The lack of a meaningful universe in our modern culture impoverishes every one of us, but the complications of daily life distract us, so few people ever stand back and notice that something essential to all human life is missing from ours: we have no believable, shared context for the problems we face together. We simply keep thinking locally, through the tired metaphors of our old political and economic systems and even older religions—while the effects of our collective actions radiate around the planet and out into the distant future beyond our current ability to conceptualize, comprehend, or care. The meaning or significance of anything a person does is never intrinsic to the action but exists only from the perspective of a larger context. Therefore, if we have no such context, we have no meaningful way of choosing. Despite interested parties yelling in both our ears why we should go one way rather than the other, we are often paralyzed. The easiest course is to go with those who promise what we assume we want. The consequences of this narrow thinking—the repeated choice of minor short-term good over major long-term good—are evident in public life, though their deepest cause is not. That is, not yet.
Whether you’re a voter or the president of the United States, to understand what is happening on the global level, you need to think cosmically, not just globally. Cosmically is the larger context. And a prerequisite for thinking cosmically is having a meaningful cosmos. Earlier cultures showed us how to create one: it takes, perhaps before all other things, a believable story that explains how everything came about and how each of us is intimately connected to all that is. The story must explain the invisible forces in the universe. No one in an age of computers and other electronics based on quantum mechanics, and of global positioning systems based on general relativity, can seriously argue that there are no invisible forces. On the Cosmic Uroboros, almost all of reality is invisible. Then the story must convincingly explain our own existence here and now. And it must be equally true for everyone. This is so important a criterion that it deserves capital letters: Equally True for Everyone on Earth. For the first time such a story is possible.
The well-known mythologist Joseph Campbell, in his final book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, argued passionately that what the modern world needs more than anything else is a story that unifies. “The old gods are dead or dying,” he wrote, “and people everywhere are searching, asking: what is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?” We humans are emerging right now from an era of imaginative origin myths that has lasted many thousands of years. We are entering a new era in which our origin myth will be both inspired and verified by science. An assortment of people ranging from scriptural literalists to corporate polluters to postmodern philosophers denounce or dismiss science, but if those people ever take a modern medicine or fly on a jet, they’re trusting their lives to science, and their actions are a more reliable sign of where their trust lies than their words. Some groups will always cling to old ideologies, but science is now a worldwide collaboration, and its discoveries are available to everyone. Science—not just modern cosmology but the entire scientific approach to reality—is the only possible foundation for a globally unifying story of ourselves. What we build on that foundation will involve far more than science—wisdom, daring, immense creativity, and good faith for starters—but the foundation must be solid or everything else will collapse.
Dedicated people around the world are working on solutions to various global problems, and they’re experimenting with new ideas and technologies. But even if some group came up with a brilliant and complete blueprint for renewing the earth ecologically, politically, and culturally, leading to a sustainable, vibrant, and equitable worldwide civilization, it’s highly unlikely that people today could agree on implementing it. A blueprint for saving the world, fantastically useful as that would be, would not on its own convince the earth’s population that success is possible and therefore worth the cost today. What could do this, however, is a believable, desirable vision that includes us all. We humans are motivated not by ideas but by feelings, although ideas are the means through which we can use those feelings. We need to feel in our bones that something much bigger is going on than our petty quarrels and our obsession with getting and spending, and that the role we each play in this very big something is what really defines the meaning and purpose of our lives. This is what a cosmology has traditionally done. Many people, religious and nonreligious, intuit this, but they can’t agree on what the big picture is or what it demands of us because their individual views have no framework in which to contemplate the global size scale of our problems. But with a cosmic framework it becomes clear that we humans are playing a cosmic role—whether individuals believe it or not.
Fig. 61. John Andrews, Boston Tea Party—Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor, December 16, 1773
The importance of an origin story is easier to see on a smaller scale. Every country has its own origin story, usually including at least some truth, and it becomes the guiding myth of the people. For example, in the United States, every child learns the story of the Boston Tea Party (fig. 61), the ride of Paul Revere, the Declaration of Independence (fig. 62), the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the wisdom and foresight of the Founding Fathers. All these are elements of the American mythology that binds our citizens together in a shared venture of upholding freedom and democracy, although none of us were there to witness any of these things. Even our name, the United States of America, tells a story. In the same way but on a far larger scale, to bind a global community together in the shared venture of preserving and protecting the conditions for our children and grandchildren to thrive on this blue planet, we humans need to see that the through line of our species back beyond our earliest ancestors and through the preceding cosmic events is everyone’s origin story.
Fig. 62. John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
Earlier cultures developed metaphors that expressed their own mythic sense of origins: the World Serpent mated with the World Egg; Grandfather Fire created light, colors, and song; the spirit of God hovered over the Deep. We have to do as well for the universe that we now know exists and is ours. We have a new technical scientific understanding, but making it into a story and an accompanying mental movie is essential if we’re going to have a mythic context that transcends cultural differences and is Equally True for Everyone on Earth.
The science-based origin story is about events on a different scale from any traditional creation story. It’s the story of the new universe. It explains how we intelligent beings came to be part of this evolving cosmos and how deep and ancient an identity we share with each other and all life. It is mind-expanding and profound, transcends all local differences, and above all is supported by the evidence. But it feels unsettling at first—it doesn’t have familiar characters or follow the implicit rules of storytelling or even the rules of existence on Earth. This can’t be helped, because our human role goes beyond Earth. We are part of a phenomenally rare and cosmically important event: the emergence of intelligence and civilization in a universe that was once nothing but particles and energy.
“In the beginning” is the way origin stories around the world traditionally open. “In the beginning the high god rose out of the Primeval Waters,” goes a creation story from ancient Egypt. “In the beginning there was no land. The Giver and the Watcher sat outside their sweat lodge,” began a Native American version of creation. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” opens the book of Genesis. But just plain “in the beginning” doesn’t work for a scientific story. “In the beginning” must be followed by “of” and then something definable. There is no beginning in itself. A beginning is a way people draw a line to help ourselves think about what may exist. We can say, “In the beginning of Earth” or “In the beginning of our universe,” but we can’t say “In the beginning,” because that implies “of everything,” and “everything” is not a clear notion until you can define it—which you can’t if you don’t have a convincing origin story. The first step is to be precise as to what our origin story is about: our universe, which, as we shall see, may not be everything.
In the beginning of the Big Bang was cosmic inflation. What would become our present visible universe was just a “sparkpoint”—a region so tiny it lay nearly at the tip of the serpent’s tail on the Cosmic Uroboros. In a wild 10–32 seconds the sparkpoint inflated exponentially by at least thirty orders of magnitude to the size of a newborn baby; that is, it expanded across every size scale from the tip of the tail of the Cosmic Uroboros halfway around to the size of humans, as illustrated in figure 55. In that brief process it spawned all the quantum impulses that have shaped the cosmic web and will do so effectively forever.1 Then suddenly, like a drop of water freezing to ice, the universe went through a phase transition called the Big Bang, and the rate of expansion dropped drastically from exponential to slow and steady. It has taken almost fourteen billion years to expand the universe by the same factor as happened in that first fraction of a second.
Space-time emerged from the Big Bang smoother than the smoothest lake, but not perfectly smooth. It had subtle wrinkles perhaps as tiny as elementary particles, wrinkles as big as the universe, and wrinkles of every size in between. This was good for us, because if the universe had been absolutely perfectly smooth in the beginning, then it would still be smooth now, only greatly expanded. There would be no concentrations of matter: no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no life. It has been the imperfections in the universe, the primeval wrinkles, that are the blueprint of the cosmic web of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and super-clusters throughout the universe. But don’t be confused by the metaphor: unlike an ordinary blueprint, the cosmic blueprint is not a sheet of paper separate from the construction; it is the foundation itself.
The new space-time was filled with a hot, dense, incredibly smooth, and nonturbulent expanding fog of particles, including quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and dark matter particles, all flying about at high speed, free and unbound. As the universe expanded and cooled, the particles swiftly revealed that they had distinctive natures—annihilating, interacting, fusing, gravitating. Light from the Big Bang was so intense that it hammered the electrically charged particles—electrons and protons although not dark matter—and yet the light could not get through them. Thus the baby universe was opaque. It took four hundred thousand years of expansion for it to cool enough so that the universe became transparent. Now the bottled-up light of the Big Bang streamed in all directions, carrying the image of the universe as it looked at that early moment, only four hundred thousand years after the beginning. That image is depicted in figure 63; this is the whole sky’s light of the Big Bang.
As the young universe expanded, dark matter everywhere moved sluggishly toward the subtle wrinkles in space, pulling atoms along. When regions containing dark matter became twice the average density around them, they stopped expanding and formed invisible halos, inside of which the visible galaxies would later form.
Fig. 63. Cosmic microwave background radiation
Gravity has been fighting expansion since the Big Bang itself. Expansion and contraction are the two counterbalancing forces of the universe. In those regions dense with dark matter, gravity has won and tamed that region of space. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies are gravitationally bound and will stay together forever, traveling as a unit in the great expansion while evolution goes on inside them.
But dark energy, which is created by space and was insignificant when space was tiny, has kept increasing as the universe expands, while the amount of dark matter stays the same. About five billion years ago dark matter—once so dominant that its gravity slowed the expansion of the entire universe—lost the power struggle to the rising tide of dark energy, and the expansion of the universe stopped slowing down and began to accelerate. Today on those immense scales where a cluster of galaxies is just a dot, expansion has won and space is wild. What gravity has not already bound together, it never will.
Held deep inside early halos of dark matter, clouds of hydrogen gas began falling together and igniting, becoming the first stars (fig. 64).
Inside the galaxies, protected by gravity from the forces of dark energy outside them, wonderful and complex events were and have been happening. Generations of stars produced a rainbow of exotic atoms—new chemical elements that might eons later make life possible on planets that did not yet exist. After nine billion years, just at the era of cosmic balance in the transfer of power from dark matter to dark energy, our sun and its planets formed about halfway between the center of our Galaxy and the visible edge. It might have looked like figure 65.
No sooner had Earth begun to cool than it acquired microbial life. Stars like the sun burn for ten billion years or so, and by the midpoint of its lifetime, which is now, the microbes on Earth have evolved into countless species, including one with the intelligence and technology to discover the universe, decode its history in still-arriving ancient light, and begin to fathom the meaning of our cosmic place (figs. 66 and 67). But with the same intelligence and technology, that species has overrun its planet and despoiled much of the surface, including the oceans, while scarcely understanding the implications of what it has been doing because, among other reasons, it has not yet learned to think in large-enough terms. It has not yet understood the necessity of balancing expansion with contraction—of accepting that this is how our universe works.
Fig. 64. A forming star
Fig. 65. A forming planet
Stage One of our origin story began with the instant of cosmic inflation. But what came before that? What caused cosmic inflation? For many people, only the word God can answer the question of what came before. Science’s approach is different: to keep pushing the beginning earlier. If there is ever a reason in principle why earlier is unknowable, we want to understand the principle.
There is a finite distance back in time that cosmology can explain with the Double Dark theory, the Big Bang, and the theory of Cosmic Inflation; but that is the end of the line for now. From the moment of cosmic inflation forward in time to today is science, but what happened before that moment is the subject of theory without evidence, and theory without evidence is metaphysics. Metaphysics is sometimes defined as a branch of philosophy that tries to explain the ultimate nature of reality, but we are using it quite literally to mean an area of inquiry “beyond physics”—at least for now. But although the source of cosmic inflation may be an area of metaphysics, it’s not guesswork: it’s based on serious calculations. Are these calculations just mathematical speculations about the real universe? We don’t yet know. It’s not even clear how we could test them. But an origin story must go as far as one can imagine—in fact, expand what one can imagine—if it’s going to be empowering. The best theory we have, which is not to say it is the best we could have, only the best we do have, says that when we extrapolate the mathematical equations of cosmic inflation backward to find its source, the most likely possibility is that inflation may have been going on forever and is still going on almost everywhere but here in our universe. We warn you that without evidence this prequel is not yet officially science, but the truth is also that serious scientific research is currently being done in this field; it is mathematically sophisticated, conceptually exciting, and published in the most prestigious journals. It is a scientific extrapolation of well-established scientific ideas to see where they lead as we go backwards in time.
Fig. 66. A pensive gorilla
Fig. 67. Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker
According to the still-controversial theory of Eternal Inflation,2 there are two possible states of being: space-time and inflation. The realm of inflation is called the “superuniverse” (or “multiverse” or “meta-universe”). Once this state of being exists, it continues forever—but tiny pockets or bubbles form in it, which become big bangs that evolve into universes that may have laws of physics different from ours. Our universe would then be one among uncountable bubbles of space-time in the cauldron of eternal inflation. Eternal inflation is hot and dense, and the expansion of the space between bubbles speeds up exponentially forever, so that in between universes nothing can ever form and only the laws of quantum physics apply.
In one version of eternal inflation, the superuniverse is a kind of Cosmic Las Vegas—that is, the laws of chance rule. Imagine that coins are constantly flipping (fig. 68). Heads means that the coin doubles in size and there are suddenly two of them. Tails means that the coin shrinks to half its size. These asymmetric odds always favor expansion. Now suppose that a particular coin has a run of tails. Simply by chance it keeps shrinking again and again. Eventually it becomes so small that it falls through the grating on the floor. The grating represents the instant of cosmic inflation. As the coin passes through the grating, it exits eternity. Its dark energy changes in that instant into ordinary energy. “Time” begins with a Big Bang, and a universe starts evolving. The snowflakes in the image represent universes: each will be unique, depending on the quantum fluctuations that happened to be occurring as the universe passed through the grating. Most may have laws of physics that could not permit intelligent life to exist.
Fig. 68. Cosmic Las Vegas
If the theory of Eternal Inflation is right, then our universe—the entire region created by our Big Bang—is an incredibly rare jewel: a tiny but long-lived pocket in the heart of eternity where by chance exponential inflation stopped, time began, space opened up, and the laws of physics allowed interesting things to happen and complexity to evolve.
In ancient Egypt the gods had created the world in the midst of the Primeval Water, and the world was a bubble still surrounded by that water. In the Middle Ages the stars were affixed to the outermost sphere, and outside the sphere was heaven. Water doesn’t have the inflation aspect, nor does heaven, but the idea that our entire universe is a bubble immersed in a strange and eternal state of being is a very ancient one.
In figure 69 we show a second, different version of eternal inflation. This is a frame from a video that visualizes eternal inflation based on the equations that describe it, though of course it could never actually be seen. But all stories, especially highly imaginative ones, benefit from visual imagery. We have used essential visual conventions to portray eternal inflation in the video, like having the light appear to come from a source in a specific direction and having objects that recede into the distance appear to get dimmer. These conventions are used to pull us viewers into the video and are not to be taken literally.
Fig. 69. Many universes in eternal inflation
There are many universes coming into existence within the state of eternal inflation. Each universe expands at the fixed speed of light, but the space between it and other proto-universes expands exponentially. In other words, the space starts expanding slowly but soon reaches speeds unimaginably faster than the speed of light. Consequently, the only way two universes could ever come into contact is if by chance they form so close to each other that by expanding at the speed of light they collide before the space between them has had a chance to expand faster.
The equations of the theory were allowed to run this simulation, and bubbles did occasionally form so close together that they collided before they could move apart. If our universe is one of these rare bubbles that did collide with another, astronomers may be able to see the effects of the collision by a careful study of the Cosmic Background Radiation, especially using observations by the new Planck satellite. This would be the only way anyone has suggested so far to test the theory of Eternal Inflation.
The idea that reality itself could be ultimately governed by the laws of chance disturbs many people, partly because they assume, sometimes unconsciously, that the moral order is something divine, that without it we would be animals, and that morality could not have come from what was ultimately accident. But that’s exactly what evolution means: whatever simple materials are given to time as resources, even just particles and energy, time will use, and complexity, possibly in the form of life and even moral life, will emerge. “From so simple a beginning,” Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Suppose it’s true that eternal inflation preceded cosmic inflation. Why stop there? Where did the state of eternal inflation come from? Although scientists can, and do, concoct theories about this, it may be that it cannot be known, because such events, if they can be called that, may be lost in principle in quantum uncertainty. Knowledge depends on the preservation of information. The heat radiation of the Big Bang has preserved information about how our universe looked in its infancy, a mere four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang occurred, and this information lets us confidently peer back that far and then extrapolate a good deal farther. But beyond the universe created by our Big Bang, the state of eternal inflation would be a pure quantum regime in which nothing persists. Therefore knowledge would not exist. We can’t even imagine how we could find out about a “beginning” for quantum uncertainty, if that is even a meaningful concept. Is this then at last the place to credit God as the literal first cause? That’s an option. But rather than skipping lightly over eternity itself to paste in the idea of God “causing eternity,” we might do better to think of the beginning as being just as unknown as the distant future and ourselves as true explorers, moving outward from the center in both directions. In cosmology both the distant past and the distant future are in a real sense ahead of us, the one waiting to be discovered, the other to be created.
Origin stories from cultures around the globe have fallen mainly into three categories, depending on their view of time.
1. The world is cyclical (it continually changes in the short term, but in the long term the cycle itself repeats eternally). This is the Hindu version, for example.
2. The world is linear (it’s always changing, and time goes in one direction). The Bible may have been the first to adopt this view, with a creation story followed by historical heroes who each play a nonrecurring role at a particular moment.
3. The world is eternally unchanging (although if created, it went through changes in a distant, irretrievable past).
The new cosmology reconciles these ancient, deeply conflicting ideas about time by revealing that all three modes of storytelling are correct—but they apply on different scales. On the size scales of Earth, which have shaped our human minds and intuitions, the seasons are cyclical, and so are the births and deaths of generations of living beings, the movements of the planets, and the return of comets. On the size scale of the Big Bang and cosmic evolution, the universe is changing in one direction: it’s expanding faster and faster, and we know of no good reason why it would ever contract. But if the theory of Eternal Inflation is right, then on that grandest scale yet conceived, the superuniverse is eternal and unchanging. Quantum possibilities burst endlessly from every sparkpoint, some of which will even become universes, yet as a whole nothing changes.
This multiscale view of time challenges the traditional order of storytelling. Origin stories have traditionally been told from beginning to end or from beginning to the present. But that may not be the best way to communicate the nature of a Meaningful Universe. The new origin story may start with the present and move both forward and backward, just as the Cosmic Spheres of Time move outward as the past zooms away from us in all directions and the future flows toward us at the speed of light. From the center outward is the way scientists have actually learned about the past—first the recent past: the planets and local stars, then nearby galaxies as they were only a few million years ago. Then, as instruments improved and we could see farther out into space, we saw further back in time, observing distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago. Our story is continually expanding and changing, restless as human curiosity, and this helps prevent the calcification of any version into dogma.
Some people react negatively to the very possibility of a single story shared around the world, as though there were no difference between mental dictatorship and scientific truth. But the difference is fundamental. When human beings serving their own interests dictate to us what we should believe, we must rebel; but when nature reveals some truth, rebellion against it merely sabotages our own future. Today such misplaced rebellion against nature’s own revelation, as though it were nothing but an opinion, could sabotage the entire human species by dismissing the only story that may provide what Joseph Campbell said we most urgently need: “a mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being.”
Some fear that a single origin story, even if it were true, would somehow impose a single way of thinking on everyone. But that’s mistaken, too. Humans are endlessly diverse, and this is our great strength. The Cosmic Uroboros shows us that events on different scales are controlled by different laws and thus require different ways of thinking. What this means for us humans is that we can preserve kaleidoscopic diversity on the scale of our local lifestyles while still finding consensus about events on the encompassing scales of the planet and the universe.
Those who insist the universe is only a few thousand years old often have no compunction about ending it shortly. In fact, for a substantial number this symmetric sort of closure gives their life meaning. But it’s not a meaning that has anything to do with reality, that can ever serve a global civilization, or that can ever support peace and a shared commitment to our descendants and our planet. Since human consciousness looks outward from the center, as we discussed in chapter 5, a tiny consciousness of history is mirrored in a tiny consciousness of the future. The end result is a consciousness too small to notice, let alone appreciate, most of reality. The larger the past that our minds encompass, the larger the future we become capable of imagining, taking seriously, and protecting. In this way the history of our universe may be the key to our future.
The origin story of the new universe also challenges deeply held assumptions about what kind of story can actually satisfy spiritual longings. If we define spirituality as “experiencing our true connection to all that exists,” then the new origin story comes closer than any other to helping us fulfill that longing. There is no sense in either judging the scientific story (unsatisfying! too hard to get! too foreign to care about!) or dismissing it (just a theory, has nothing to do with God’s creation). What makes sense is to seek passionately to absorb these discoveries, using every cultural tool available to bring home to ourselves this new knowledge of where and what we humans actually are. If anything is a miracle, this is it: that precisely at this pivotal moment for our species, when so much is required of us, a cosmic opportunity has fallen into our laps. A potentially empowering, transcendent origin story has appeared that could unify so many around the world who may not see eye to eye on many other things. All they need to agree on is that our place in the universe is extraordinary and that humanity could have a cosmically long future. This level of agreement could change the world.
