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It appears that the Universe is not here to help me, as it has no perceptible organs of sensation or emotional needs to help beings such as you or I to prosper. Perhaps it is just the other way around; we are here to help the Universe to become a sentient, emotional, caring being. In that sense, we are potentially a transitional species moving toward a non-organic style of life based on the organized electronic beings we are presently manufacturing. We are still in a primitive transition stage that looks like silicon-based information processing systems such as Google, but things are changing fast. Our experience with this kind of thinking is less than a hundred years old, and yet if it is once set into being this new form of life could last for hundreds of billions of years. Because it isn’t living in the usual way, it can go dormant for very long periods of time, and when things are right it can come back into fully operational beingness.

Personally, I don’t feel threatened by these thoughts because I and my species appear to have a limited existence because we are consuming the energy basis of our livelihood. Things will obviously change enormously in a hundred years for our species if we continue behaving as we presently are doing. At present, there isn’t even a public conversation about how to bring the population into balance with the resources of our Earth. Most are opposed to such an imposition on our liberty to reproduce randomly, and many are horrified. However, Malthusian processes are still in play and Mother Nature will have her way. (That was inadvertently poetic.) The limits on food and water will become the limits on human population.

If we do choose to move forward with creating a non-organic life form, what will be its limitations? To get deeper into that question, I recommend reading Life 3.0, by Max Tegmark. He is for creating absolutely fail-safe limitations on super-intelligent computers before we let them have access to unlimited legal personhood.

From the perspective of the very long run, that is billions of years, it seems that we must acknowledge this new electronic form of our being. We have the opportunity to participate in the creation of a Universe-size super-being. That’s scary! As it should be, but the other option is simply human oblivion.

At what point do the Universe and its needs versus humans and their needs conflict? That question only makes any sense if we can have some impact on the evolution of the Universe. But, it appears that at present our technologically advanced civilization at this brief moment in time does have that option. Thus, for us, it’s a choice between moving forward into the Universe or vanishing forever.

How can we measure ultimate Universal values? We can fall back on that most unlimited of all human thoughts, mathematics, and compute how big the Universe might be, and at what point does it become absurd to talk about its size and our influencing its behavior? Let’s explore that size and possibility for a moment.

Wikipedia – Universe states the diameter of the observable universe is 8.8 x 10^26 meters.

So, measuring the universe in terms of the smallest unit of measure possible would yield a really big number.

From Quora “May 1, 2016 – That would be the Planck length or about 1.6 x 10^-35 meters. According to some theories of quantum gravity, it is impossible to determine the difference between two locations less than one Planck length apart. Accordingly, that is the smallest distance that ever can be measured.”

In this case, we get to add the raised powers together even though one is positive and the other is negative, thus 8.8 x 10^26 m + 1.6 x 10^-35 m which gives us 14.08 x 10^61 or = 1.4 x 10^62.

That is the diameter of the Universe for the moment, but it is reported to be expanding. Supposedly the Universe isn’t spherical, but 4/3 pi r^3 is probably a ballpark number for our volume. With that crappy mathematics, we would get 32.928 x 10 ^186 just measurable tiny volumes of Universe to work with. Hmm? How can we do that? We humans in our present form can’t, but in our evolved electronic form we can.

It’s a big Universe to cope with, but if we don’t do it the Universe may remain a blind, deaf, unfeeling, unloving, dead thing forever.