The Zana Zen

This year (In November) I’ll begin my Biotechnological Engineering studies at the Ben-Gurion university at the Negev in Israel. I chose Biotechnology because I’m fascinated by life and because along with biology studies – you also get some math, physics and chemistry

So I began to think and study about life and how it is made, the material that we are composed of, etc. I thought about something some days ago that I think would be interesting to share, I’m first going to outline the most common and widely accepted theories among the scientific community regarding how the universe and life were created, this will give the reader some good background before proceeding. Afterwards I’m going to discuss what I think will happen to the universe in the future, most chances you’ll be surprised by it so keep reading!

Please read every sentence carefully, since it is very summarized.

Some Background

Today, from observations into outer space, we know that galaxies draws away from us, the farther the galaxy is away from us, the bigger its speed it goes away from us (Hubble’s Law). This is true from any point of view that you’ll look at it (principle of relativity, nothing special about earth), far galaxies will draw away faster from your observation point, aka the universe is expanding. This led to the birth of the Big Bang idea, or at least it supports it, the big bang theory suggests that these galaxies must have been closer in the past and at the beginning, the universe was in “singularity” ~13.7 billion years ago (singularity is defined as a point with infinite density and high temperature), when the big bang occurred it expanded and the universe was formed.

So lets say the universe was created somehow and matter was formed somehow (I want to get fast to the point). Matter as far as we know today obeys a certain dynamic, we don’t completely understand the dynamics, but we have built a really nice model of what we think matter is (quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc…), lets hope CERN will push us a step further in the understanding of matter and our universe. “Playing” by these “matter dynamics”, planets, solar systems and galaxies were formed. One of these planets was earth, it was formed ~4.5 billion years ago, and then life is assumed to be created spontaneously later on, some says that life sprung almost immediately after the earth was formed.

Of course that we cannot prove this is true, but if you’ll study “life chemistry”, it will be seem more logical to you that if you apply Darwin’s process of evolution to molecules and atoms, it is imminent that life will be formed, solely by the nature of matter in our universe. A good explanation to that process is found in the book: Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene. There are two other points that you’ll have to accept if you follow this logic. 1) Earth is a single planet amongst billions of billions, so life was probably formed elsewhere as well (See the the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image to grasp how big the universe is). 2) On earth, life took a carbon based form, which was the best choice on earth’s environment, but no one said this is the only form of life available and there is a good chance that other forms exists as well.

The groundwork of life contain two things: survival and replication. Survival is done by “finding” the “fittest” form (Natural Selection) and replication is by producing more of the same molecule (DNA), cell or organism (interesting reading – Mitosis).

Another assumption I take is that the development of intelligence would be the next native step to take place after the creation of life, this is also derived from natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

The Future of the Universe

We can say that the creation of life and intelligence were native processes that would take place again and again if the universe was re-created again for any reason. If you’ll look at it in an abstract way you can say that matter aspire to become intelligent. Furthermore, the survival & replication process turns all matter bit by bit to become intelligent so inductively you can conclude that at a certain point all the matter in the universe will become intelligent.

Of course there are some certain limits to this process, but at the other hand, giving enough time (billions of years), and assuming intelligence can take many forms, you may conclude that the whole universe will aspire to become intelligence. Who said that there isn’t any life and intelligence in our sun? maybe it is based on plasma chemistry or whatever…

Maybe the whole universe may become a single organism one day.