What if the universe was created?

What if the universe was created?

A Public Thought Experiment

          When people look up into night sky, or around the world, there are two things that immediately hit you. The first one is the scale of size, and the second is the scale of complexity. As a result, a section of our population reached the conclusion that it all was created like this on purpose. Now, I was never really one of those people. Sure, I believed in a deity at one point in time, but I never believed because I couldn't explain the level of complexity one can find in the universe. However, for the moment, let's assume this is the case. What if there was some creative agent who either set it all in motion, or directly created things to be the way they are? What can we find out about them? Why did they do it?


          Well, one thing is for sure, they didn't do it solely for the benefit of the human race. If we were to assume this was their purpose, then said creator must be very lousy at what they do. Our population is crowded on this planet, which may I remind you is full to the brim with deadly animals and diseases that have gotten pretty good at killing us off. Only after 100,000 years of our species fighting tooth and nail, adapting to our conditions and eventually conquering our environment to shape it to our needs, do we enjoy the comfy lifestyle we have in the modern world (if you're ignoring impoverished nations, anyway).


          From the paleolithic all the way up to the early 20th century the average life expectancy at birth hovered anywhere between 20 and 40 years of age. It's only in recent years where technology has spread wide have we managed to get the number up all the way to a tad above 67.* If I were to design a universe tailored to human life, I would think a semi-flat plane filled with varied terrains and resources spreading out in all directions forever would be much more suitable to human growth and development than a finitely sized rock orbiting an enormous nuclear fusion bomb. The very fact I can conceive of a universe better fitting to human life than the omni-powerful creator of the cosmos leads me to believe humans are not the most important item on their list.


          If humanity isn't the ultimate end goal for this creator, what could it be? Well, the universe is full of many things. Gas, dust, stars, galaxies, but above them all, empty space. Empty space vastly outnumbers everything else in the cosmos, and the disparity is getting larger all the time. Thanks to something currently referred to as Dark Energy, the acceleration of the universe' expansion is not only very fast, but it's getting faster. Whatever is causing this dark energy seems to be stretching the universe as thin as it can, and has yet to find a limit.


          If this acceleration continues to spiral out of control, expanding all points in space simultaneously, the resulting speed at which space expands will cause all matter to be ripped to it's basic component parts. As the Igor from Ghostbusters put it, "Imagine every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." That's essentially what would happen at this stage in universal development. Molecules would decay to atoms. Atoms would further decay into electrons, protons and neutrons. They in turn would decay further still into quarks and gluons until the only thing left is energy in it's least condensed form, incredibly low frequency radio waves.


          For this reason, it seems to me, assuming the creator in question knew all of this before creating our universe, that he/she/it just wanted more space. If they weren't aware of these effects, I'd say it's a safe assumption the creator of a universe like ours just wants to see what happened, and would likely have a myriad of other universes with varying laws of physics to see how they all would interact and to what universes they would give rise to.




* The chart for this is in the following Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time... Also, please note the chart is life expectancy at birth, this takes infant mortality into account. Once one lives to the age of 21 the numbers get significantly better as the article goes on to say.