Here's a speculation based on a paper by A. Aguirre and S. Gratton from Princeton University that I read about Inflation. The title of their paper was "Inflation without a beginning: a null boundary proposal".

The concept of the paper is that eternal inflation near in time to the big bang propagated not only in the direction 'forward' in time, but certain areas of a de Sitter space also inflated 'backwards' in time. That is, an infinite universe was created into the future, and an infinite universe was created into the past. Hence, all events in an eternal universe are as a result of an inflationary point that 'rewrote' its own past where the big bang 'never happened' (assuming I understood the paper correctly, which maybe I didn't).

In any case, what is interesting about this proposal (although the idea itself is way out there), is what if instead of the universe experiencing 'past occurring inflation' near the big bang, what if it experienced 'past occuring inflation' as a result of some future advanced lifeform (far beyond our minds can imagine kind of lifeform...). Then in this scenario, an eternal universe is the creation of some human(?) advanced lifeform, of which we exist because of their actions (which haven't happened yet, but will happen).

Of course, the whole notion - as well as Aguirre's and Gratton's hypothesis - terribly mess with the notion of causality. But, it's an interesting concept that we are hear because our universe was caused by an event in our future (or at least some lifeform's 'future') which caused universes to inflate into an infinite past as well as an infinite future.

It might make for a good scifi novel someday...

• A bit scary - yanniru - August 27, 2003 - 18:53 UTC
  • That's one argument against an infinitely old universe - harvey1 - August 27, 2003 - 19:07 UTC
    • that's more lethal... (nt) - harvey1 - August 27, 2003 - 19:08 UTC
    • Pertaining to Mechanical ideas of Old Universe - kantolfir2 - August 28, 2003 - 03:58 UTC
• Interesting - superluminal - August 28, 2003 - 08:52 UTC
  • One caveat - harvey1 - August 28, 2003 - 16:45 UTC
• Basically, you are suggesting? - robertgregory - August 28, 2003 - 10:50 UTC
  • I think it's an approximation - yanniru - August 28, 2003 - 11:33 UTC
  • My understanding - harvey1 - August 28, 2003 - 16:39 UTC