BONUS: Time Drain
Volume 4: The Lost Side Quest
BONUS: This article was going to be part of the closer for Volume 4, but ultimately, as mentioned previously, it simply didn’t quite live up to my vision. Still, it’s a pity to put all that writing to waste, so I’m making it available as a bonus to my paid subscribers.
Now, this isn’t a BAD piece of writing, not by any stretch. Indeed, perish the thought of me ever charging for writing I felt was substandard! It’s actually some of my best writing, it just didn’t fit in with the greater narrative I was aiming at. Which made it all the more difficult and painful to ultimately kill it.
I wholeheartedly feel you’ll find it an enlightening and edifying read, nevertheless. Just not necessarily “gaming” related, unless my Chrono analysis is still making the rounds through your synapses. In which case… yes, very relevant.
Anyway, here you go. As for Volume 5, preparations are going great, and I’ve got some AMAZING and—dare I say—magical stuff in store for you once we launch!
~Jay
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Like a temporal Ying-Yang, both past and future seem locked in dualistic opposition. The past is the domain of nostalgia, simpler times, the prime times of our lives which we’ll never get back, and a long-gone era where playground structures were made out of metal. The future, on the other hand, is shrouded in mystery—since nobody knows how it’ll pan out, we view the future the same way we do anything unknown: with dread.
The future inspires fear in everyone—if not outright terror, then at least mild trepidation. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either:
a) Lying,
b) The Dalai Lama, the reincarnation of Evel Knievel, or Dr. Manhattan,
c) Clairvoyant [NOTE: If you suspect this might be the case, but the seer in question hasn’t used their knowledge of the future to become insanely wealthy or powerful, see “a)”]
After all, a year is a long time, in which a lot can happen—you don’t know if you’ll still have a job, a house, a partner, or even be alive by this time next year.1
The underlying fear, of course, is change. As a species, we don’t handle change very well. It’s the twin sister to the other primal fear I’ve repeatedly mentioned in this newsletter: the fear of the unknown.
But change is inevitable—it will happen, whether we want it or not. That’s kind of the point of time! Take away change, and time loses all meaning. Before the Big Bang, before the expansion of spacetime, when the entire Universe was compressed into a singularity,2 time had no meaning.
And at some mind-bogglingly far-off point in the future—AT LEAST 10^10^76 years,3 if not much longer—all the energy in the universe will be spent. And since change can’t happen without energy, this means there will be no more change, either. And time will once again lose all meaning.
There is a kind of sublime cosmic poetry to the idea that, given enough time, even time itself will die. Though it takes a hardcore stoic to extract even that slim sliver of beauty from such a grim prognosis. But the existential panic you’re probably feeling right now illustrates my point perfectly—the future, and all the change it brings (even the change to having no more change), is nothing short of frightening.
But again—we can’t change it. Because, again, time IS change, and change IS time. So, we might as well roll with change as best as we can.
Quantum Bang
If all this talk of the heat death of the universe is really doing a number on your sanity, I get it. Trust me, I’ve been there. But if it makes you feel better, there’s still hope, believe it or not.
First, keep in mind that heat death is still very speculative. Like so much else in theoretical physics and cosmology, it could turn out to be either flat-out wrong, or at least radically different from what we currently imagine. Besides, depending on the limits of what we can observe, we may never know for sure.
Not reassuring enough? In that case, you can take solace in quantum physics, perhaps the most mind-bending and counter-intuitive subject within an already mind-bending and counter-intuitive discipline.
Quantum mechanics deals with the smallest scales possible—this is the sub-atomic world, a strange realm that plays by its own rules to the point that it’d sound magical, impossible, or outright insane if the math didn’t line up so well, or if so many observations and experiments hadn’t confirmed so much of it.
In this bizarre dimension (a misnomer, I know, but I just had to make that reference), particles are simultaneously waves, moving freely through time in all directions. They pop in and out of existence as if from—and back into—nothing. Stranger still, the whole stratum exists as pure probability and can change just by the act of observing it.
But in this discussion, the most important concept to remember is: quantum fluctuations. These are abrupt changes in a vacuum where a tiny flash of energy just… spontaneously appears. Out of nowhere! And then, as quickly as it popped in, POOF… it’s gone.
Now, if you didn’t sleep through science class, I know what you’re thinking—doesn’t this violate thermodynamics? Specifically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics? You know, entropy? The reason there’ll even be a heat death in the first place?
And the answer is… yes. It absolutely does. Kind of. Sort of. Actually, I shouldn’t have used that word. In the world of quantum mechanics, nothing is absolute. Or rather, nothing is certain.
Now, hold this concept of quantum fluctuations in your mind, because we’re going to pivot to probability real quick. This is the second piece of the puzzle.
When Heisenberg (no, not THAT Heisenberg) codified his Uncertainty Principle, he was talking about calculating the position and velocity of particles. But uncertainty is also foundational to the field of Probability—which makes sense, given that mathematics and physics are as intertwined and inseparable as Twitter and societal breakdown.
Statisticians, risk assessors, and sports bookies, PLEASE forgive me for oversimplifying your complex and fascinating field to a TL;DR, but it must be done in the interest of space and time (in multiple meanings of both those words): basically, nothing is certain.
No, I’m not just repeating myself. There’s some important nuance here that’ll come into play soon. Basically, since nothing is guaranteed to happen, it’s impossible to predict anything with 100% confidence. There is a 40% chance of rain tomorrow. A flipped coin will land on its edge once per 6,000 tosses.4 Approximately one in every 10,000 clovers will have four leaves. You get the idea.
Sure, you can be 99.990002% certain that the Sun will rise on any given day (that’s a real figure, by the way), but the fundamentally chaotic and uncertain nature of the Universe means there will always be that 0.00009998% chance that it doesn’t… and at some point, there actually will be a day where the Sun no longer rises.
The point is, that’s the whole idea of probability! How the future unfolds is a matter of likelihood, not certainty, because the Universe is fundamentally uncertain. The uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. No wonder existence is such a struggle!
But, follow this logic far enough, and you’ll come across the other side to this coin: since nothing is certain, nothing’s impossible, either. I’m simplifying, obviously—the Universe, chaotic as it may be, is still constrained by the laws of physics, so don’t expect to flap your wings and fly off your roof anytime soon. But the list of things that can be absolutely ruled out as “impossible” is a very short one, indeed.
Every single day, people witness medical recoveries that the doctors themselves call “miraculous.” Others recall impossibly detailed recollections of events they didn’t experience. And all the while, scientists continue making replicable and verifiable discoveries that fly in the face of centuries of mathematical and empirical evidence to the contrary.5
Hell, take time travel. As mentioned in a previous issue, time travel for you and me is impossible—but only because of hard practical constraints (namely, the finite amount of energy in the universe); it’s still theoretically possible. And in the subatomic world of quantum physics, the universe’s smallest particles move as freely through time as we do from the couch to the fridge.
So, even “impossible” events still have that infinitesimally small probability of happening. And they will happen, given enough of one single, magical ingredient: time.
Case in point: everyone’s heard that metaphor about a bunch of monkeys in a room eventually typing up Shakespeare. From the vantage point of a human lifetime, or even a planet’s lifetime, this sounds preposterous. But what if they had a literal eternity’s worth of time to do so? Then, it doesn’t sound nearly as far-fetched.
By the way, if you’re curious about the monkeys, it’d take them 4.1206 x 10^5660329 years, or the age of our universe (currently estimated at 13 billion years, and change) multiplied by a number that would fill 2000 pages.
Obviously, this makes Shakespearean Monkeys “impossible” in just about every practical sense of the word. But conceptually, given enough time, even the impossible becomes not only possible, but practically (and paradoxically) inevitable. Told you this was counter-intuitive!
And again, when you’ve got actual eternity in front of you—like, for instance, a dead and energy-less universe where time’s lost all meaning—what’s another 2,000 pages worth of “years,” anyway?
This is where we come back to those quantum fluctuations. These will still happen even after heat death, because the universe will still keep expanding (entropy has no bearing on the expansion of space-time, so the universe will still keep growing; it’ll just be empty).
Untold scores upon scores upon scores of years after the universe expends its last bit of energy, these quantum fluctuations will start yielding weirder and weirder results. Not just particles, but entire objects will instantly pop into and out of the featureless void: first just weird clumps of matter, but then objects like hats, human brains, planets, stars, and even galaxies, all appearing and disappearing like cosmic soap bubbles.
And then, at some point in 10^1056 years,6 one of these quantum fluctuations could even produce a whole new Big Bang! Thus, a new Universe is born, and the cycle continues.
Now, a big caveat—all of this is still highly speculative, contentious, and likely unknowable either way. But then again, so is the whole heat death thing. And so is practically all cutting-edge theoretical physics, for that matter.
Hell… while we’re at it, so is the future, full stop.
So, you know, make of it what you will. One thing we do know: we may not have much time in this world, but time has all the time in the world. So let’s make the most of what time we have.
~J
And that’s just on an individual level. Zoom out to the macro level, and the future looks even bleaker—war, recession, a never-ending pandemic, rampant inequality, a frightening degree of polarization and political tribalism, America and Russia’s twitchy fingers on the nuclear trigger… and to top it all off, a potentially apocalyptic and likely inevitable climate catastrophe. But… that’s way beyond this article’s scope.
An infinitesimally small area that’s so inconceivably tiny and dense, that it literally breaks the laws of physics.
That’s a one (1) with 760 zeroes (0) after it. Go ahead, count ‘em: 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
SOURCE: Murray and Teare, The probability of a tossed coin falling on its edge, Phys. Rev. E. 2547-2552 (1993)
Hey, look! An actual academic citation!
Quantum mechanics itself is a prime example, a radical yet empirically proven paradigm that physicists are still trying to reconcile with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which practically every new observation into the cosmos seems to further confirm and reinforce.
That’s a one (1) with 1056 zeroes (0) after it. No, I’m not going to type it out.