before existence... what did it look like?

[droog]

ok. so the other night a few friends and i were smoking some very good hydro, resulting in a very intense, yet enlightening discussion. after smoking, we were chilling and somehow we got on the topic of existence. so i proposed an unanswerable, yet legitimate question:

what did life, as we know it, look like, before anything existed? before bacteria, ants, humans, cities, countries, planets, solar systems, the universe...

my answer was that it looked clear... but then my friend said, what color is clear? what would the background be? white, black, gray... but the thing is that those colors simply wouldn't exist if there was nothing, so my best guess is that it would be the color of air, but then that's not a color. so really, it would have to "look like" millions of miles of air with no background (a clear background). but the funny thing is our minds cannot imagine this spectacle. we are unable to imagine it because we always see some sort of a background (or at least a color) when we look at things, which does not allow us to imagine nothingness. perhaps, to simplify the question: what does nothing look like?

after lots of thinking, we realized that we had just blown our minds, so we decided to go to the strip club, which doesn't require much thinking at all.

[hippifried]

Well I'm thinking that it would've all be pitch black since there'd be a total absense of light. But you could have watched the whole thing happen in the wall texture if y'all'd been droppin' acid instead of smokin' pot. Aaahh, the good old days... :D

[BlackMath]

The answer is it would be nothing.

Because there is no universe, there is literally nothing.

So there is nothing to BE coloured.

[NYBURBS]

I would say it was dark, but then again darkness is something and yet there was supposedly nothing. On an interesting side note I listened to this show with some physicists from a university and they were saying that they think the Universe expands at a rate faster than light travels (just something else to ponder next time you get high).

[MacShreach]

I would say it was dark, but then again darkness is something and yet there was supposedly nothing.

Black holes are dark because there gravity is such that light itself is unable to escape. There must have been a point before the Big Bang when all matter and energy that exists was collected together, and the gravity of this mind-boggling mass would be such that the same would surely be true, so yes...total darkness and silence.

Nothing.

[rcatf]

ok. so the other night a few friends and i were smoking some very good hydro, resulting in a very intense, yet enlightening discussion. after smoking, we were chilling and somehow we got on the topic of existence. so i proposed an unanswerable, yet legitimate question:

what did life, as we know it, look like, before anything existed? before bacteria, ants, humans, cities, countries, planets, solar systems, the universe...

my answer was that it looked clear... but then my friend said, what color is clear? what would the background be? white, black, gray... but the thing is that those colors simply wouldn't exist if there was nothing, so my best guess is that it would be the color of air, but then that's not a color. so really, it would have to "look like" millions of miles of air with no background (a clear background). but the funny thing is our minds cannot imagine this spectacle. we are unable to imagine it because we always see some sort of a background (or at least a color) when we look at things, which does not allow us to imagine nothingness. perhaps, to simplify the question: what does nothing look like?

after lots of thinking, we realized that we had just blown our minds, so we decided to go to the strip club, which doesn't require much thinking at all.


First, sounds like you had some good stuff going before your "question". As to the question itself, those that said blackness/nothing are right, IMO...there is no light, no "eyes" to see it, no reference point (or anything for comparison against) in any sense that could be understood or compaired to. Basically you're question could lead to what was the evolution of God or, at least, God's senses. I suspect had you decided to visit a Budist monestary instead of a strip club you could have had some very lively conversations (not as many breasts jiggling or loose dollar bills tho...probably).

[ScottyBabe]

firstly, reading your post makes want to get shhtoned!

secondly, as to what the instant before the Big Bang was like has many answers. for me, it's wasn't nothing. i'm of the opinion that the universe expands rapidly then cools, contracts and ends in a concentration of mass and gravity so infinite it is incomprehensible to our minds and therefore leaves us unable to answer the question "what did it look like before the big bang?"

also, the duration of this mass and gravity would be so infinitesimal that the instant it happens also can't be comprehended. but i don't believe that there was nothing, it may have seemed like it or been close to it, but not "nothing"

but hey, we'll never know, so let's just get stoned off our biscuits and enjoy the now!

[MacShreach]

firstly, reading your post makes want to get shhtoned!

!

LOL Yup it's a real toker's question. There was clearly not "nothing," but he asked what it would have looked like, and whether you subscribe to the "One Big Bang" or "Pulsating Universe" theories-- and I'm with you on this-- there must have been a point, however short, when all matter and energy was locked together; and at that point, since all the light energy was contained and we need light to see, we would have seen....nothing. Total silence and darkness....And then the greatest firework show ever.

Of course the "Pulsating Universe" theory just puts the question back in time.....what prompted the first pulse? Is this the first pulse? Are there other universes pulsating away? Are the Laws of Physics constant across them? Why do flies circle round light-bulbs...?

It's your turn to skin up.

[nitron]

Hi there, good question , I've thought about this problem a great deal of time and have come to the conclusion that our Universe must be in beaded in a much greater Multiverse/ Megaverse/ Infinity. I say this because logic suggests that "something" arising from "nothing" is impossible. The very nature of nothingness precludes "things". So before the big bang, there would have been "things", but light is a byproduct of our universes laws. Therefore if in this Multiverse the laws are different to ours ,the existance of light is a non started. So darkness should be the outcome. But hey I could be wrong. We will get an answer some day in the future to this question, as long as humanity doesn't screw up. Take care.

[jaycanuck]

I've had many a talk like this..the thing is it always ended up at an end point (though when you're high that doesn't matter :) ). That end point or circle was "where did "x" come from?"...be it God, nothing, big bang, before the big bang...then if someone comes up with an answer..same question.

We also enter into the quantum world and believe we're all God.

....I need bud for a talk like this so early in the morning. :-)

[ScottyBabe]

Of course the "Pulsating Universe" theory just puts the question back in time.....what prompted the first pulse?

I think that's my favourite part of this kind of discussion, MacShreach.

i love the idea that there is no "first", no beginning. maybe this pre-concieved notion, that we as humans have, that everything has to have a start, duration and end doesn't apply when it comes to the universe (or indeed universes).

this idea, which through discussing with people and noticing the majority think the same, that "timeless" is non-existent is perhaps proof that maybe we're just not supposed to know what happened, that it's beyond our grasp.

on the other side of the coin, you could say that this world of ours is such a teeny, tiny miniscule part of this system that is doesn't matter what happened or what we think as we have no consequence upon it. so lets just have fun and get pissed!

that why i'm with you jaycanuk, i think some booze needs to flow before the words do!

[NYBURBS]

I would say it was dark, but then again darkness is something and yet there was supposedly nothing.

Black holes are dark because there gravity is such that light itself is unable to escape. There must have been a point before the Big Bang when all matter and energy that exists was collected together, and the gravity of this mind-boggling mass would be such that the same would surely be true, so yes...total darkness and silence.

Nothing.

Yea but is darkness something? We perceive it, so therefore it's not a stretch to say it is something. We're limited in our understanding by what we can perceive, so it's kinda tough to say either way. It's just one of those things that can cause you to go round and round in your head until you go crazy lol.

[MacShreach]

I would say it was dark, but then again darkness is something and yet there was supposedly nothing.

Black holes are dark because there gravity is such that light itself is unable to escape. There must have been a point before the Big Bang when all matter and energy that exists was collected together, and the gravity of this mind-boggling mass would be such that the same would surely be true, so yes...total darkness and silence.

Nothing.

Yea but is darkness something?

Total darkness is a complete absence of light....You can't call an absence "something" in a tangible sense, although you could in a conceptual or philosophical sense. But the OP asked about what it would look like; there might be something there, but in the total absence of light, we would see nothing. And so that's what it would look like.

[droog]

interesting thoughts guys... but perhaps our universe is just a speck of dust sitting on someone's window sill inside of a much bigger universe... maybe when we get the answers in our next lives, we will be saying, wow, that's so obvious, i cant believe i couldn't figure it out!

[MacShreach]

interesting thoughts guys... but perhaps our universe is just a speck of dust sitting on someone's window sill inside of a much bigger universe... maybe when we get the answers in our next lives, we will be saying, wow, that's so obvious, i cant believe i couldn't figure it out!

I want some of what he's smokin!

[droog]

I want some of what he's smokin!

[Norma]

Of course the "Pulsating Universe" theory just puts the question back in time.....what prompted the first pulse?

I think that's my favourite part of this kind of discussion, MacShreach.

i love the idea that there is no "first", no beginning. maybe this pre-concieved notion, that we as humans have, that everything has to have a start, duration and end doesn't apply when it comes to the universe (or indeed universes).

this idea, which through discussing with people and noticing the majority think the same, that "timeless" is non-existent is perhaps proof that maybe we're just not supposed to know what happened, that it's beyond our grasp.

on the other side of the coin, you could say that this world of ours is such a teeny, tiny miniscule part of this system that is doesn't matter what happened or what we think as we have no consequence upon it. so lets just have fun and get pissed!

that why i'm with you jaycanuk, i think some booze needs to flow before the words do!

:rock2 This is the best answer in my opinion. Humans are not intelligent enough to comprehend or come up with the answer to that question.

No human will ever know the answer while alive, therefore it is not a question to be asked, technically.

[hippifried]

Never say never. Well... Except you never know what you don't know.

Now I'm with Scotty on the time abstract, but the question was: "Before Existence..." The question itself assumes a reality of the time abstract with the word "before", but it's not necessary to include time in the answer.

If nothing exists, there's nothing to perceive. There's nothing for light to reflect off of. There's nothing to generate light. There's no light. There's nothing to look at anyway. It all sounds exceedingly dull. Think I'll just hang around & see if I can't get involved in a big bang.

[trish]

what did life, as we know it, look like, before anything existed?
What did life look like TO WHOM, before anything existed? Perhaps the intent of of original question is, “If someone were there to observe it, what would it had looked like before anything existed?” But to that question one would have to counter, “Where would that observer have been, if nothing…not even space, with its three distinct dimensions…existed?” There would’ve have been no place to be. Worse, there was no time before time. More accurately, “before” has no meaning in such a context. At this point words fail us and we stumble over them.

[BrendaQG]

The answer to this is. Suppose you existed in your own little parallel universe and have a great view of the universe before the big bang. What would you see?

Nothing, because there would be no light, and no space-time for the light to travel through to get to you. (Remember the big bag created not just matter and light filling in some void, it created the very space-time we live in itself. It is often thought of as an explosion but it really wasn't.)

Supposing you could get inside the tiny point that the universe banged out of what would you see? Again nothing, because based on the best theories we have the universe was so compact that gravity, E&M (light) and the nuclear forces were all unified into one force. There wasn't even light as we know it. Nothing we know of could live in our universe.

The only thing left is to consider all the different types of parallel universes that could exist, Now about those we can know nothing for sure.

[jaycanuck]

A bit along the same lines... check this video out.

http://www.revver.com/video/99898/imagining-the-tenth-dimension/

[transmaven]

the first ~50 seconds of this video explain everything

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHoE156RAo&fmt=18

[MacShreach]

what did life, as we know it, look like, before anything existed?
What did life look like TO WHOM,


Trish, that would be the "theoretical observer." These often appear with rather bloodshot eyes and markedly slowed speech, but to be fair, they have been around a long while and scientists and philosophers not experiencing altered mind-states regularly use the device.

We are such a visual species that, without the theoretical observer, many concepts would be hard indeed to understand.

[hippifried]

The "big bang" assumes something was already there, so it has no bearing on this discussion. What does have bearing is the apparent existence of some very good weed.

[trish]

Theoretical observers are perfectly fine devices as long as they obey the rules. No observations of position and momentum that defy heisenberg, no traveling faster than light etc. The theoretical observer must always report a perspective. When there's no place to stand (as when nothing exists) there's no perspective to report.

[tstv_lover]

This looks like the kind of discussion that can carry on into infinity (assuming time can be infinite) without anyone being proved wrong

[lahabra1976]

Totally good point Trish, your thinking along the lines of "Einstein's theory of relativity." Einstein said nothing is absolute, not even time, not even color, its all based on perspective. So what did the world look like? What color? Perhaps the answer is it depends on who is observing it, how fast are they moving relative to some frame when they observe it, but as Trish mentioned, it is even possible to have a frame of reference here?

Perhaps this is something just beyond the grasp of human beings, our thinking isn't advanced enough to think in these terms as a pervious poster mentioned. We just assume something has to have color or has to be nothing (pitch dark). Something can be dark just because our eyes can't preceive the light, for example, there could be cosmic rays going through the air, but we can't preceive them, it doesn't necessarily mean absence of light all the time.

Even something we take as absolute such as physical size is relative. Einstein believed as things moved faster approaching the speed of light, the object gets smaller. This was proven by science by taking an object that could not fit a through a ring. But when the object was speed up really, really fast, the object was able to fit through the ring. So its actual size shrink in our frame of reference.

[droog]

A bit along the same lines... check this video out.

http://www.revver.com/video/99898/imagining-the-tenth-dimension/

this video was crazy jay!

[jaycanuck]

A bit along the same lines... check this video out.

http://www.revver.com/video/99898/imagining-the-tenth-dimension/

this video was crazy jay!

Yep...3 dimensions down...7 to go.

[Ecstatic]

what did life, as we know it, look like, before anything existed?
What did life look like TO WHOM, before anything existed? Perhaps the intent of of original question is, “If someone were there to observe it, what would it had looked like before anything existed?” But to that question one would have to counter, “Where would that observer have been, if nothing…not even space, with its three distinct dimensions…existed?” There would’ve have been no place to be. Worse, there was no time before time. More accurately, “before” has no meaning in such a context. At this point words fail us and we stumble over them.
Well said, Trish. When I saw this thread, I immediately wondered if you had contributed to it.

The ancient Indian philosophical system of Kashmir Shavism has a concept, summarized in a single Sanskrit term, spanda, which is remarkably similiar to the big bang theory. The literal translation of spanda is "movement within no movement": as there can be no movement (or observation) absent a second distinct something (observer) to measure the movement relative to that observer, there is, in effect, nothing (no time, no space, no substance, no energy). Yet out of that nothing (ex nihilo) comes the observable universe. Taoists say "out of nothing comes the one, out of one comes two, out of two come three, out of three come myriad things."

Perhaps we should all reserve a table with Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (or the Big Bang Burger Bar) to discuss it all.....

[trish]

Perhaps we should all reserve a table with Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (or the Big Bang Burger Bar) to discuss it all.....

Hey, I'm there already; waiting for you guys. Third table from the stage by the port side observation windows.

[iloveshemales77]

Einstein said nothing is absolute...

By saying that nothing is absolute hasn't he just confirmed one absolute: to wit, that nothing is absolute?

[Inigo_Montoya]

In the absences of existence, reality resembles the deep, cataclysmic and dark recesses of the inside of Courtney Love's bruised vagina.

It's dark.....and STINKY.....

[trish]

Einstein said nothing is absolute...

By saying that nothing is absolute hasn't he just confirmed one absolute: to wit, that nothing is absolute?

Einstein did not in fact say that everything was absolute. I’ll stick out my neck and conjecture that lahabra was referring to the fact that Einstein did show that a number of notions which we took in the 19th century to be absolute were in not. Determinations of simultaneity depend upon the relative motion of the observers making the determinations. Measurements of distance, duration and mass are also dependent upon the relative motions of the observers carrying out the measurements. Einstein did, however, suggest that certain quantities are not relative. The “proper time” between two events is something that everyone, regardless of their relative motion, will agree upon. It was this discovery that lead to the realization that space and time are welded together into one unified four dimensional geometry. Nevertheless, the theory, however absolute, tells us nothing if we cannot deduce from it the views and measurements of a given observer. Observers report the world from their perspective and theory must be able to accommodate and reconcile all appropriate perspectives.

The question in this thread, in my opinion, goes beyond relativity, because it asks what it would be like if there were nothing; no matter, no space and no time. If there is no place to stand and no time to stand there, there is no perspective to report. The theory of nothing is the simplest theory there is: it says nothing.

There is a misconception, I think, that at first there was nothing and then there was the big bang. But that way of visualizing it puts time outside the universe, as if there was a time when there was nothing. That‘s not the way cosmologists understand it. The phrase, “big-bang” was invented as a derogatory label by Hoyle and Bondi who were pushing the steady-state theory back in the forties and fifties. The big-bang theory is not a theory about the “start” of the universe. It has always been a theory about the expansion of the universe and the claim that there was no time when it wasn’t expanding. Even though the theory predicts the universe has a finite age, it does not predict there was a very first instant. The theory only concerns itself with the universe. It has no power to deduce anything at all about anything that transcends the universe.

There are indeed, in the twenty first century, more ambitious theories; e.g. there are theories about multiverses that bubble out of inflationary space-time’s and there are theories about parallel universes in exponentially splitting quantum phase spaces etc. etc. etc. Many of these speculative scenarios incorporate the traditional big bang theory, but they attempt to do much more than the comparatively modest big bang theory tries to do, and they should not be confused with the big bang theory.

Now I suppose one way to interpret the question raised in this thread is to assume the multiverse theory and simply ask “what were things like when our particular universe wasn’t around?” But that’s kind of a cheat because it quickly provokes the question, “what would it be like if there weren’t a multiverse?” which brings us back to situation wherein there’s no place to stand and no time to stand there.

[macjay18]

ahh, the creation of the universe, the big bang theory and multiverse ideas. One of the only theories that Scientists havent quite got their head around and thus one of the common motifs in religion vs science arguments.

[trish]

That would be three (of the only?) ideas scientists haven't got their heads around.

[lorddigitalhighfixer]

if the force of gravity is too strong in any given universe, it collapses into itself, Planck Epoch happens/universe explodes again. before the big bang there was probably a shrinking universe filled with desperate uber advanced lifeforms that fed in a mathematical dna stream to the supermassive black hole at the center of their galaxy to seed life once again right before they escaped into the next membrane just before their universe was annihilated and ours was born.

/startrek

[nitron]

Maybe there was another one? "Turtles all the way".

[trish]

That's tough on the turtles.

[Laphroaig]

That's tough on the turtles.

Yep, 4 elephants and a Discworld to support...

925823

I believe this may also apply to the original question.

925824