Pitfall Harry In A “Closed Universe”
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
Each Voyager spacecraft was launched by NASA with a kind of time capsule in order to communicate to extraterrestrials about our human life on Earth. It contained a Golden Record of Earth Sounds and an inscription by then-President Jimmy Carter that is printed above.
I was four years old when Voyager 2 was launched sixteen days before it’s twin Voyager 1 in 1977. I was sixteen years old when Voyager 2 encountered Neptune. I am now 45 as Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space in 2019. Both Voyagers are predicted to go silent sometime mid-2020s when its plutonium batteries fully decay.
This week, Voyager 2 has become only the second satellite to venture into Interstellar space, the data coming back has thrown scientists into a loop.
Literally.
Data coming from Voyager 2 has revealed there is a spilling of particles from both sides of the heliopause, the void between stars or interstellar medium between two stars. This heliopause is a place that absorbs cosmic rays that if allowed to travel further could be damaging to biological beings such as ourselves and prevent life.
This dovetails into the final release of data from Planck spacecraft measuring cosmic microwave background (CMB). An anomaly was detected that there’s significantly more “gravitational lensing” of the CMB than expected — meaning that gravity seems to be bending the microwaves of the CMB more than existing physics can explain.
Simply said, the universe seems to possibly loop on itself.
Jack Black’s, an actor, comedian, and musician, parents Thomas William Black and Judith Love Cohen were engineers who helped build the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble telescope can take a picture of a galaxy 100 million light-years away. Simply said, it is taking a picture of a galaxy as how it looked 100 million years ago.
But what if we are actually looking at its future?
Jack Black’s first television credit was appearing in an Atari’s most successful 1980s video game Pitfall! commercial. Pitfall Harry was a character in Pitfall! So famous in fact it had its own cartoon in 1983 during Saturday Supercade time. And as a personal fan of the video game and the cartoon, the reason I loved Pitfall! was you could go backward. You can start the game and go off-screen the “wrong” way and play the game in reverse.
As was the time of Christopher Columbus where people believed the world was flat and even now as flat earthers who just had their world conference in São Paulo led by the host of YouTube channel Professor Terra Plana, Siddhartha Chaibub, are trying to demonstrate our modern scientists could be wrong about the universe.
However, not as wrong as flat-earthers not being able to properly explain Equinox or explaining that our Sun is only 3,000 miles away which means it would never set even though we have sunrises and sunsets.
Our belief that the universe is an infinitely sized flat bedsheet might be incorrect and instead, the universe seems to gently curve as if we are all inside a balloon or “closed universe”. Not an “open universe” that is constantly expanding.
As scientists are doubting that time flows like a river but instead moves out in all directions. As Dr. Bradford Skow is quoted, ‘We’re not located at a single time.’
A universe that loops could mean that if we should ever encounter extra-terrestrials they might not be aliens at all. It could be us. Us from the past or us from the future — finding ourselves in a different part of space-time.
The repeating radio signals that China keeps intercepting from deep space could actually be from us — from a future or past location — 3 billion light-years away.
So the flat-earthers who seem to be taking us backward in centuries accepted science, might be just reminding us of those first explorers who before they raped, pillaged Carribean and Latin American cultures, they believed the fastest way to the other side is going in reverse.
They said, “The Earth is round. Let me prove it.”
So on a moonless night, miles away from the lights of the city, when we look up into the millions of stars, one of those tiny, twinkling lights could actually be our own sun — either in the past or in the future.
As I wrote about previously, Neil Degrasse Tyson and other physicists and philosophers have alleged that maybe our universe is a simulation or a video game. If that’s true and we live in a “closed universe”, it means all of us are a living Pitfall Harry.
As a human race, we are swinging on vines, standing on the heads of open-mouthed alligators, and skimming across sinkholes that appear out of nowhere. We as a species are just trying to survive.
We can go forward. Or we can go in reverse. The adventure is ours.
As the inscription just above the Golden Record reads for future aliens to interpret as written by President Jimmy Carter: “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”
And by “yours” it means ours.
Godspeed Voyager 1 & 2. See you on the other side.
