The
Final Prophecy
One day, as Sarkon the Prophet was about to leave for his beloved misty spiritual paths to meet new thoughts and ideas, Dr. Qworm the Mad Scientist came up the Welgon Age's hill in an extreme state of agitation.
"I have breaking news!" he panted to Sarkon, who stepped down from the stairway to the spiritual paths with regret.
"Are these news worth a delay in my search for truth?" asked an annoyed Sarkon. "As you see, I was going to think some important thoughts, and –"
"These news are part of your search for truth, silly!" exclaimed Dr. Qworm, and Sarkon remembered that the spiritual paths could indeed sometimes appear in the weirdest manners – even in a form as grotesque as news from the Mad Scientist.
"Oh. Did you discover the speed of stone at last?" Sarkon couldn't refrain from mocking, though.
"This is a matter that is still not resolved," admitted Dr. Qworm, "but eventually it will. Anyway – the news I bring is that it has been discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster!"
Sarkon looked across the Welgon Age. From the top of the hill, everything it was made of was in sight. He could see Dr. Qworm's laboratory, General Kwar's casern (or castle, or parliament, or whatever he called the hut in which he was ruling), cookie's playground, his own hammock where he was thinking when he wasn't on the spiritual paths, and the tea room where they usually met. All the Welgon Age's shores were in sight, too: the ground there was bordered by some foamy cloud strips, and then there was just empty sky. That was it.
"I never noticed the Welgon Age expanding at all," he commented.
"Forget the Welgon Age," Dr. Qworm dismissed Sarkon's narrow-mindedness with a wave of the hand. "I'm speaking about the whole universe here!"
Sarkon nodded. Dr. Qworm's belief in a huge universe with lots of worlds, stars and galaxies light-years distant from each other was rather pathetic, but the Mad Scientist didn't like being contradicted about that, and Sarkon admitted that the idea was at least theoretically interesting. "Something almost infinitely large is getting even larger, then," he commented, "so it remains almost infinitely large. What's the reason for your excitement?"
"Don't you understand?" Dr. Qworm waved his arms frantically. "The fact that the universe is expanding faster and faster, that galaxies are moving away from each other with more and more speed means that gravity is not only too weak to make the whole of the universe's matter come together again to start a new Big Bang, but not even strong enough to slow it down! This means that there won't be any new Big Bang! Once the energy of this universe is consumed, nothing will remain, nothing will start again, and we'll be doomed!"
"Wait a second. Since when is energy consumed? Isn't it just transformed from one form, like matter, to another, like heat or light?"
Dr. Qworm dismissed Sarkon's comment with a grunt and another nervous wave of the hand. "Ok, call it transformation, then. But at one point, this transformation seems to be irreversible – or did you ever witness a transformation of light into something else?"
"Photosynthesis," Sarkon pointed out. "Through photosynthesis, light helps turning mineral matter into organic matter. In a way, photosynthesis is an association of light and matter turning into consciousness."
Dr. Qworm eyed him with a puzzled look. "You got a point here," he admitted, "although photosynthesis helps to sustain life, not to create it, and although the starting of the food chain is certainly the most indirect creation of consciousness one can come up with!"
"That's how it seems to work, anyway," Sarkon shrugged.
"Whatever. What I want to say," Dr. Qworm went on, "is that with this discovery of galaxies speeding from each other, the universe seems indeed to head towards entropy, a state in which energy will transform less and less, produce all the heat and light and consciousness and whatever else it can produce, and then lay to rest in a graveyard of cold, stable clumps of matter infinitely distant from each other. So we're heading towards definite death instead of heading towards rebirth, which we would do if the universe were able to contract again to form a new Big Bang! Isn't that frightening?!" Dr. Qworm opened his arms in frustration.
Sarkon the Prophet stroked his beard, uncertain about what to think. But as any good prophet, disbelief and lack of faith were his main virtues, and reassuring frightened souls by pointing out new and positive ways of evaluating facts that they regarded as negative was his almost-favorite occupation, second only to free thought. "Not necessarily," Sarkon began after a while of thinking about it. "First, the fact that galaxies move away from each other more and more rapidly doesn't mean that they won't all end up at the same place. As long as we don't know where they're going, there's no way to know for sure. Take a spherical world, like a planet for instance: if you see somebody running away from you faster and faster, you'd at first think you'll never see him again – and then one day be utterly surprised when the same person bumps into you again after having run all the way around the planet! How do we know the universe isn't spherical in some kind of dimension? Besides, the Big Bang theory implies that the characteristics of the universe changed from a singularity to what it is now; we don't know what other changes lie ahead of us in the future. As a matter of fact, we cannot be sure of the future evolution of the universe until we witness it."
Dr. Qworm was unimpressed. "The random ideas you seem to throw up like Socrates shits may be very soothing for the mind, but they are not supported by any known scientific observation, so you better stop ridiculing yourself by sticking to the facts!" he scolded. "And the main fact is that the end of the world is near and that we're doomed."
"Near?" wondered Sarkon.
"Something like twenty billion years, maybe even less!" estimated Dr. Qworm. "And this only if we manage to colonize other solar systems, which we are far from being able to do yet!"
Sarkon the Prophet stroke his beard again. Twenty billion years wasn't much, indeed, since it was as far from infinity as a couple of seconds. "Maybe the fact that no Big Bang is going to happen again isn't that bad, after all," he said after a while.
"But I don't want existence to stop, and in order to have it go on forever, the universe has to have a cycle of some sort, like life has! You think non-existence is hip? What fun does nil have?" moaned Dr. Qworm.
"Well, at least we would escape the Nietzsche nightmare," Sarkon pointed out.
"The Nietzsche nightmare?" wondered Dr. Qworm, whose philosophical knowledge was as limited as Sarkon's scientific understanding was.
"You know, having to live your life over and over again. If the universe extended and contracted eternally in endless Big Bangs and Big Crunches, there would be no reason one universe would be in any way different from the previous or the next, which could mean that the same lives would indeed be lived again and again, eons apart. Even though nobody would notice, it would be kind of boring, philosophically speaking. With a non-self-recycling universe, this nightmare can't take place, so at least we escape one form of eternal entrapment."
"Death instead of boredom. I'm so relieved," Dr. Qworm commented sarcastically.
"And you should," Sarkon agreed most seriously.
"Whatever. What is almost as heart-wrenching is the fact that this discovery makes us understand the universe even less, since it is in total contradiction with what should happen according to our current knowledge of physics."
"What should happen, then?" asked Sarkon.
"Gravity should at least slow down the galaxies' speed. It shouldn't necessarily be strong enough to invert the tendency and make them come together again, but at least slow them down a little. Instead, they are accelerating! And we don't know what force could do that!"
Sarkon smiled. This time, he didn't have to stroke his beard for long before thinking of an answer. "It would seem perfectly logical to me that since some force hurled matter apart at the beginning of the universe, there is no reason it shouldn't still be doing so… The odds that this unknown force is the same force than the one that started it all are far from negligible. As a matter of fact, this discovery could end helping us understand the origins of the universe, because if this force is identified, it could help explain how the Big Bang was triggered."
Dr. Qworm eyed him suspiciously. "The day you won't have an explanation for something, however far-fetched, is the day I'll grow hair again," he commented, going over his bald cranium with his left hand. "But okay, I'll accept that until I know better. By the way, wasn't your last theory that the Big Bang had been triggered by force of will?"[1] he asked mockingly.
"That was just an assumption to point out the possibility of interesting consequences," Sarkon justified himself. "Even you tried it out, by the way," he reminded Dr. Qworm.
"Anyway – whether it helps us understand our beginnings or not, the end remains the same: we're doomed!" lamented the Mad Scientist.
Sarkon sighed. Dr. Qworm might not be the nicest of persons, but seeing someone despairing always chagrined him. "How did scientists find out that galaxies were receding from each other, by the way? Maybe they made a mistake somewhere," he suggested.
"A mistake? These measurements have been made by the greatest of scientists and checked by even greater ones, and doubting their calculations would be an insult to the whole scientific community!" erupted Dr. Qworm. "But of course you are a total ignorant about the matter, so I'll explain to you the basics of how this theory was established and verified," Dr. Qworm agreed condescendingly.
"Everything started with a physical phenomenon called the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect states that if an object is in movement compared to a given observer, any waves that object will emit will be either compressed if the object is moving towards the observer, or stretched if the object is moving away from the observer. In the case of an object emitting light, for instance, the light would shift into blue (shorter wavelengths) if it is coming towards us, and shift into red (longer wavelengths) if it recedes from us.
"Enter an astronomer named Edwin Hubble. He noticed that the further a galaxy was away from us, the more the light it emitted shifted towards red. Thus he concluded that the further a galaxy was away from us, the faster it receded from us. He even noticed that the galaxies were moving away at a speed proportional to their distance from us. That became Hubble's Law."
"All galaxies?"
"Well, almost all of them. Very close ones, like the Andromeda galaxy, are getting closer to us, but it is admitted that that's because the gravitational force between our galaxy and Andromeda is strong enough to override Hubble's law," explained Dr. Qworm.
"Hmm… I don't like exceptions. Maybe there's another explanation," ventured Sarkon.
"Sure. Tell me that physicians have been wrong for the last seventy years," Dr. Qworm sneered.
"Distance between galaxies is usually in the order of millions of light years, isn't it?" asked Sarkon.
"At least. Most often, it's billions."
"So Hubble found out that the image of stars billions of light years away, an image that was also billions of years old since that's the time their light needed to reach us, showed that they receded from us, the further the faster. Since his evidence was not only billions of light years distant but also billions of years old, wasn't his conclusion that their velocity was proportional only to their distance in space a little too rash? Shouldn't he also have considered their distance in time?"
Dr. Qworm opened his mouth, but it took a while before something got out of it. "I… As a matter of fact, the images Hubble drew from seem to have been spacetime data, not just space data, if you consider that what they showed was as old as it was distant. Time should indeed appear somewhere in his equation…"
"Couldn't we just as well say that the velocity of a galaxy is proportional to the age of the picture we get from it? The further in the past our image of a galaxy is, the higher its speed?"
"And what does it change to the current theory?" asked Dr. Qworm.
"Everything!" exclaimed Sarkon. "Because instead of having a positive value – distance – in the equation, we have a negative one, since the galaxies' speed goes up as we look back in time!"
"Wait! That means…"
"The further away in time, the faster a galaxy recedes; thus the closer from us in time, the slower a galaxy recedes. That means that the expansion of the universe is actually slowing down!"
"…Which is exactly the opposite of what Hubble's Law told us for the last seventy years!" Dr. Qworm stuttered, utterly baffled.
"Now let us look at the intuitive aspect of it. Intuitively, it makes perfect sense that the closer a galaxy is to the time of the Big Bang, the faster it goes. In any explosions we know, matter gets hurled away fast in the first few seconds, then is slowed down by gravity and falls back to earth. If there was no earth, we could guess the matter would slowly fall back upon itself."
"It does make sense, indeed…"
"Now this could also explain Andromeda's getting closer to us. We shouldn't merely dismiss that as a local exception due to gravitation, but maybe consider instead that a little more than 2 million years ago, the expansion of the universe stopped and the reverse process started…"
"The Big Crunch!" exclaimed Dr. Qworm.
"Maybe," Sarkon shrugged. "In any case, we have no idea what the galaxies from which we get billion-year-old images are doing now. They might have turned to cheese – we wouldn't know for a long time. But we can observe trends, and if distance would tell us that the universe's expansion is going faster, time tells us its expansion is going slower!"
Dr. Qworm looked at him with envy. "If I were you, I'd call that the Sarkon Paradox, but since you're only a prophet, I guess you don't care for scientific truths or, for that matter, honors. As for me…" he clenched his fist and went on, "I knew these bunch of imbeciles were wrong! I knew it all along! What an idiot this Hubble was! And all the people who believed him, what a bunch of morons! I'm gonna demonstrate that the speed of galaxies is proportionate to their distance in time, not in space, and rename Hubble's Law the Qworm Law! Heck, I can demonstrate it right now!"
Dr. Qworm took a pencil and began scribbling on the tea room's white wall.
"The Hubble constant H is defined as the radial speed v of a galaxy divided by its distance D from us:
H = v / D
"The speed v is obtained by a galaxy's redshift: the faster a galaxy recedes away from us, the more its light will shift into the red part of the spectrum. This is a data obtained by telescopes.
"Now you, Prophet, suggested that the Hubble constant should rather be defined as follows:
H = v / ØT
"With ØT being the age of the image we get from the observed galaxy (the image of a galaxy distant 1 billion light-years would have an age of one billion years, for example).
"Let's see what this changes for the measurement unit of H. The measurement unit of H in the equation H = v / D is:
Kilometer per second / [any distance unit, Mpc (Megaparsec) for instance]
"…And H has been measured as being between 50 and 100 Km/s/Mpc.
"In the equation H = v / ØT however, the unit would be:
Kilometer per second / [a time unit]
"If we take the second as time unit, H would be measured in Km/s/s, thus in Km/s2.
"...And Km/s2 is an acceleration!
"...Or rather a deceleration, as ØT is a negative value, since the image of the observed galaxy is younger than us.
"Thus, the Hubble constant would be the constant of universal deceleration. Which could just as well be the Qworm constant of Universal Deceleration!" the Mad Scientist added with a greedy smile.
"Shouldn't we leave to Hubble what is to Hubble?" Sarkon asked cautiously.
"Did Einstein name his theory 'Newton's General Relativity' when he corrected Newton's calculations? I'll let Hubble keep his mistakes," Dr. Qworm granted generously, "and paste my name on something that's actually true!" He then went on.
"We can even calculate the value of the Qworm constant. In order to do so, I'll translate the Mpc into ly (light-years), which I'll then translate in years of distance from us (since it is light we receive, it will be a 1/1 transformation; this will be easy indeed!), which I'll then turn into seconds:
1 Mpc = 3.08 * 1022 meter divided by
1 ly = 9.46 * 1015 meter
= 3.26 * 106 ly
=> 3.26 * 106 years, which make 1.028 * 1014 seconds.
"Qworm's Universal Deceleration constant Q would thus be comprised between 50 and 100 Km per 1.028 * 1014 seconds2, or, in meter/s2:
4.864 * 10-10 m/s2 < Q < 10-9 m/s2 (let's be generous).
"Let's say that at the time
of the Big Bang, everything was going at the speed of light (or it was, at
least, a maximum). How much time would be needed for the universe to reach its
maximum expansion, which would also be half the duration of its existence in a
cyclical self-renewing model, if Q is comprised between the two values
mentioned above?
3 * 108 / [4.864 * 10-10] = 6.168 * 1017 seconds, which make 1.956 * 1010 years, thus
19.56 billion years if Q = 4.864 * 10-10 m/s2.
"And if Q = 10-9 m/s2, it would need only 9.5 billion years. The question of whether the Big Crunch has already started would thus be very relevant – especially since the Andromeda galaxy is already getting closer to us, as you mentioned!"
Sarkon could only nod.
"All these measures do not take into account any relativistic corrections. H (and of course Q) is supposed to vary at speeds close to the speed of light," noted Dr. Qworm. "But anyway – these calculations should be a good approximation already! The next question we could ask ourselves is whether this deceleration could be the consequence of gravitation. Calculations can be made to check that, too, as soon as we have a better idea about the distribution of matter across the universe," finished the Mad Scientist.
* * *
"Impressive," admitted Sarkon when Dr. Qworm was done filling the tea room's wall with writing.
"Thank you." Dr. Qworm had a self-indulgent smile and added, "Now I'm gonna milk the scientific community for every honor it has ever thought up – maybe I'll even get rich!" he rubbed his hands greedily.
"What community? General Kwar or cookie?" asked Sarkon.
Dr. Qworm let his whole body sink again. "Once more I forgot where I was… Why must I make breakthrough discoveries in a world nobody cares about?!" he shouted with a raised fist at the injustice of his situation. Then he sunk again. "Whatever – I'm sure there was a flaw in this time-rather-than-distance theory you suggested anyway. I'll never discover anything of any value whatsoever. And the universe is expanding forever and we're doomed," he sobbed.
"Even if I was wrong, the fact that no Big Bang will ever happen again if things are left alone doesn't mean that we can't do something about it," argued Sarkon, who was becoming a little angry about Dr. Qworm's despondency.
"Do something about it?" Dr. Qworm's eyes opened wide. "How do you mean, 'do something about it'? You mean about the Big Bang?"
"Sure," said Sarkon with a shrug.
"Hahahahahahaha!" Dr. Qworm burst out laughing. "And people say I am mad! This is the utmost delusion of grandeur I've ever witnessed! And how do you plan to engineer this new Big Bang, Prophet?" he asked. "Dragging the galaxies back to each other?"
"I certainly don't have any clue about how such a thing could be achieved," Sarkon acknowledged, "and I do admit that the concept of Big Bang engineering is the most grandiose thing that can be thought of, but if the continuation of existence depends on it, we'll have to think about it in a few billion years," he warned in a most serious tone. "Humanity – consciousness – has accomplished so much in the last few hundred years that we don't know if something that seems utterly beyond our power now will remain utterly beyond our power forever in the future – especially a future billions of years away."
Dr. Qworm couldn't stop giggling. "Big Bang engineering! Sarkon, gimme five! You just thought up the most grandiose concept ever! I cannot think of anything more mind-boggling! It must be the ultimate limit both for science and for philosophy!" He raised his hand, which Sarkon high-fived with a smug smile. "After all," he added, reflecting Sarkon's smugness, "we can neither expect nor risk that something as important as the creation of the next universe is left to chance or laws beyond our control. We have to engineer it one day, it looks clear to me!" Then he hugged Sarkon and exclaimed, "Sarkon, thank you! This is the biggest delusion of grandeur I've ever had!"
"And if ever we succeed in becoming able to do it at least theoretically, it would also be a proof that the Big Bang from which our universe is the offspring was also the result of consciousness – of force of will –, since if we become able to start a Big Bang this time, it would almost certainly imply that we (or some other form of us) also started the Big Bang the time before. Thus my theory that force of will is the trigger of the universe[2] would be proven!" Sarkon marveled.
"Don't expect that to happen during your lifetime, though," Dr. Qworm added while drying the tears his utter amusement had made roll down his cheeks.
"I don't," agreed Sarkon. "I'm a prophet, remember? Prophets never predict things that happen during their lifetimes – failure is something we'd rather not meet!" he explained.
"For predicting something that far away in time, you are breaking all the records," Dr. Qworm added, laughing. "I can assure you that you'll still be considered a loon in a million years from now!" he mocked.
"A million years won't matter. My prophecy's timeline is twenty billion years."
Dr. Qworm couldn't help bursting out laughing again. "I don't know how you did it, Prophet, but I'm not afraid at all anymore! Too many endorphins in my brain right now, I guess," he analyzed. "I wish you all the success future generations will be able to provide you, in any case!" he concluded.
"And you should," finished Sarkon the Prophet. "You really should."
* * *
When Sarkon left for the vaporous mists of the spiritual paths at last, he was elated. He had demonstrated that the universe was not necessarily doomed even if it looked like it was; he had left Dr. Qworm in the highest spirits he had ever seen the usually grumpy scientist; he had given the Welgon Age something to think about; and finally… Twenty billion years! That was a heck of a prophecy – definitely the furthest away in time ever made!