WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE
There is no doubt that our universe is expanding, and there is abundant evidence that it began in a primeval explosion of matter-
In the first scenario, the very nature of a truly infinite universe is that anything that can happen, must happen, so our universe must eventually repeat itself precisely with an absolutely identical history by the process of ‘Poincaré recurrence’ (remember monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare sonnets?). This means that since we are part of the events making up the history of this universe we must also be in the identical future universe. An analysis of what makes us feel like ‘us’ shows that this future identical ‘we’ must be, and more importantly must feel like, the ‘we’ who are writing and reading this. The billions of years between our death in this life and our birth in an identical future life will, for us, not exist because time is only detectable when we are alive to detect it. The upshot of this is that the instant we die we are reborn again in our mothers’ arms -
But a repeat of our universe also has implications for the nature of time, because if there is a future universe with a history absolutely identical in every detail to our universe, it must, by the principle of identity, be considered as our universe, repeated. The universe has returned to its starting point, and the dimension of time in which it has done so therefore must be considered as circular. So when we are reborn as ourselves, it will actually be in the repeat cycle of our universe in this circular dimension of time.
The second possibility, that the universe collapses into a Big Crunch, appears so different from the first that it might be expected to have a very different outcome. In fact the outcome is precisely the same for us and for time as for the infinite universe. It has been shown that all the matter-
At the Big Crunch the ‘debt’ will be ‘repaid’ with the positive matter-