The Exigent Duality
Metaphysics and Dust - 15:45 CST, 11/09/18 (Sniper)
You know those pictures of bizarre worlds at the bottom of the ocean? We're living in one of those, right at Earth's surface.

What we "see"-- colors, shadows, textures-- are just visible light of varying wavelengths reflecting off of surfaces. If we could see more or less of the spectrum, the world would look almost totally alien! It's like we're existing in a phantom, "Stranger Things"-style upside-down world, only it doesn't "look" or feel that way to our human eyes, and our developed notions about the way things "are".

On a related note, Duncan and I were recently looking at millions-times electron microscope imagery, and something as seemingly fine or boring as dust is actually a tremendous variety of objects, of different shapes and sizes-- another whole world, within our own! A whole civilization could live in the dust, and we'd never know because it would be so tiny and fleeting.

It made me wonder if the "big bang" was just some cosmic alien having tipped over his coffee mug, and our perception of time is so limited that the billions of years of the "infinite expansion" are just the tiny interim period until the giant wipes the spreading mess off his desk. Like our lives, or even the whole scope of the universe, is just one tiny, microcosmic, ephemeral spark coming off of an anvil.