by Scott Kaelen
I’ll remind you at this point that there are Christians who insist that God created all things. This means those people who accept Darwinism are giving God the royalties for creating all life on Earth. The irony being that none of them seem to realise how many creatures that is condemning to a second life of eternal torture. Or do animals get into Heaven by proxy? If so, what’s the big beef God has with humans, that he would let all those intellectually inferior lifeforms into Heaven along with all the Christians who also happen to be rapists, paedophiles, cannibals and serial killers, but he won’t let disbelieving humans up there? What an arrogant and obnoxious arsehole he must be, and may the hand of God strike me down for saying so.
To risk making a point seem ludicrous, dare I ask about all the reptiles, birds, insects and marine animals that have existed since the Cambrian Explosion 542,000,000 years ago? Tough gig for those guys, as well. No Gold Pass for any of them, I don’t doubt. And as for the poor, godless microbial mats of 3,500,000,000 years ago, and the biogenic graphite of 3,700,000,000 years ago, well, I suppose those scandalous universal common ancestors of ours must be the most ancient heathens who ever existed. Well done, my primitive, disbelieving brethren, I’ll join you all for a swim down in the magmal ponds in a few years from now, or decades if I’m lucky.
What staggering arrogance Christians have, who believe, assert and preach that anyone who doesn’t accept and embrace the Christian belief system is not only going to Hell, but that they deserve an eternity of the worst possible pain and torture imaginable. Oh, blessed truly are the meek, for anyone who isn’t like them will surely inherit the molten ocean around the core of the Earth, while the bigoted chosen will take to the skies for distant Heaven, somewhere out there between the gaps in science.
THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC GOD
From the poetry volume DeadVerse
by Scott Kaelen
Do you remember when
the world was huge
and Man much smaller,
when you were accorded
credit for all Creation?
Those days are far behind
you now, and men
stand tall, defiantly
gazing up between
your messengers so sacred.
Do you tremble at what
is seen by Man beyond
your chosen children,
now objects deserving
not of prayer, but study?
The unknown Earth was yours
to reign, its ends
still far from Mankind’s ken,
but the flat lands evolved
as vellum wrapped around rock.
To you belonged the skies,
when only the chosen
dwelt beneath your cloak,
and believers were promised
an afterlife eternal.
Where now is your Heaven,
pushed far by Man’s
evolving perception,
billions of light years
beyond the Sun and its planets?
When today your flock dies,
it takes each of their souls
almost forever
to reach your domain,
where by science you were exiled.
Such a long, lonely flight,
when mere hours away
lies Hades, its heart
of nickel-iron as hot
as each of your guardian angels.
Once God of all places,
of people and things,
now you’re God of the Gaps,
where, through fogs of new questions,
each day truth shines brighter.
Is it cramped in your hole,
dismissed by free minds
and cast out by reason,
crawling like the lizard
you so cruelly dismembered?
Do you brood like a child
in your dark corner,
as the walls grind together
with each leap of Man’s knowledge,
that fruit so forbidden?
I’d be scared, were I you,
for, when gaps close, gods
diminish under judgement,
demoted from fact into fiction –
among thousands of brethren,
with their hellfire and thunder –
to mere stains in the graveyard of myths.
BEYOND THE BIG BANG THEORY
(SUPERSEDING THE CURRENT MODEL)
New things are coming. Astrophysics is constantly blurring the edges of the current models of scientific understanding. The Big Bang Theory is almost cognate with the Big God Theory. It worked for a while, it really has helped our scientific progression, but it’s in supercession – it’s on the way out…
Existence is timeless, with quantum mechanics moving forwards, backwards, at superluminal speeds and at non-speed. Space is endless, containing matter, energy, dark matter, dark energy, gasses and ionized gasses. This non-linear space-time has ‘quiet’ stages where the mechanics settle into linearity, where the simplest of gasses and energies are not formed into heavy elements or matter.
My proposal is that rather than having no beginning and no end, existence is full of pockets of beginnings and endings. But the before and after of these events, due to their finite nature, can never reach true infinity. There never was or will be an ‘always this’ or a ‘never that’. Existence is in a constant state of flux, ranging from a near-infinite void to a near-infinite upward scale of quantum and spatial chaos.
In such a continuum, at least one massive cosmic event already took place, because we’re living in the resulting growth of such an event. However you look at it, everything measurable has an age, and something did happen 13.8 billion years ago. A Big Bang did occur. But was it the first, the only one?
Tracing general relativity back in time to 13.8 billion years ago yields an ‘infinite’ temperature and density occurring at a ‘finite’ time; this merely denotes a level (be it numerical or otherwise) that we can not yet fathom; something beyond our ken today, but, given time, an understanding that is potentially achievable. But let’s not get caught up with ‘infinity’.
We have measured the expansion of observable space, the temperatures of cosmic background radiation, and the correlation of galaxies to give us an accurate understanding of the contents of our known universe.
But the observable universe, surely, can not be all there is…
The Big Bang theory is accurate, but flawed. For me, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall lends a lot of weight to that flaw, and it’s my speculation that at least part of the H-CB Great Wall has its origins connected to a separate massive cosmic event to the one that gave rise to most of the currently observable universe. Perhaps the Bang that gave rise to Herc-Corona was a somewhat smaller and older event, considerably distant from and predating our own Big Bang.
Extra dimensions to the proposed 11 of M-theory may exist, and massively distant areas far beyond our known universe must also exist. I mention this because general relativity, including higher dimensional relativity and extra-universal gravitational influence, must have an effect on cosmic singularities such as the Big Bang.
Some renowned experts in physics prescribe to the presumption that a timeless, infinite void existed for near-infinity, ending almost fourteen billion years ago, and was preceded by no cosmic events. Others believe that matter has existed within the current observable universe forever.
I suspect that both of the above theories are flawed. I highly doubt that a single cosmic event in time and space was the be-all of universal creation. Of course it wasn’t; all of that compressed matter and energy had to have come from somewhere – it had to have been compressed in the first place. It had to have existed in a previous bubble universe, or, thanks to the nod from Herc-Corona, in more than one previous bubble universe.
THE HERCULES-CORONA BOREALIS GREAT WALL
It’s become a scientifically accepted theory that the universe is a star’s fart away f
rom being 13.8 billion years old. Easy to wrap your head around, right? Right. Of course it is.
Our star, the Sun, or Sol, is 4.6 billion years old. That’s roughly 1/3rd the age of the universe. Wow. Old-timer. Not really; our Sun is a comparatively young individual compared to other stars.
The Milky Way itself is roughly 13.2 billion years old, but of course looks much different now to when it originally began to coalesce. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years at its widest point. As far as galaxies go, ours is pretty damn small. File that away, I’ll get back to it later.
Back to the age of stars. Well within the confines of our Milky Way (or, as I prefer to call it, the Via Lactea) is a star known as SM0313. This star was born 13.6 billion years ago from one of the primordial supernovae, less than 200 million years after the Big Bang that supposedly kickstarted the entire universe. SM0313 is 400 million years older than the galaxy in which it snugly resides. Compared to our Sun, SM0313 is a doddery old pensioner – the oldest survivor of a great and terrible time…
Or perhaps not.
Remember, we’re talking about the known universe, the observable universe. Science is the beating heart of human knowledge, and knowledge is the fantastic progression that widens our scope of understanding. From believing the Earth was flat, to believing the Earth was the centre of all things, to believing the Earth was a mere 4,000 years old, we’ve come a long way. Or, rather, some of us have.
Science has brought us to where we are now – a place with a plethora of facts, each of which has shattered a previous concept. But, as far as I’ve always been concerned, the ultimate age of existence is not something we’ve identified yet. I accept there was a Big Bang. I utterly accept that as an undisputed fact. But, unlike most people who prescribe to scientific methodology, I don’t accept the Big Bang as being the be-all of creation. To do so is synonymous with a faith system claiming its deity to be the creator of all things. One singular occurrence? One moment on the cusp of a timeless void?
No, you can take your Big Bang Theory and put it on the shelf above the original Theory of Evolution that stated Man descended from Cro Magnon, Neanderthal, and so forth; a shelf situated dizzyingly high above religion, but nonetheless archived in the Previously Held Beliefs Room of humanity.
Back to sizes. The largest known structure in the universe used to be the Huge Large Quasar Group (or U1.27), a cluster of 73 quasars situated far out at the rim of the universe, and stretching 4 billion light years across, in contrast to the Milky Way’s comparatively tiny diameter of 100,000 light years. By the way, a typical quasar (or active galactic nuclei) has a luminosity of about 100 times that of the entire Milky Way. In other words, a single quasar is brighter than hundreds of billions of stars combined. Jaw-dropping? Absolutely. But Huge-LQG was knocked off the top spot as the biggest cosmic structure.
The universe is almost 13.8 billion years old, and some 29 gigaparsecs (93 billion light years) in diameter, which means we can see approximately 46-47 billion light years in any direction from the Earth. No matter how far humanity extends its reach, we will always be at the centre of the observable universe (though I can see that fact also being shelved in the future.)
Keeping in mind the size of the known universe, let’s move on to the heart of the topic. The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a gigantic hypermassive galactic wall, is situated 10 billion light years from Earth, Coincidentally, the Her-CrB GW is also 10 billion light years across at its thickest point.
I’ll say that again: 10 billion light years across.
One structure.
Remember that what we’re seeing today is the ghost of how the Great Wall looked 10 billion years ago; this means that a cosmic structure of 10 billion light years in diameter existed when the universe was allegedly only 3.8 billion years old. But, according to the modern models of the evolution of the universe, such a complex and massive structure could not have existed only 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. In other words, the Her-CrB GW is impossible, and yet it exists, and its existence shatters all working theories on the age of the universe.
The exact time at which the Big Bang took place is indisputable. And yet the Her-CrB Great Wall – so distant, so ancient – lies out there and shakes its head at our Big Bang Theory. It speaks to us from a time long past, from a place so utterly far away, and it smiles knowingly, its eyes glittering with hints of deeper secrets, and it says, “You’re doing great, guys, but it’s time to go back to the drawing board again, for I am here, and I’ve been here so very long.”
And it’s right. The existence of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall 10 billion years ago as the singularly greatest structure in the universe, at a time when the universe was young and dense and yet to reach much of its future playground, defies the Big Bang Theory. In fact, it laughs at it. And it gives us a teasing message: “If you think my existence is theory-shatteringly spectacular, you ought to see what I can see on the other side of me…”
This Herculean structure could not have originated from the Big Bang. And if the Big Bang was the beginning of all existence, then how, and more importantly when, did the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall come into existence? When did it begin to coalesce, and with matter that originated from where? If it was so hypermassive 10 billion years ago, it must have begun coalescing many billions of years earlier. Which makes the Great Wall unquestionably older than the Big Bang itself.
Back to the drawing board, indeed.
THE COSMIC BLACK HOLE & THE OMNIVERSE
I’ve always believed that something more exists far beyond the void at the edge of the universe. The Big Bang theory always seemed, by modern comparison, as naive as thinking the world was flat, or that the Sun revolved around the Earth. A recent theory that our entire observable universe could lie inside the heart of a four-dimensional supermassive black hole, which in turn lies within an unimaginably larger and higher-dimensional level of existence, filled with immense four-dimensional stars, each the size of our comparatively tiny cosmos – that’s one 4D star the same mass and volume as a septillion 3D stars. It blows me away; there can’t be any such equivalent sensation in all the religions combined. As if existence could just end at the blackness beyond the known universe? That’s like the goldfish failing to comprehend anything beyond the impenetrable light-show barrier at the edge of its water.
This new theory pleases me no end, as it finally aligns current cosmic theories with my own long-held speculations. Unfortunately, if it is true, we’ll likely never know, because of two factors: the distortion of space-time at and within a black hole’s event horizon, and gravity.
The suggestion of higher-dimensional cosmic black holes is not a revelation; it’s just a theory, but an exciting one which increases potential speculation. The wonder of science is that there will always be another question. Science is a hungry and inquisitive creature; never satisfied, ever wanting more.
The harder we try, the further we reach.
How do we know the observable universe is 13.8 billion years old? We know because of how long it takes light to reach Earth. No light seems to exist from before 13.8 billion years ago. No one really knows how big the void beyond the quasars at the rim of the universe is, but I’ve always imagined it to be immense, dwarfing all we can as yet see. I suspect that beyond the void lie other universes. existing within the same dimensional laws. We’ve mapped the stars and the distant galaxies, and from these a map of the known universe now exists. But try and imagine a map of more than one universe – hundreds of them, or billions – each a huge cluster of galaxies condensed on the map to the size of a star, each twinkling on an unimaginable sky that may never end. It’s almost beyond the grasp of human imagination.
I don’t know which is more exciting – the idea that our universe is situated inside a black hole, or my own long-held idea of an infinitude of universes spread throughout an immeasurable, extra-dimensional mosaic. But wait… Endless? Surely not. What lies beyond all that? What lies beyond the newly-
proposed four-dimensional universe? Or beyond the three-dimensional map of countless universes separated by stretches of void?
The key to the whole thing is gravity. The Moon orbits the Earth. The Earth orbits the Sun. The Sun and every other star in the Milky Way circles the galactic centre. All matter in the observable universe is affected by the gravitational pull of the centre of the universe.
It’s alpha dominance on a cosmic scale.
The movements of everything in the known cosmos are governed by things bigger and stronger than themselves. Even those rogue planets – the lonesome wayfarers travelling between the stars – even their routes are determined by the galaxies they’re wandering through.
“But what about the rogues in between galaxies?” I hear some of you ask. Same principle applies: they may be galactic orphans, but sure enough there are galaxies surrounding them and therefore influencing their movements.
Outside of this great cosmic dance is a void, so immense it potentially negates any outside gravitational influences, such as distant universes beyond the void, or a supermassive-massive 4D black hole event horizon.
Yes, the universe is expanding from its epicentre, but it’s still intrinsically intertwined with that nexus point – ground zero of the observable universe. Some say it will eventually stop expanding and begin contracting in what is hypothesised as a Big Crunch. Others suppose it will just slow to a stop and all the stars will slowly fade from existence until nothing but an ocean of black stars remains – that’s called Heat Death, or the Big Freeze. Another supposition is that if the universe contracts in a Big Crunch it will collapse back into itself, causing a phenomenally huge black hole. This will eventually spew out another Big Bang; this is the Bang-Crunch-Bang theory, and could potentially be an eternal repercussion, something I call a ‘Cosmic Reincarnation’.
