The Center

“See that!” 

“That little bit of light from that star was created like billions of years ago and it’s been travelling and travelling through deep space ever since.  It’s been bent around stars and galaxies and grazed meteors and comets and been through more space and time than humans could even imagine… I mean like way longer than human existence, like even before the dinosaurs… maybe even like before the first amoebas.  That’s how long it’s been on its trip - thousands and thousands times longer than civilization has been around.”

“…and then it had to get pulled into our atmosphere and it got bounced around by way more than trillions of air molecules and all the atoms that make up all the stuff in the air in a gazillion random patterns."

"…and it did all that just to end up right smack here.  Those photons that carried that light had a billion-plus year trip going at the fastest speed possible through a distance we can’t even imagine just to end up here tonight on the receptors in the back of our eyes so that our brains could perceive just one tiny dot of light for one little moment.”

“Here’s the crazier thing though…  What makes me humble myself to the universe….  All those thousands and thousands of stars up there, each of them is different light from different stars that have also been traveling for eons and eons... Maybe not a billion years for all of them, but thousands and hundreds of thousands of years for most of them and all those little lights were created at totally different times over all that time and just like that one, they were pulled and pushed and curved by all kinds of different astronomical stuff …  Just so all of them… all those little photons… could come together right here right now just for us.  Out of all the places and times in the universe they could have ended up, they all chose to end up here in this pattern so that we could see a starry night.”

“…and now after all those years, none of them are going any further.  All any of them are now is just some fired synapses in our brains.”

“It’s like overwhelming…. Like they were all created just for us.  Travelled all that way just for us. All came together in this particular way just for us….  And if we blink or turn our heads or don’t bother to come outside to look up at the night sky, they all made all those trips for nothing.”

“But you know what I really, really think about.  It’s that when we look up at the sky, it’s not even the same time we are looking at.  Like for the far-away stars, we’re seeing what happened on them millions or billions of years ago because it took their light that long to get to us, but with the close-up stars, we’re just seeing what was happening on those stars like ten years ago or something, like when we were kids or something.   So, looking up at the night sky, it’s like going out into the town square and seeing cavemen and knights on horses and cowboys in stagecoaches and modern people with Ferraris all together at once…  I mean it’s all stuff from different times all thrown together in one picture.”

“There isn’t one past… one point of time from the past… that we could ever see at the same time.  It’s all different points in different pasts.  That’s the only way we can see the universe at all - as a mixture of times and places.  The only reason we humans beings think there is such thing as ‘the present’ or can even make sense of time at all is because we look at stuff so close that it all seems like it is all happening at the same time.   But even when we look at each other a foot away, all we’re seeing each other from the past.... but like a fraction of a second ago.”

“Things that we see on Earth happened so recently that our brains can’t process fast enough for us to perceive that they actually happened in the past, so we just call the jumble of close-by things "the present", even though in actuality, everything we see… even close-by… is already in the past.  Things that are further away, like the Sun, we can tell that we are seeing the past, but it’s only like seven minutes in the past or so."

"But the interesting ones are the far, far away things... the ones that we can tell are from the deep past. When we look at the far away stars and galaxies and nebula, we are actually looking millions or billions of years in the past.  If you think about it, if we could see far enough – like 13.8 billion light years away – we could see the start of the universe, when the universe was just one infinitely small point and no matter what direction we look, it’d all be the same point, because that one little point is all there was back then.  I mean when you point far enough in any direction, you’re pointing at the exact same thing that you are pointing when you point far enough in any other direction.”

“But that’s it for us and our universe…. There’s nothing farther than that.  If there really was actually anything beyond that, it would have taken longer for its light to get to us, than the whole age of the universe, so I guess we won’t ever know."  

"And the universe plays a wicked game by expanding at the speed of light.... It's like saying not only can't you never get past the edge, I'll never even let you see past it. It makes the light that gets to us from the start of the universe always and forever the absolute border.  It’s like the universe is one big bubble and we are right exactly in the very center of it and the bubble is expanding at the speed of light. So not only can't we get to the edge of the bubble, we can't event get closer to it. Even if we could travel at the speed of light away from Earth and towards the edge of the universe, it would be running away from us at the exact same speed, so we would be exactly as far away from it as when we started.”

“But what if could? I mean what if we could go faster than the speed of light?  Like imagine there was Planet X that was exactly one light year away from Earth.  If you had a telescope that could see everything that was happening on Planet X, you could only see things that happened there a year ago ‘cause that’s how long it would have taken light from Planet X to get to your telescope on Earth.”

“But what if… Poof!… you teleport from Earth to the Planet X immediately, like faster than light, then you would get to see what is happening on Planet X right now in their time…. It would be a year later than what you saw in your telescope right before you left Earth.  You would be going a year forward in their future.”

“More mind-blowing would be that, once you got to Planet X, if you looked in a telescope back at Earth, you would see things that happened on Earth a year ago.  If you waited long enough, you could see even see yourself getting in the teleportation pod to go to Planet X.  And that’s just it!  That’s the cool thing!  When you teleport to Planet X you are teleporting into the future and are able to look back into the past.  So if Planet X wasn’t one light year away, but like say a hundred and fifty million light years away and you teleported there and then looked at a telescope at Earth, you would see the Jurassic Period happening.  It would be like a perfect history book.”

“But here’s the part that blows my mind…. The part I can’t wrap my head around.  Let’s say that you looked totally the opposite way from Planet X and you looked as far as you could to the beginning of the universe, 13.8 billion light years away, so for Planet X it would be 13.8 billion plus one light years away….  I mean it would be like before the beginning of their universe... Outside of their universe altogether, right?  So if you could teleport to Planet X, you could tell them what it look like outside their universe.”

“But you can’t… Wanna know why?  It’s because from their perspective, they’re already that one year in the future.   So, when you got there and described what it looked like outside their universe, they would be like ‘Yeah we know, we can see that same thing you say is 13.8 billion plus one light years away, but it's only 13.8 billion light years away. You’re just a year late.’  They’d see the same beginning of the universe that you saw on Earth and see it exactly the same way you saw it on Earth before you left, but they would have waited another year for the light to pass by Earth and get to Planet X.  So theoretically you would think they would say, yeah, the universe started 13.8 billion plus one years ago, but they wouldn't.... They would just see the same thing that we thought was the start of the universe on Earth: 13.8 billion years without the plus-one. So, they would say Earth is wrong - the light took another year to get to Planet X, so the universe must be a year older than you people on Earth thought it was.”

“But it also works the other way.  When you got to Planet X, you could try to look away from Earth to what would be 13.8 billion plus one light years from Earth, past what you thought was the start of the universe for Earth.  This is light that still has a year before it gets to Earth.  So, you'd be all excited to be looking at stuff that is outside Earth's universe. But you couldn't. It would look exactly like it does on Earth and exactly as far away - 13.8 billion light years away. So you would say to yourself I guess the universe must be a year younger than I thought it was on Earth.”

“So who’s right?  Earth or Planet X?  Did the universe start a year earlier or a year later?  

“….and remember, it scales to any distance.  So if there was a Planet Y that’s 13.8 billion light years away, we wouldn’t be able to see it on Earth for another 13.8 billion years from now.  There is nothing we could possibly do to prove that it exists. It just doesn't exist for us. But, let's say Planet Y does exist and you were to able to teleport to it and, once you got there, you tried to look back to Earth. Earth wouldn’t be there.  All you would see is the beginning of the universe from Planet Y’s perspective.  It would look like billions of years were needed to pass until the Sun was even ready to form.... And it's not just that they can't see it, it would actually be true in every physical measurement possible. In their universe, Earth simply would not exist yet. ”  

“So, who’s right?  Earth or Planet Y?  Does one of them exist and one of them not exit and won’t exist for billions of years or do they both exist outside each other’s universes?”   

“Maybe I'm totally wrong on all of this, but I figure there are three facts that we’re sure of.”

“Fact One: we know that there was some definite point of time in the past that the universe began and that point of time is the same no matter where you are in the universe. It can't be billions of years old in one place and a hundred years old in another.”

“Fact Two: there is a finite amount of energy and mass in the universe and Earth and Planet X and Planet Y can all measure it as exactly the same from their inertial frame of reference.  You can swap between mass and energy, but you can’t create more mass or energy no matter where you are, when you exist, or how fast you travel.  So the mass and energy that makes up Earth (or will make up Earth sometime in the future depending on where you’re looking from) will exist no matter where you are in the universe.”

“Fact three: the physics on Earth and Planet X and Planet Y are all the same.  The speed of light is the same for all of them, E =MC² on all of them, and the universe is bounded and expands at the same rate for all of them.”

“Put these three facts together and you have your answer:  All three planets are correct!  Their perception of their time and their universe at their particular location is totally accurate!”

“In Planet X’s universe, it is still last year on Earth.  In Planet Y’s universe, Earth doesn’t even exist yet… On Earth, we exist and are in 'the present' and our universe pays back Planet Y by making it not exist yet... And, in all three universes are totally correct." 

“… and remember that bubble of the universe that we’re the center of…. Well, Planet X and Planet Y are the centers of the bubbles of their universes too.  (Remember, they have exactly the same physics we do.)  If you teleported to them, you would be teleporting to the center of their universe, but that universe would be totally reorganized in time and space from what you perceived being in center of Earth’s universe.   Things that we saw happen from Earth wouldn’t have happened yet…. And all kinds of stuff in the future that someday we are going to see happen from Earth will have already happened in those universes.  It would look like someone took all the same things from Earth’s universe (all the mass and energy) and all the same events that have happened or will happen in Earth's universe and reorganized space and time in exactly the right way so that whatever planet you are on would be the center of the universe and whatever point in time you land on would be the present.”

“If you think about it, all those space movies and all that science fiction with warp drives faster than the speed of light have all lied to us.  If anyone was ever able to travel faster than light, we would come out in a different version of the universe watching Earth’s past.  The Space Force Troopers or the Earth Resistance Army or whatever would teleport to some enemy planet and the Galactic Emperor would be like ‘What the heck are you doing here?  Look in this telescope...  We haven’t invaded Earth yet.  We weren’t even planning to invade Earth for another thousand years.’  And in his universe, he'd be right.”

“So don’t you get it?   Right here… This point between us.  Right now… This thing we call the present.  In this space that we call the universe.  It’s all just one manifestation one manifestation of time and just one manifestation of the universe.  Everywhere else has a totally different present and a totally different version of time and a totally different organization of the universe.  Someday, those other universes will catch up with us.  In those universes, us sitting here looking up at the stars and having this conversation will happen at some point in the future.”

“But, there are none of them except ours in which it's happened yet. Out of all the infinite universes, this is the only one in which you and I are here now.”