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121 - Purely Biological

El Cid

on Oct. 29, 2016

Second-to-last page of excessive smut; things will take a darker turn next week.

As was mentioned before, this scene has kind of run on for a while, largely because I had to rewrite the scene to include Ozzy's demise. It's almost like two scenes (maybe even two-and-a-half) in one. So yeah, it's a bloated scene, but it's starting to wind its way down now. Hang in there!

Op Ed blurb!



If you look up at the night sky, and wait long enough, a most troublesome thing happens. No, not after a few minutes, or even hours, but years… thousands of billions of years. As the universe expands, all the galaxies and nebulas not bound to our little local cluster continue to fly away from us, at an ever increasing pace, until eventually they're speeding away at a rate many times the speed of light. As they move faster and faster, the wavelengths of light coming from them become stretched until they exceed the length of the observable universe. When that happens, they become invisible. All of the evidence that the Big Bang happened, and that we're part of a larger universe, will be lost to any newly emerging civilizations that come about in these dark times. The universe will have covered its tracks for good. It will be the end of science, at least as we know it.

But we may not need to wait a trillion years to see science sing its swan song. It's well on its way to extinction already.

There's a certain self-assured, almost smug, certainty among the science-faithful that the day will come when science vanquishes all of our primitive mystical beliefs and dogmas; that we'll reach a level of scientific sophistication that enables us to explain every aspect of our physical world empirically beyond all doubt. I've never fully bought into that viewpoint. I think it makes a lot of dodgy assumptions, both about our human ability to be purely rational, and about the limitations of science. Looking around the world today, no one could say with much certainty that science has defeated religious dogma. To the contrary, many parts of the world appear to be regressing, not just to a Medieval mindset but one of antediluvian barbarism.

And here's the bad news: When it comes to the really deep questions about our origins and the fabric of reality, we may be running out of theories we can actually test.



Leonard Susskind – often billed as the Father of String Theory – is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the idea that we can ever devise a feasible experiment to verify the claims put forth by string theory. As he stated in a past interview: ”…an accelerator that could probe the scales that we're really interested in would have to be as big as the galaxy and it would have to use a trillion barrels of oil a second to fuel it.”

And he's not alone. For a number of high-concept physical theories – the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum reality, the kaleidospcopic multiverse theory, any number of pre-Big Bang conepts – it seems highly unlikely that we'll ever be able to confirm them with actual real world observations. This has led several top theoretical physicists and cosmologists to explicitly advocate that experimental verification and falsifiability should no longer be a requirement for a scientific theory to be accepted. If it's “sufficiently elegant and explanatory,” it is argued, then that should be enough.

This would be a dramatic departure from scientific tradition, but we may some day find ourselves with no alternative. Without confirming through empirical observations, however, there would never be a way to know whether any of these theories are descriptions of how the actual real world works, or if they're just extremely elegant and internally consistent nonsense with nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Worst of all, it would be the end of science, or at least the end of science as a truly separate discipline from theology. What's always separated science from religion is its method, not that it claims to have the right answers. Science is about investigating, not about belief. Once you remove the experimental element, and all you're doing is purely theoretical – assumptions based on assumptions based on assumptions – and running computer simulations… you're no longer doing science. You've replaced science with a religion based on mathematics rather than scriptures or Dharma.