What we do in life...echoes in eternity.
Sounds familiar? It's one of Russell Crowe's lines from Gladiator...great movie but that line sometimes feels a bit corny.
But what if, like gravity waves, our lives are writ in space-time for all of eternity? I don't mean that your future is pre-determined. I mean that your life is woven into space-time as you live it, based upon the choices you make and the hand of fate and - once woven - those experiences in your life are forever sealed...in the eternal fabric of space-time. But space-time is a journey, not just the fabric of existence. Without time, everything would happen at once. Without space, everything would happen in the same point. That's called a singularity. But we're beyond the singularity - the Big Bang - now. Our individual journeys through space-time are simply a part of universe's journey through space-time, into the future. Every moment of your life so far still exists, in space-time, and will forever exist.
The idea of time-travel relies upon a similar idea. After all, if you travel back in time, where are you travelling to if that part of past space-time no longer exists? So, everything you have ever done, and everything you will do, may well form echoes in eternity.
The same might be true of everyone that you know, everyone will you know, and everyone you once knew. It may not be "heaven", but perhaps it is a consolation to think that, maybe, when we die...our lives "live" on. And so too, perhaps, do the lives of our loved ones.
I came across the idea of a an eternal "block universe" in British theoretical physicist Julian Barbour's book "The End Of Time".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Barbour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_space_and_time
I've also wondered about photons, and the speed of light, in relation to time. At the speed of light, time ceases to exist. The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second (or roughly 300,000 km/s). But for a photo travelling at the speed of light, time ceases:
https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.html
Time is weird.
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Image: Gravity Waves, NASA
