On Creating Imaginary Worlds: Science Fiction

If there's an infinite number of universes as big as this one - all contained in a drop of water on a leaf in a universe just like this one except much, much bigger, and so on... then we are pretty small.
 
It is dangerous thinking of the universe as a sphere; far better to visualise it as the two-dimensional skin of the sphere, that way you don't get any of the standard misconceptions like "the centre from which everything is expanding" (choose any point in the Universe, and it is the centre, with no preference) or "the edge beyond which nothing, no spacetime, exists" (the furthest 'edge' in that direction is identical, and adjacent, to the furthest one in the opposite sense; it's not expanding into anything, because before it gets there there can't be anything to expand into.) Addinddispersal on probability axes merely involves adding an extra dimension or two, but don't forget, "dimension" means "direction" in mathspeak, not a place, so you can add an infinity of extra continua with one supplementary dimension (not that you could generate an infinity, even if each particle with the choice potential to decay or not had been generating a new universe since the big bang, that would just be an extremely large number, not infinity. In the same way as you can never run out of numbers, because the set of integers, never mind the set of real numbers, is infinite, not merely very, very large.

Sorry about that, but you did place the post in the "imaginary worlds, science fiction" thread, not the "fantasy" one.
 
Chris, something I've never understood- is the vacuum between the stars (not including all the particles and radiation and bits and pieces floating in it. I mean Pure Empty Space) the Nothing outside the universe that matter is expanding into or is it part and parcel of the big bang?

Hope this question makes sense.
 
Before it gets there, there can't be anything to expand into. That's where you want to set up your cosmic Shoppe, before the rents go up.
It's hard to imagine there could be a universe of creatures living on, say, this guitar pick. What would happen if prolonged strumming occurred?
Dark matter or light, sir?
 
J-WO said:
Chris, something I've never understood- is the vacuum between the stars (not including all the particles and radiation and bits and pieces floating in it. I mean Pure Empty Space) the Nothing outside the universe that matter is expanding into or is it part and parcel of the big bang?

Hope this question makes sense.
Click to expand...
The vacuum between the stars , between the galaxies, has dimension, interval, light can travel in it, has time (lots of it, very cold, dark time). It is part of the universe. It is space. Before the universe expands to enclose something (or nothing, depending on how you look at these things, although you can't, as electromagnetic radiation cannot exist outside the immaterial boundaries of the universe) there is not merely a total lack of anything, but a total lack of nothing. Not only no light, or heat, but no darkness or cold either. Unimaginable is a wild understatement, cosmic bathos. Without time, all of everything that isn't happening is doing so at once, and since there is no dimension, no interval, in the same place, so it's just as well there isn't anything going on or we might have got/be getting/get another big bang, and the universe created might not be in any way compatible with the one we live in.

That vacuum might feel hostile and unfriendly, but it's next door neighbours relative to primordial prechaos before physical laws have stabilised, and that is warm and cuddly relative to the pre universal situation, if the structure "preuniverse" can have any definition without time.
 
A total lack of nothing.
I read oncet about the Universe forming- how there were elements, combinations of primitive...chemicals and such... that have never existed anywhere since, once everything managed to spread out and combine into all the stuff we have now.
Vague, but it's hard for non-physics minds to hold onto this stuff.
 
J Riff said:
A total lack of nothing.
I read oncet about the Universe forming- how there were elements, combinations of primitive...chemicals and such... that have never existed anywhere since, once everything managed to spread out and combine into all the stuff we have now.
Click to expand...

That's good. To get a grip of the seemingly unimaginable, or conversely to imagine a world, I like to remember how a whole river can be contaminated. At the downstream end someone without imagination chucks in something toxic: petrol, used oil, radioactive isotopes, thinking it'll wash away, but forgetting that organisms can grow, and die, against the flow. So a few years later, a hundred miles upstream, there's not a living thing. Similarly, that concept of a whole connected living organism is how I think of life generally, not separated by fences, fields, walls, doors, space, vacuums but inextricably linked throughout the universe. I believe that Sagan says this in his dandelion seed idea, so I'm not being original. I have a story about a fish that comes from Mars that I developed from this way of thinking. I'll put it up on the critique. Why not? :D
 
Evelinn said:
We could be one living organism, after all, we’re made of the same. Star stuff.
Click to expand...

I like that idea. I'm fascinated by the idea that many animals do a lot more living in the present than we do, and in different ways. Dogs are mad about establishing exactly who is boss, horses don't go a bundle on half-hearted types, they're all living a different reality. Well I think most humans are but that's another story.
 
If we were driven only by instincts, we’d probably be acting more like animals (some do now too) but if we’re all apart of a connected universe, it has to look at itself from different `angles` so it can learn and evolve, perhaps that’s why we’re so diverse.
Maybe we’re sentient because the universe wants to know why it exists? After all, those are the questions we all ask.
 
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