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vacuum cleaner–like beast in the movie Yellow Submarine that goes around sucking up all it encounters. After hoovering away everything else on the movie screen, it ultimately turns on itself and sucks itself into nonexistence. With a pop, the world reappears, along with the Beatles.
there is something rather than nothing simply because nothingness is impossible. As one contemporary philosopher has put it, “There is just no alternative to being.”
When the French philosopher Henri Bergson tried to imagine universal annihilation, he found that there was inevitably something left over at the end of the experiment: his inner self.
But nothing could precede a world with an infinite past, so such a world could have no prior cause and hence no possible explanation for its existence.
Science has removed the obscuring veil of mystery from many phenomena, much to the benefit of the human race: but it confronts us with a basic and universal mystery—the mystery of existence. . . . Why does the world exist?
As a clue to what kind of resources, consider that, a fraction of a second after its birth, the entire observable universe was no bigger than an atom.
“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
for life to evolve in the universe, each of the cosmic constants needs to be fine-tuned in a particular way for many different reasons at once. The strength of the electromagnetic force, for example, has to be in a particular narrow range,
The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”
But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”
So the number of genetically distinct identities the genome can encode is at least 2 raised to the thirty-thousandth power—which roughly equals the number 1 followed by 10,000 zeros. That’s the number of potential people allowed by the structure of our DNA. And how many of those potential people have actually existed? It is estimated that about 40 billion humans have been born
It is not the prospect of unending nothingness as such that makes death terrifying; it is the prospect of losing all the goods of life, and losing them permanently.
