In a Mormon universe Y Psi is the number of wives sealed to the prophet Joseph Smith; D Delta the number of sections in the Book of Mormon as a ratio of the time it takes to stare at a peep-stone in a hat; H Eta is the strong binding nuclear force of the Penishood; and K Kappa is the distance to Kolob as a ratio of the IQ of the person yearning to get there.
Paul Davies prefers the lumpy porridge of the Three Bears to explain our upstart place at the universe table in The Goldilocks Enigma. Here’s your breakfast universe menu:
1) The Absurd Universe: Our universe just happens to be this way;
2) The Unique Universe: The Theory of Everything governs the values of the universe;
3) The Multiverse: Multiple universes with all possible combinations of constants, and we have hit the cosmic jackpot;
4) Intelligent Design: A crazy creator designed the universe to support intelligent life;
5) The Life Principle: Some underlying principle obliges the universe to evolve intelligent life;
6) The Self-Explaining Universe: Only universes with a capacity for consciousness can exist;
7) The Fake Universe: We are part of a virtual reality simulation.
This final option — Simulated Reality — is a pot-load of fun, popular with philosophers and freebasers of science fiction. Picture a civilisation whose computing capacity doubles every eighteen months or so as prophesied by Moore’s Law. Imagine a techno-future when that civilisation’s super-duper computer is empowered to duplicate an exact copy of planet Earth, replete with holes in socks that need mending, and hair that needs cutting. And if this super-duper computer can compute one copy of planet Earth, it’ll be damned if it doesn’t likely compute a multiverse of copies. The succoured people of planet Earth will not realise Life is a simulated reality. The chances weigh heavily we’re imprisoned within a copy of planet Earth and not the pristine original. The pixels of this computer program are the iddy-piddy quarks and protons we hold in smashing esteem at the Cern particle accelerator.
‘You cannot have complexity to build a computer, to build a second-life software to run us, unless the creatures that built that computer evolved ... Sooner or later regresses of that kind have to be terminated. You cannot suddenly invent complexity and intelligence. The only way to do it is to start from primeval simplicity and work up gradually.’ Richard Dawkins, American Atheist Conference 2009
Too far-out and trippy for you? This advanced civilisation has evidently discovered a way to bypass an unnamed law that dictates your computer will crash at the climax of your video game. The philosopher Nick Bostrum proposes a window pop-up with the message: ‘You are Living in a Simulation; Click Here For More Information’. Should you come across this marvel of super-computing, feel free to assume you’re confronting a giant computer bug, you’re the picked-out favourite of the programmer, God, or in accordance with a universal Sod’s Law you’re about to crash into oblivion.
This universe would have to be one sick fucked-up computer program. How else do you account for the Eurovision Song Contest, the Spice Girls or Arsenal regularly beating Spurs at home?
‘This universe we live in — scientists have discovered some remarkably strange things about it. So strange they are having to use the most disturbing principles to describe what’s going on.’ Horizon: The Anthropic Principle, BBC 1987
Scientists point with prurient probing to the peculiarly incestuous relationship between the universe and mathematics.
High-church big-up respect to Galileo who realised our universe obeys mathematical laws. So is mathematics merely a language that sets to paper the music of the universe, or is there a more fundamental key?
‘If Max [Tegmark] is right, Maths isn’t a language we’ve invented, but a deep structure we are gradually uncovering like archaeologists. An abstract unchanging entity that has no beginning and no end. As we peel back the layers we are discovering the code. Strange as it seems it’s a comforting theory because if the reality is a mathematical object, understanding it might be within our reach.’ Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
Picture a trip like Alice down a black hole, up through a white rabbit hole, over the rim of an event-horizon and into a universe thirteen and a half billion years old, and floating on a vibrating membrane of ten dimensions of Space and one of Time, where every particle vibrates like String — now that really would be mad.
‘But Lenny [Susskind] didn’t stop there. He and other physicists made a truly shocking leap of the imagination: they asked what if the whole of reality is a hologram, projected from our own event-horizon, the far edges of the universe?’ Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
The profound loneliness of the human condition inspires the most dulcet, dreamscaped drama, literature, art and music.
‘What a piece of work is man!’ enthused Hamlet in one of his upbeat moments. ‘How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!’ This backward, red-necked day-dreaming species of human — half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee, the late Christopher Hitchens called us — like Herculean Giants crawl from the gutter to look up at the stars, and with the mighty power of reason seize black holes by the throat, swim down wormholes, smash atoms like a quantum game of billiards, suck from the bellies of comets, and toast the delights — from our blue oasis — of a champagne supernova universe.
‘We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’ Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean, 1979
‘But yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me,’ sorrowed Hamlet in one of his downbeat moments. ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in’. This backward bloody-minded species of humans — barely down from the trees — abandons its moon landings to spend trillions on nuclear weapons, abandons its brothers and sisters by the millions to die of starvation, and abandons the benevolence of a good nature to burn with greed for the Yankee dollar.
‘The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of Tragedy.’ Steven Weinberg
The freedom of a consciousness-raising trip to the stars outshines the synthetic rush of endorphins from the strictures and confines of false religious dogma. Unchain the mind and release a roaming spirit to explore a superstar universe where wonders are weirder than we can suppose.
‘Look up at the stars. Not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see. And wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.’ Stephen Hawking, Paralympics opening ceremony 2012
Any committed cosmologist worth the hire will swear to high Jove in job interviews to a jam-set belief in star-jumping alien life. But your modern cosmologist who confesses in job interviews to the minority view that we are alone in the universe, and probably better off dead, will likely not attract superstrings of funding, and get the gig.
The reader will be familiar with the modern popularity of all fifty shades of grey alien life. Ah! But the search had theme-tunes, ray guns, and was way simpler back when Star-Trek boldly split its infinitives. Were Martians green? Can’t remember. Memory gone to pot. Tribbles were popular.
So was Captain Scarlett. Award yourself an quasi-academic First if you can remember the theme tune … ready? … All together now ♪♪♪ ‘Captain Scarlet, dum-dum-dum-dum, He’s the one who knows the Mysteron game … ♪♪
Star prize for the coolest aliens may be credited to the film It Came From Outer Space, featuring alien thespians with the foresight to be shot in 3-D.
Nowadays, planet Earth is crammed with crash-heavy, sky-roaming aliens raining on our parade. Big greys. Little greys. Ferocious fang-faced blood-sucking chupacabras who prefer your succulent Puerto Rican goat rather than your superior though tougher-skinned noble English goat.
The pain-in-the-neck neighbours to avoid are probably the Borg from Star Trek, whose cuboid tastes in architecture will bring down the tone of your neighbourhood, and who are giving honest gangsters a bad name.
The discovery of prime real-estate planets replete with their own pristine suns, the age of the universe, and the ease with which the virus of Life spreads from desert to ice-cap, suggests our universe should be chokka with tech-savvy aliens wanting to sell us afterlife insurance.