The Answer to the Mystery of Life Revealed

 Cryptographer James H. Ellis once told a friend, "I can tell you the secret of the universe, but it's not going to do you any good."

Which is the principle problems of secrets of the universe or answers to the mystery of life. They're inferior to money, sex, or even a really good Schwarzwalderkirschtorte, and they're only guaranteed to make theoretical physicists happy.

Case in point: I came up with this while I was working on something else. It explains why we're here, it makes sense of the development of the universe--and I realize that it wouldn't even make a decent science fiction story.

I've read plenty of sf stories that have tried --and they almost always consist of manuscripts left by suiciding scientists, hard-to-decode messages from dying alien civilizations, and endings consisting of big white explosions or Gauloises and tumblers of vodka. (the SF-knowledgeable might bring up Phillip K. Dick, but that's a mistake: his novels are always precipitated by unlearning something important. The only writer I've read who writes stories driven by philosophical principles is A.E. Van Vogt, and he was just nuts.) (I also exempt the David Lindsay's utterly extraordinary A Voyage to Arcturus--mentioned more than once before here--as equally nuts. But both wonderful.) 

I don't guarantee that I'm never going to figure out a way to put this into a kickass story, so I reserve all rights. I know both my limitations and my lack of same. And with that unnecessary buildup, herewith the answer.

One of the important facts in cosmology is that, while electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force all have attractive and repulsive aspects, gravitation is only attractive. Thus, while everything else can trend more or less to neutrality and equilibrium, gravity has seemed to shape our destiny. If it was powerful enough, we have a Yuga-like pulsating universe, Big Bang followed, eventually by a Big Crunch. If it wasn't strong enough, we had an uninviting spreading puddle of a heat-death universe. 

These days, though, there's a different vision--that of a universe beginning to come apart the seams by something called 'dark energy'. Not very much clue to what it is--whether it's the missing anti-gravity or not. But whatever it is, it isn't coupled to gravity the way EM repulsion is coupled to EM attraction.

We have Dark Energy pulling the universe apart--and an equally undetermined Dark Matter supplying most of the mass of the universe--keeping us together. 

Here's the secret: whenever a decision is made, an alternate flip flop from one or the other--native universe is made--all the myriad ways of possibility. It's been posited that these alternative universes interact gravitationally--and it 's that quantum splitting that creates the dark matter that keeps dark energy from ripping the universe into shreds.

Now consciousness seems to be involved in the collapse of the wave function into one alternative or the other. The unobserved parts of the universe don't necessarily flip flop from one to the other--impossible to know, of course, but we can assume that there isn't a big variation brought about by the vagaries of radioactive decay. No, conscious beings two functions--awareness and deliberate action--both lock in a non-superposed results and create alternatives.

So, as dark energy seeks to tear apart the universe, it's the actions of conscious beings that create more alternate worlds, more mass that interacts darkly and keeps the universe stable. and continuing.

So there you have it. The secret of the universe, and the mysterious purpose of life.

Now, how about some cake?