Ask HN: Do we know enough to guess the purpose? - graycat
======
graycat
Apparently man has long wanted to know about the universe, God as maker of the
universe, etc.

Well, now we know much more about the universe, our solar system, earth, and
life on earth than just 100 years ago.

Here is a little of what we know:

At

[http://www.askamathematician.com/2017/06/q-where-is-the-
midd...](http://www.askamathematician.com/2017/06/q-where-is-the-middle-of-
nowhere/)

is

Q: Where is the middle of nowhere?

Posted on June 13, 2017 by The Physicist

with at

[http://www.askamathematician.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/06/...](http://www.askamathematician.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/06/Nearsc.jpg)

a map, amazing, of our local universe, within about 500 million light years
from earth.

Amazingly there are large voids. Can see several voids 100+ million light
years across on the map. Off the map there are voids maybe 1 billion light
years across; considering that the big bang was about 13.7 billion years ago,
a void 1 billion light years across is surprisingly large. Where there are
stars and galaxies, there are strings, sheets, walls, etc.

Weird stuff.

But we know much more than in such a map.

We must ask:

Q 1. What the heck was the propose of creating the universe?

Q 2. Then we ask, do we know enough now to start to guess a purpose?

Maybe the most amazing thing we know about so far in the universe is human
life. Well, even if human life now is a bit messy to serve as a guess of the
purpose of the universe, the amazing parts of human life have increased a lot
in just the last 100 years.

So, we ask,

Q 3. Give human life another short time to develop, say, another 100 million
years, what might human life be, how knowledgeable, powerful, advanced,
amazing, and then ask if that state of human life could be a guess at a
purpose?

Note: So far it appears that there were some physical laws. Somehow they were
_enforced_. Then someone clicked on the button "Big Bang", essentially left
hands off, and let just the physical laws -- the same ones without any changes
-- take over from there. Amazing.

Guess 1: Maybe the purpose is just for the universe, i.e., humans, to discover
the physical laws.

Note: So far it appears that humans are quite strongly locked into the
universe and, in particular, just our local part of it. With the amount of
energy required for space travel and the speed of light speed limit, it's
tough to see how humans could explore more than just a tiny fraction of the
total: Yes, I know, humans could start colonizing and eventually have
descendants explore and/or colonize our galaxy all in a reasonable interval of
time, say, 1 billion years.

That given, for humans to explore the whole universe looks like one heck of a
challenge.

So, it appears that humans are locked in.

Guess 2: Maybe the purpose is to see if humans can get out of being locked in,
to explore and understand the whole universe, what made it, how it's made, how
the physical laws get enforced, how space can expand, etc.

Q 4. As we look at the data and understanding we have so far, e.g., that map
above, the standard model of physics, the 3 K background radiation, and much
more, can we get some good hints about the purpose?

