The Black Vault

Our indirect "image" of such truly alien material beyond our Big Bang envelope will always have very low resolution, but we have to take what we can get. Only a transcendent divinity "above it all" could see better. Nevertheless, this singular low-resolution achievement would place us finite humans higher up the ladder of sentient beings on Earth and elsewhere who are living "in the image of God."

Since this essay was first written in 2007 the advance of science has continued, and will continue. In September of 2008 scientists announced their discovery of the likely presence of dark matter beyond our visible universe. That either means there was a universe preceding our Big Bang universe, with the initial inflationary expansion of our Big Bang pushing outward pre-existing dark matter; or it could also mean that there are indeed other universes in the Universe beyond our own.

This recent data comes from the WMAP satellite. Basically, a gravitationally strong patch some twenty degrees in diameter has been detected toward the Centaurus and Vela constellations. Very distant galaxy clusters are moving toward it in ways that cannot otherwise be explained. This WMAP observation opens the door for future observations of other gravitationally strong patches, and even for the concept of a broader halo of matter somewhat more distant. I invite you to read a report in Astronomy magazine at this URL: http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7423

Eventually, it could be demonstrated that so-called dark energy may primarily be distant energy/matter increasingly attracting our known universe, as what we know moves toward the boundaries of our observable universe. If this flow is so, then the vision of everything, even atomic cores, being totally ripped apart by phantom energy in a Big Rip some 80+ billion years hence is not true. Of course, our own universe may vanish as such in a sea of bubble universes. Its constituent elements should survive elsewhere, to be followed by new bubbles created by future big bangs. There would be no end to everything within an infinite singularity of chaos, merely a mixing of the soup over and over again. In this extremely long term view, the more things change, the more they remain the same.