Can we follow this a little further?
Let’s say you and me are little bits of algae which are floating in blob in the ocean off the coast. We are in a larger current which we cannot see. The current is such that we will eventually strike the shore together.
We are in a cluster of material together. It’s not exactly algae, there are a bunch of random gels, some mostly decomposed skin parts. Some very fine grit.
Of course the ocean is constantly mixing everything up, so even though we have been in this blob together for several weeks, that’s not exactly normal.
Well, there millions of blobs like ours, so I guess it’s sort of normal. But there are a quadrillion billion blobs that won’t last the hour. So our blob is, if not abnormal, improbable.
You and I are algae, so we can’t sense much. But we have noticed many events over our lives. Very early in our lives we perceived the day cycle. There are good times to photosynthesize, boy did we feel that. Time. We noticed quite a few bacterial... situations. And geometrically there have been a number of events in our blob. It used to be much bigger, for one thing. We certainly noticed every time a chunk got taken out of the blob and the energy gradients went haywire.
Of course we’re algae so we don’t remember, but we notice.
There is a world outside our blob, but we cannot know it. Sadly, this is physics. There’s not enough atoms in the blob to make a fin, let alone an eye or a brain. So there will be no peering out of the water at the sky. We can sense events within the blob. Outside the blob there may be more going on, but we certainly can’t see it.
There are unexplainable patterns in the blob. Why does it look sheared off on two sides? “We”, meaning our limited algae consciousnesses, didn’t exist during those events so we are just as cut off from our past as we are cut off from the world around us.
And we are barreling now, in a wave towards the shore.
And now we are floating.
And now we are rolling through a wave towards the shore.
And now we are slipping calmly on the surface.
And soon we will crash onto the sand, where we will be consumed by bacteria and insects, and our blob will be no more.
It is inevitable. The first law of algae says: you will be eaten.
But we will not be eaten this minute. And so I ask you: what happened in the blob, before it existed?
Luckily, though we can’t see outside the blob, we can ponder questions like this, because we are hypothetical blobs, and hypothetical blobs have human brains!
We can certainly guess what our bodies were before the blob existed. They were a cloud phosphorous and nitrogen. And presumably there were other plants or bacteria in our proto-blob that produced those nutrients for to become us.
That bit of skin I mentioned was on a dead whale. It was on the ocean floor but it got kicked up to the surface in a storm.
The gels came from jellyfish. And the salty water around us... well, it was salty water.
What shape was all that stuff in? A strange one. But still, we could draw it if we had some art supplies. And fingers. The current that brought in the whale skin could be drawn to an approximation. The bacteria largely came from two identifiable blooms, plus a long tail of about a thousand others, plus an unknowable tail catalog of origins describing the last 0.001% of bacteria in our blob. We couldn’t draw that, but maybe a light watercolor fog around our greater vicinity could represent it.
If I could draw our blob before it existed, it would look like a strange flower. With very long tendrils but also several beautiful simple twisted surfaces.
Now, what about the universe itself?
Science suggests its origins were not nearly so “soft”. Our blob was sort of “assembled” from pre-blob parts. The universe doesn’t appear to have been assembled in a soup that same way. Trend lines suggest it started as a singularity, not an assemblage.
But all physicists will admit we don’t have the technology to peer into those first moments. Like us and our blob, there’s just not the equipment available to look outside the universe to get data, nor was there equipment present to remember things as they happened.
We just don’t know what physics is like in those kind of moments. Is it an assemblage of parts from a larger vicinity? Are there even larger vicinities than our blob?
Or, to put it in terms that you and I would understand: did the universe, at birth, have a bit of whale skin in it? Some dead jellyfish bodies?
We can only speculate. As for me I say: why not?
But I’m just a bit of algae. What do I know.