Something I thought about. Remember the final seen in Men in Black that shows our whole universe to be inside a marble? Could such a thing happen given what we know about particle physics and energy, or perhaps the way gravity works. If we can’t see anything beyond the known universe, there has to be more out there no way we could be the center, we can’t even detect the gravity past our vision point right? Is such a thing possible although unlikely or is their some science reason it cannot be?
Maybe every big bang is the by product of alien shampo
Well, the contents of a cell are far more organized than the contents of our universe, so that alien would be a lot less efficient than anything we consider as life.
Particularly since we can see distant objects that can’t see each other. I’m not sure how a being could exist if different parts of its body were not in causal connection with each other.
Effects only travel through space at lightspeed. We can look in opposite directions and see things that will never interact with other because they are too far away from each other but not from us. As opposed to the cells in a body, whose components all strongly interact with each other.
Some things in the universe are so far apart that light hasn’t had enough time to travel between them. Say we look through a powerful telescope and see a distant quasar with a very high redshift. It’s so far away its light has taken almost the entire lifetime of the universe to reach us. Now, if we look in the opposite direction we might see another distant quasar, but it’s impossible for the quasars to see each other. The universe hasn’t been around long enough for light to make the trip. It’s barely been around long enough for light to make it to the halfway point (us here on Earth).
Astronomers sometimes talk about “the visible universe”. That’s everything that’s close enough for its light to have made it to Earth in the 14 billion years since the Big Bang. But the actual universe is larger than that – probably much, much larger.
So if the entire universe is contained within the cell of a larger being, then the cells of the being are so huge that light hasn’t had time to travel from one to another over the lifetime of the universe. It’s impossible for a cell that size to interact with its surrounding cells. And I’m not sure how such a being could exist if its individual cells couldn’t interact with each other … .
You’re picturing a universe with a static size - but our universe is expanding. When those 2 quasars existed the universe was much smaller and those 2 quasars were much closer together. It’s enough to make your head hurt but expansion is what makes them look like they are so far apart now, but they weren’t 30 billion light years apart when they actually existed.
I was leaving out the expanding part to keep the explanation simple, but the point still holds. We can see both quasars, but they can’t see each other. And each quasar can see other parts of the universe that we can’t (and, because of the accelerating expansion of the universe, never will) see.
So if our entire universe exists as part of a giant alien, that alien’s cells are so huge that they are unable to exert any influence over each other. They are out of each other’s light cones. It hard to imagine how a creature like that could even be thought of as a creature at all.
Of course, that could just mean that entities in the super-universe interact on much longer timescales than we do. Just because two objects are causally isolated now, doesn’t mean that they’ll still be isolated billions of years from now.
The main problem with ideas like this is that they’re unfalsifiable. If it’s true, what would it mean for anything we can ever observe?
But all that means is that it might be possible for a causally-linked entity (like a living creature) that’s larger than our universe to exist some time in the distant future. Such an entity is still impossible right now.
It’s not that the entity doesn’t exist right now, just that “right now” is a negligibly small slice of that entity’s existence. At any given moment, there are particles in my body which are causally unconnected, at least for a few nanoseconds.
But your body is more than a random assemblage of parts. It required a chain of causal events driven by the DNA in your originating zygote to assemble itself.
Such a being could only exist right now if it somehow magically popped into being fully formed. There’s no natural process that could have led to its existence. And if “Is this possible if we allow magic?” is included as a premise, then ANYTHING is possible, trivially.
Well, it takes a small, but non-zero, period of time for every interaction in our own bodies to occur, down to the simplest chemical reactions. So, there are parts of my body that aren’t causally connected to other parts at any given instant.
Is it possible that this organism exists on such a long timeframe that the entire history of our universe is just part of the process of sparking a single synapse for this organism?
This seems absurdly unlikely to me, but is it impossible?
Technically, the existence of the universe is “magic”, if by magic we mean without a falsifiable hypothesis, insofar as we have no plausible explanation within the framework of existing physical science as to why it should exist, where the energy came from, or what governs the particular set of fundamental physical constants that appear to be arbitrary and yet govern the workability of electrochemical and intranuclear reactions.
As it happens, the universe is not just “a random assemblage of parts.” The observable cosmos shows large-scale structures up to filaments of galactic superclusters. There is no accepted physical reason why such distinct structures should exist, as the influence of gravity over such distances is too small on its own to have created such discrete collections. The most widely accepted accepted hypothesis is that visible (radiating) matter is embedded in a distributed matrix of dark matter which allows such structures to form over cosmological distances; however, that does not provide an explanation as to why there is such a non-homogeneous distribution of visible matter in what is (presumably) homogeneous dark matter. To resolve that, a repulsive scalar field labeled “dark energy” provides the impetus to cause the space between visible structures to increase while nearby matter clumps with itself gravitationally.
If this all seems like very arbitrary, ad hoc explanations based upon substances we can’t see or directly measure, well, you’re not far from the truth. Even if it is correct, it still doesn’t provide any rational for the “why” of such structures. It may be that there are larger scale structures that we cannot see simply because they are formed across distances that exceed the visible universe. It may also be that such structures are artifacts of higher dimensional structures that we can only observe in 3+1 dimensions, and causal linkages exist in outside or compactified dimensions.
As others have pointed out, the lack of global causal connections is not a problem; on the time scale of electrochemical reactions, the vast majority of a cell is beyond the visible future of a single protein, which will be disassembled long before it ever has the opportunity to traverse the boundaries of a cell.
Of course, other theories exist as well:
*In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of God, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought.*[right]–Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe[/right]
This goes back to what I said earlier. There is definitely some order in the universe. But there’s a whole lot more order in a cell.
If someone had asked whether it was possible that our whole universe couldn’t be [insert your favorite example of a non-organic* bit of stuff] of a larger universe, that’s a more open question.
It might also be worth bringing up that cells, almost by definition, have a boundary, and the universe doesn’t.
I suppose our universe could be the lysed and broken-down remnant of a cell on some long-dead alien, if that’s an interesting thing to think about.
To avoid confusion, I’m using “organic” in the old, ambiguous sense of “having something to do with the processes of life”, rather than the modern, unambiguous sense of “made of molecules containing carbon, except for most carbonates and pure-carbon molecules, and there really should be C-H bonds for it to count, except when there aren’t.”
