, but for the universe itself.
Chapter Fourteen
THE SECRET OF THE PINE
Nothing in the world lasts,
Save eternal change.
—Honorat de Bueil
Last week, on a dark, cold afternoon, an ambulance pulled up in front of George’s house. The attendants went in with a gurney and soon reemerged with George. He was walking, with some difficulty, his arm braced by one of the paramedics. I realized that he had refused to lie on the stretcher. They got into the ambulance and left. Since then the lights in George’s house have been off, and I fear things did not go well at the hospital.
This week a For Sale sign appeared in front of my Portuguese neighbours’ house, and yesterday morning their real estate agent slipped a brochure under my porch door. The neighbourhood is changing. Even the houses are transforming. Several neighbours with young children have expanded their homes with additions and new decks. On most days one or two contractors’ vans are parked on the street.
It snowed last night, as this morning the roofs of the houses and the cars were dusted with white. By noon the snow had melted, though it was gloomy and cold all day. But just before evening fell, the sun came out. Its rays were almost horizontal as it crested the roofs of the buildings in the west. The sunlight had a warm tinge, and the bricks of the houses across the street were lit up as if they were glowing red-hot, fresh from the kiln. My Austrian pine (I must admit to proprietary feelings, even if it isn’t on my property) was also lit up, its thickly set combs of needles as green as any June forest. It radiated a timeless calm and seemed to harbour daydreams in its lobed canopy.
RADIANT TIME
Because time’s flow has no three-dimensional direction, it’s hard to picture how time ramifies, how it slides from past to future. Yet time moves neither up nor down, left nor right, east nor west. Trying to grasp time’s motion, or lack of motion, has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever tried to conceive. The best I can do is create metaphors, which may not accurately reflect what time is, but which at least lead me towards a more essential grasp of its intrinsic nature.
Last March, when I stood beside the rustling bamboo, time felt like a wind that blew through everything. That sensation captured the ubiquitous nature of time, how it manages to insinuate itself into the smallest atom and the largest galaxy at once. It also revealed time’s invisibility and its power to change the fabric and shape of whatever it blows through, like waves of wind rippling fields of summer grass. But the metaphor didn’t get at the unidimensional character of time, the fact that time doesn’t actually move through this world at all. Or, if it does move, it moves unlike anything else in our universe.
This afternoon, though, looking out at the old Austrian pine across the street, watching the sunlight that seemed to incandesce its foliage, I had another sensation of time. It came to me in an image of rain falling on a still pond. The ripples spread from each drop in a randomly even pattern of overlapping, expanding rings. Then I imagined the surface of this pond doubled, so that there were two transparent surfaces, one just above the other. I could see the rain splashing on the second pond as well, with its own pattern of ripples. Then I pictured another surface laid over the first two, and then another and another, until they were countless and filled all space. Now the ripples from each drop propagated not in flat rings but in expanding, transparent spheres within spheres, radiating through all the layers. Time, I thought, didn’t flow from the past towards the future, but from inside of everything, at once, everywhere.
It was the old pine that congealed this vision. In the sunlight it looked dusty, almost pointillistic. Just for an instant, I could see the millions of expanding, transparent circles of time spreading out of the tree before they became microscopic and invisible. As they faded, they merged into the world—into the other trees, the buildings, the clouds, the sky and the earth. A purple finch flew into the pine and started up its melodious song while a tabby, stalking beneath, paused to look up at the bird. These creatures, both wild and tame, myself, these buildings, all joined in the net of time.
Everything sheds time in a steady emission that swells out of every atom, every leaf, every human being—even out of empty space. That’s why the old pine, with its evergreen halo of sun-soaked needles, seems beyond time. It, and me, and all of us, are soaked in Chronos. Perhaps time is more like a sourceless, uniform inner light. Its outward-flowing ripples are so small, so fine, they are undetectable. Perhaps the fountain at the heart of time is the infinitely divisible “now,” the “now” that is a billion billion “nows” within itself. Every second is infinite—a millisecond in the second, a nanosecond in the millisecond and a femtosecond in the nanosecond. It all blossoms, swells out from the centre of everything at once. We shine with time. True, time’s arrow points in one direction, just as the needles of the pine radiate outwards from their branches or rays from the sun point in one direction, but time’s grain is directionless. Time’s arrow points everywhere at once, and all of creation glows with time.
It is here that our future lies, not ahead but within. If each second contains a near eternity, then are we not, in one very real sense, already immortal? And even though we are as unconscious of our immortality as an elephant is of the ants that crawl over its hide, we nonetheless exist within eternity, and our lives, however brief, stretch for countless eons within each minute, infinities within each hour.
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