Tim I loved this article. My background is technology and anthropology although I was lucky enough to attend a graduate course in astronomy in about 2004~ish that had (incredible as this seems) John Dobson (the telescope guy) himself personally doing a week of lectures in person for our class of about 20. His lectures (I still have his handouts) occurred as we were building 8” homemade “Dobsonian” telescopes. I had no idea how fortunate as a class we were, I still have and use the telescope. He was lecturing, as you would guess, on the nature of what we are, what we are in … and how we got here.

I have a non credentialed, no mathematical/astronomy/physics proof of theory but a personal belief that I have adopted for myself with no basis to convince anyone else. Your article sparked this response: Infinity (awkward but self evident truth) has infinite in cosmo(s) and singularities are misnamed because when they bang they are apparently imperfect (clumpy) and generate what we observe around us (elements, galaxies, systems, even biology). In early life (I postulate we are in an early life universe) the expansion carries most observation outward (red shift). Eventually expansion is distributed enough to begin incorporating other dark matter and with enough mass forms the nucleus of what will, in time, be a “bang”. All of the collected intelligence is stored in what we call a “singularity” and more or less recycles — hence we observe sometimes the opposite of entropy (complex systems such as boys on a corner chewing gum waiting for the school bus).

The sum of this would be that in terms of “base reality” or “artificial reality” we are both (our bang had a lot stored in it before the bang). Moreover, no life form, no matter how advanced, can become eternal (we all get unavoidably get pulled into a singularity). There is, I propose, an unavoidable end and recycle based on eventual inclusion into forming “singularities” and it comes with embedded information. My guess is our universe is liminal, a teenager. We all eventually go dark and recycle, we’ve sorta been here before.

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.”

— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets