This essay I wrote sometime in the mid-1980's. I'm still hoping that someone who has a deep mathematical understanding of General Relativity might want to investigate this idea further.

A Radical Cosmology

In terms of our current scientific understanding, the ultimate question about the fate of all of everything is this: is the universe open or closed? The universe is expanding outward from the Big Bang, the initial explosion which was the beginning of all of everything and the beginning of time. If the universe is open, it will continue to expand eternally, but if it is closed, the gravitational attraction between all the matter in the universe will be enough to stop the expansion, and it will all come together again, which will be the end of time.

Because the open universe is eternal, to some this may seem to be the fate to be preferred, but this is not so. As all the disperate elements of the universe grew further apart in an infinite space, with no chance of reunion, all the stars would eventually burn out and die. The universe would grow cold, and life would no longer be possible. The eternity offered by an open universe is an eternal dreamless sleep from which there can be no awakening.

The vision offered by the closed universe is that of reunification. It correlates precisely with the ancient Indian mystical teaching that the universe is cyclic in nature, expanding into infinite diversity and contracting into unity over and over again. It has been said that this is the cycle of God learning about Herself, forming of Her very substance the various multifarious manifestations of the phenomenal universe in order to study from all angles the nature of being, and thus gaining in self-awareness, which brings Her back to the primal state of oneness. (It is, of course, an artifact of language that I must pick a gender for God. I just use the one which seems most natural to me.)

It would seem that the closed universe is to be preferred. But is there enough mass to slow down the expansion from the Big Bang, and bring about return? The facts are hard to ascertain, but in A Brief History of Time, Steven Hawking suggests there may be only one tenth the mass required. Thus the best guess according to current theory is that we are doomed to the fate of the open universe. Onward to maximum entropy, to heat death, to pointless oblivion!

I have a theory which lends hope that the universe may yet be closed, even if the mass of the universe alone is not sufficient. The theory of relativity states that as an object having mass approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity. (This is why nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.) A spaceship travelling between two stars at a speed near that of light relative to those stars would actually warp the fabric of space between them, forming a sort of connection. I don't know the mathematics to calculate the exact nature of this connection, but my intuition suggests that it would develop harmonic oscillations. These interstellar voyages at relativistic velocities would so change the nature of the large-scale universe that it is beyond our imagining. The stars (and eventually, galaxies) would become directionally connected, without regard for the space to be found in other directions. The theory that these connections, formed by the travels of sentient beings, will play a crucial role in the closure of the universe, I call The Participatory Closed Universe Theory.

I have one other observation about this scenario: this web of stars connected by harmonic oscillations in the fabric of space would resemble very much the structure of a simple nervous system...