Richard Branson (+ crew) going into space means space tourism will be open to all of us soon, and I hope to experience Space someday.
But taking a bigger picture view, it’s only a start, and the Moon and Mars are coming soon. However, even that is only the start since we may eventually have access to warp drives and wormholes permitting us to traverse the cosmos faster than speed of light limitations.
So let’s say humanity, or more precisely “post-biological” humanity, has progressed to mastering spacetime itself including harnessing Black Holes for travel, energy, information storage, computation, and other practical things, with a theory unifying General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that explains Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and other problems.
We’re STILL confronted with a question that no amount of science and technology can ever answer even in principle…
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“Nothing” here does not refer superficially to the vacuum of space, since even in that emptiness there exist quantum fields giving probabilities of matter/energy, and of course any emptiness we imagine resides “within” spacetime itself which is definitely not “nothing.”
This question is actually deeper than asking:
- What the laws of the universe are, which can be determined through empirical methods in what we call “Science”
- The much more superficial question why life exists or the meaning of life, which can just be random, blind, and meaningless evolutionary processes that had no reason
…since these questions are “only” confined to the smaller scope of how the universe works or information-processing sentient entities. They do not address why there’s something itself for which the laws of nature work or life exists.
It’s sorta like saying God created the universe, but then jumping one step up and asking why God must exist?
I used to think that these sort of problems will have answers if/when humanity becomes far more cognitively capable, but I don’t see any resolution no matter how collectively powerful or smart we become. How do we even begin to imagine what actual…
