Welcome to Gaia! ::

I always find myself drawn to perplexing philisophical questions - and this is a good one. This question is so deeply tied into the concept of time, which is still not well understood, despite it's being a basic aspect of our daily existence. According to the Big Bang Theory, time and space as well as matter and energy were created in the beginning of the universe.

"Another misconception is that we tend to image the singularity as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.1, 2 According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."3 The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we."


This suggests that time is finite. If time is finite, then it cannot be considered forever. Of course does having a beginning mean it has an end? I came up with my own paradoxical question some years back, and it goes like this. If a man is born and then lives forever you would call him immortal. If a man is destined to die someday, as are all of us, but was never born, would you call him immortal also? It seems absurd to think a man who will die could be immortal, but mathematically being born and never dying is equivalent to dying but never having been born. Either way life has one end, but is endless in another direction. Is this infinite? Is this even possible? Of course I don't want to detract from the question at hand.

There is also the question brought up by the Big Bang Theory about the nature of aditional universes. If the universe collapses on itself, an idea known as a closed universe, then it may allow for big bangs to occur repeatedly, with the universe contracting and expanding eternally.

The inflationary theory also explains why the universe’s density is so close to the limit that determines whether the universe will expand forever or will eventually begin to contract. The universe’s outward expansion is thought to be propelled by the initial force of the big bang. If the universe is dense enough, the force of gravity could eventually overcome the universe’s expansion and start pulling matter in the universe back together. Cosmologists are still trying to find out how dense the universe is. Some estimations fall very close to the dividing value between a universe that expands forever (an open universe) and a universe that eventually contracts (a closed universe).


If time was created in the big bang however, the idea of Big Bangs before or after our own poses an interesting time-space puzzle? Is there a higher time outside of our own - hypertime - to match the hyperspace of sci-fi fame. Perhaps eternity lies there, along with the tantilizing puzzles of time travel. This is an area outside the limits of science, or even of current human understanding... The realm of imagination.