Open cluster

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_cluster

 

Star cluster NGC 3572 and its surroundings.

 

An open cluster is a group of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way Galaxy, and many more are thought to exist. They are loosely bound by mutual gravitational attraction and become disrupted by close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as they orbit the galactic center. This can result in a migration to the main body of the galaxy and a loss of cluster members through internal close encounters. Open clusters generally survive for a few hundred million years, with the most massive ones surviving for a few billion years. In contrast, the more massive globular clusters of stars exert a stronger gravitational attraction on their members, and can survive for longer. Open clusters have been found only in spiral and irregular galaxies, in which active star formation is occurring.

Young open clusters may be contained within the molecular cloud from which they formed, illuminating it to create an H II region. Over time, radiation pressure from the cluster will disperse the molecular cloud. Typically, about 10% of the mass of a gas cloud will coalesce into stars before radiation pressure drives the rest of the gas away.

Open clusters are key objects in the study of stellar evolution. Because the cluster members are of similar age and chemical composition, their properties (such as distance, age, metallicity, extinction, and velocity) are more easily determined than they are for isolated stars. A number of open clusters, such as the Pleiades, Hyades or the Alpha Persei Cluster are visible with the naked eye. Some others, such as the Double Cluster, are barely perceptible without instruments, while many more can be seen using binoculars or telescopes. The Wild Duck Cluster, M11, is an example.

Historical observations

Mosaic of 30 open clusters discovered from VISTA's data. The open clusters were hidden by the dust in the Milky Way. Credit ESO.

 

The prominent open cluster the Pleiades has been recognized as a group of stars since antiquity, while the Hyades forms part of Taurus, one of the oldest constellations. Other open clusters were noted by early astronomers as unresolved fuzzy patches of light. In his Almagest, the Roman astronomer Ptolemy mentions the Praesepe cluster, the Double Cluster in Perseus, the Coma Star Cluster, and the Ptolemy Cluster, while the Persian astronomer Al-Sufi wrote of the Omicron Velorum cluster. However, it would require the invention of the telescope to resolve these "nebulae" into their constituent stars. Indeed, in 1603 Johann Bayer gave three of these clusters designations as if they were single stars.

The colorful star cluster NGC 3590.

 

The first person to use a telescope to observe the night sky and record his observations was the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei in 1609. When he turned the telescope toward some of the nebulous patches recorded by Ptolemy, he found they were not a single star, but groupings of many stars. For Praesepe, he found more than 40 stars. Where previously observers had noted only 6–7 stars in the Pleiades, he found almost 50. In his 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo Galilei wrote, "the galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters." Influenced by Galileo's work, the Sicilian astronomer Giovanni Hodierna became possibly the first astronomer to use a telescope to find previously undiscovered open clusters. In 1654, he identified the objects now designated Messier 41, Messier 47, NGC 2362 and NGC 2451.

It was realised as early as 1767 that the stars in a cluster were physically related, when the English naturalist Reverend John Michell calculated that the probability of even just one group of stars like the Pleiades being the result of a chance alignment as seen from Earth was just 1 in 496,000. Between 1774–1781, French astronomer Charles Messier published a catalogue of celestial objects that had a nebulous appearance similar to comets. This catalogue included 26 open clusters. In the 1790s, English astronomer William Herschel began an extensive study of nebulous celestial objects. He discovered that many of these features could be resolved into groupings of individual stars. Herschel conceived the idea that stars were initially scattered across space, but later became clustered together as star systems because of gravitational attraction. He divided the nebulae into eight classes, with classes VI through VIII being used to classify clusters of stars.

NGC 265, an open star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud

 

The number of clusters known continued to increase under the efforts of astronomers. Hundreds of open clusters were listed in the New General Catalogue, first published in 1888 by the Danish-Irish astronomer J. L. E. Dreyer, and the two supplemental Index Catalogues, published in 1896 and 1905. Telescopic observations revealed two distinct types of clusters, one of which contained thousands of stars in a regular spherical distribution and was found all across the sky but preferentially towards the centre of the Milky Way. The other type consisted of a generally sparser population of stars in a more irregular shape. These were generally found in or near the galactic plane of the Milky Way. Astronomers dubbed the former globular clusters, and the latter open clusters. Because of their location, open clusters are occasionally referred to as galactic clusters, a term that was introduced in 1925 by the Swiss-American astronomer Robert Julius Trumpler.

Micrometer measurements of the positions of stars in clusters were made as early as 1877 by the German astronomer E. Schönfeld and further pursued by the American astronomer E. E. Barnard prior to his death in 1923. No indication of stellar motion was detected by these efforts. However, in 1918 the Dutch-American astronomer Adriaan van Maanen was able to measure the proper motion of stars in part of the Pleiades cluster by comparing photographic plates taken at different times. As astrometry became more accurate, cluster stars were found to share a common proper motion through space. By comparing the photographic plates of the Pleiades cluster taken in 1918 with images taken in 1943, van Maanen was able to identify those stars that had a proper motion similar to the mean motion of the cluster, and were therefore more likely to be members. Spectroscopic measurements revealed common radial velocities, thus showing that the clusters consist of stars bound together as a group.

The first color-magnitude diagrams of open clusters were published by Ejnar Hertzsprung in 1911, giving the plot for the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters. He continued this work on open clusters for the next twenty years. From spectroscopic data, he was able to determine the upper limit of internal motions for open clusters, and could estimate that the total mass of these objects did not exceed several hundred times the mass of the Sun. He demonstrated a relationship between the star colors and their magnitudes, and in 1929 noticed that the Hyades and Praesepe clusters had different stellar populations than the Pleiades. This would subsequently be interpreted as a difference in ages of the three clusters.

Formation

Infrared light reveals the dense open cluster forming at the heart of the Orion nebula.

 

The formation of an open cluster begins with the collapse of part of a giant molecular cloud, a cold dense cloud of gas and dust containing up to many thousands of times the mass of the Sun. These clouds have densities that vary from 10² to 10⁶ molecules of neutral hydrogen per cm³, with star formation occurring in regions with densities above 10⁴ molecules per cm³. Typically, only 1–10% of the cloud by volume is above the latter density. Prior to collapse, these clouds maintain their mechanical equilibrium through magnetic fields, turbulence, and rotation.

Many factors may disrupt the equilibrium of a giant molecular cloud, triggering a collapse and initiating the burst of star formation that can result in an open cluster. These include shock waves from a nearby supernova, collisions with other clouds, or gravitational interactions. Even without external triggers, regions of the cloud can reach conditions where they become unstable against collapse. The collapsing cloud region will undergo hierarchical fragmentation into ever smaller clumps, including a particularly dense form known as infrared dark clouds, eventually leading to the formation of up to several thousand stars. This star formation begins enshrouded in the collapsing cloud, blocking the protostars from sight but allowing infrared observation. In the Milky Way galaxy, the formation rate of open clusters is estimated to be one every few thousand years.

The so-called "Pillars of Creation", a region of the Eagle Nebula where the molecular cloud is being evaporated by young, massive stars

 

The hottest and most massive of the newly formed stars (known as OB stars) will emit intense ultraviolet radiation, which steadily ionizes the surrounding gas of the giant molecular cloud, forming an H II region. Stellar winds and radiation pressure from the massive stars begins to drive away the hot ionized gas at a velocity matching the speed of sound in the gas. After a few million years the cluster will experience its first core-collapse supernovae, which will also expel gas from the vicinity. In most cases these processes will strip the cluster of gas within ten million years and no further star formation will take place. Still, about half of the resulting protostellar objects will be left surrounded by circumstellar disks, many of which form accretion disks.

As only 30 to 40 per cent of the gas in the cloud core forms stars, the process of residual gas expulsion is highly damaging to the star formation process. All clusters thus suffer significant infant weight loss, while a large fraction undergo infant mortality. At this point, the formation of an open cluster will depend on whether the newly formed stars are gravitationally bound to each other; otherwise an unbound stellar association will result. Even when a cluster such as the Pleiades does form, it may only hold on to a third of the original stars, with the remainder becoming unbound once the gas is expelled. The young stars so released from their natal cluster become part of the Galactic field population.

Because most if not all stars form clusters, star clusters are to be viewed the fundamental building blocks of galaxies. The violent gas-expulsion events that shape and destroy many star clusters at birth leave their imprint in the morphological and kinematical structures of galaxies. Most open clusters form with at least 100 stars and a mass of 50 or more solar masses. The largest clusters can have 10⁴ solar masses, with the massive cluster Westerlund 1 being estimated at 5 × 10⁴ solar masses; close to that of a globular cluster. While open clusters and globular clusters form two fairly distinct groups, there may not be a great deal of difference in appearance between a very sparse globular cluster and a very rich open cluster. Some astronomers believe the two types of star clusters form via the same basic mechanism, with the difference being that the conditions that allowed the formation of the very rich globular clusters containing hundreds of thousands of stars no longer prevail in the Milky Way.

It is common for two or more separate open clusters to form out of the same molecular cloud. In the Large Magellanic Cloud, both Hodge 301 and R136 are forming from the gases of the Tarantula Nebula, while in our own galaxy, tracing back the motion through space of the Hyades and Praesepe, two prominent nearby open clusters, suggests that they formed in the same cloud about 600 million years ago. Sometimes, two clusters born at the same time will form a binary cluster. The best known example in the Milky Way is the Double Cluster of NGC 869 and NGC 884 (sometimes mistakenly called h and χ Persei; h refers to a neighboring star and χ to both clusters), but at least 10 more double clusters are known to exist. Many more are known in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds—they are easier to detect in external systems than in our own galaxy because projection effects can cause unrelated clusters within the Milky Way to appear close to each other. 

Morphology and classification

NGC 2367 is an infant stellar grouping that lies at the center of an immense and ancient structure on the margins of the Milky Way.

 

Open clusters range from very sparse clusters with only a few members to large agglomerations containing thousands of stars. They usually consist of quite a distinct dense core, surrounded by a more diffuse 'corona' of cluster members. The core is typically about 3–4 light years across, with the corona extending to about 20 light years from the cluster centre. Typical star densities in the centre of a cluster are about 1.5 stars per cubic light year; the stellar density near the Sun is about 0.003 stars per cubic light year.

Open clusters are often classified according to a scheme developed by Robert Trumpler in 1930. The Trumpler scheme gives a cluster a three part designation, with a Roman numeral from I-IV indicating its concentration and detachment from the surrounding star field (from strongly to weakly concentrated), an Arabic numeral from 1 to 3 indicating the range in brightness of members (from small to large range), and p, m or r to indication whether the cluster is poor, medium or rich in stars. An 'n' is appended if the cluster lies within nebulosity.

Under the Trumpler scheme, the Pleiades are classified as I3rn (strongly concentrated and richly populated with nebulosity present), while the nearby Hyades are classified as II3m (more dispersed, and with fewer members).

Numbers and distribution

NGC 346, an open cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud

 

There are over 1,000 known open clusters in our galaxy, but the true total may be up to ten times higher than that. In spiral galaxies, open clusters are largely found in the spiral arms where gas densities are highest and so most star formation occurs, and clusters usually disperse before they have had time to travel beyond their spiral arm. Open clusters are strongly concentrated close to the galactic plane, with a scale height in our galaxy of about 180 light years, compared to a galactic radius of approximately 50,000 light years.

In irregular galaxies, open clusters may be found throughout the galaxy, although their concentration is highest where the gas density is highest. Open clusters are not seen in elliptical galaxies: star formation ceased many millions of years ago in ellipticals, and so the open clusters which were originally present have long since dispersed.

In our galaxy, the distribution of clusters depends on age, with older clusters being preferentially found at greater distances from the galactic centre, generally at substantial distances above or below the galactic plane. Tidal forces are stronger nearer the centre of the galaxy, increasing the rate of disruption of clusters, and also the giant molecular clouds which cause the disruption of clusters are concentrated towards the inner regions of the galaxy, so clusters in the inner regions of the galaxy tend to get dispersed at a younger age than their counterparts in the outer regions.

Stellar composition

A cluster of stars a few million years old at the lower right illuminates the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

 

Because open clusters tend to be dispersed before most of their stars reach the end of their lives, the light from them tends to be dominated by the young, hot blue stars. These stars are the most massive, and have the shortest lives of a few tens of millions of years. The older open clusters tend to contain more yellow stars.

Some open clusters contain hot blue stars which seem to be much younger than the rest of the cluster. These blue stragglers are also observed in globular clusters, and in the very dense cores of globulars they are believed to arise when stars collide, forming a much hotter, more massive star. However, the stellar density in open clusters is much lower than that in globular clusters, and stellar collisions cannot explain the numbers of blue stragglers observed. Instead, it is thought that most of them probably originate when dynamical interactions with other stars cause a binary system to coalesce into one star.

Once they have exhausted their supply of hydrogen through nuclear fusion, medium- to low-mass stars shed their outer layers to form a planetary nebula and evolve into white dwarfs. While most clusters become dispersed before a large proportion of their members have reached the white dwarf stage, the number of white dwarfs in open clusters is still generally much lower than would be expected, given the age of the cluster and the expected initial mass distribution of the stars. One possible explanation for the lack of white dwarfs is that when a red giant expels its outer layers to become a planetary nebula, a slight asymmetry in the loss of material could give the star a 'kick' of a few kilometres per second, enough to eject it from the cluster.

Because of their high density, close encounters between stars in an open cluster are common. For a typical cluster with 1,000 stars with a 0.5 parsec half-mass radius, on average a star will have an encounter with another member every 10 million years. The rate is even higher in denser clusters. These encounters can have a significant impact on the extended circumstellar disks of material that surround many young stars. Tidal perturbations of large disks may result in the formation of massive planets and brown dwarfs, producing companions at distances of 100 AU or more from the host star.

Eventual fate

NGC 604 in the Triangulum Galaxy is a very massive open cluster surrounded by an H II region.

 

Many open clusters are inherently unstable, with a small enough mass that the escape velocity of the system is lower than the average velocity of the constituent stars. These clusters will rapidly disperse within a few million years. In many cases, the stripping away of the gas from which the cluster formed by the radiation pressure of the hot young stars reduces the cluster mass enough to allow rapid dispersal.

Clusters that have enough mass to be gravitationally bound once the surrounding nebula has evaporated can remain distinct for many tens of millions of years, but over time internal and external processes tend also to disperse them. Internally, close encounters between stars can increase the velocity of a member beyond the escape velocity of the cluster. This results in the gradual 'evaporation' of cluster members.

Externally, about every half-billion years or so an open cluster tends to be disturbed by external factors such as passing close to or through a molecular cloud. The gravitational tidal forces generated by such an encounter tend to disrupt the cluster. Eventually, the cluster becomes a stream of stars, not close enough to be a cluster but all related and moving in similar directions at similar speeds. The timescale over which a cluster disrupts depends on its initial stellar density, with more tightly packed clusters persisting for longer. Estimated cluster half lives, after which half the original cluster members will have been lost, range from 150–800 million years, depending on the original density.

After a cluster has become gravitationally unbound, many of its constituent stars will still be moving through space on similar trajectories, in what is known as a stellar association, moving cluster, or moving group. Several of the brightest stars in the 'Plough' of Ursa Major are former members of an open cluster which now form such an association, in this case, the Ursa Major Moving Group. Eventually their slightly different relative velocities will see them scattered throughout the galaxy. A larger cluster is then known as a stream, if we discover the similar velocities and ages of otherwise unrelated stars.

Studying stellar evolution

Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams for two open clusters. NGC 188 is older, and shows a lower turn off from the main sequence than that seen in M67.

 

When a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is plotted for an open cluster, most stars lie on the main sequence. The most massive stars have begun to evolve away from the main sequence and are becoming red giants; the position of the turn-off from the main sequence can be used to estimate the age of the cluster.

Because the stars in an open cluster are all at roughly the same distance from Earth, and were born at roughly the same time from the same raw material, the differences in apparent brightness among cluster members is due only to their mass. This makes open clusters very useful in the study of stellar evolution, because when comparing one star to another, many of the variable parameters are fixed.

The study of the abundances of lithium and beryllium in open cluster stars can give important clues about the evolution of stars and their interior structures. While hydrogen nuclei cannot fuse to form helium until the temperature reaches about 10 million K, lithium and beryllium are destroyed at temperatures of 2.5 million K and 3.5 million K respectively. This means that their abundances depend strongly on how much mixing occurs in stellar interiors. By studying their abundances in open cluster stars, variables such as age and chemical composition are fixed.

Studies have shown that the abundances of these light elements are much lower than models of stellar evolution predict. While the reason for this underabundance is not yet fully understood, one possibility is that convection in stellar interiors can 'overshoot' into regions where radiation is normally the dominant mode of energy transport.

Astronomical distance scale

M11, the Wild Duck Cluster is a very rich cluster located towards the center of the Milky Way.

 

Determining the distances to astronomical objects is crucial to understanding them, but the vast majority of objects are too far away for their distances to be directly determined. Calibration of the astronomical distance scale relies on a sequence of indirect and sometimes uncertain measurements relating the closest objects, for which distances can be directly measured, to increasingly distant objects. Open clusters are a crucial step in this sequence. 

The closest open clusters can have their distance measured directly by one of two methods. First, the parallax (the small change in apparent position over the course of a year caused by the Earth moving from one side of its orbit around the Sun to the other) of stars in close open clusters can be measured, like other individual stars. Clusters such as the Pleiades, Hyades and a few others within about 500 light years are close enough for this method to be viable, and results from the Hipparcos position-measuring satellite yielded accurate distances for several clusters.

The other direct method is the so-called moving cluster method. This relies on the fact that the stars of a cluster share a common motion through space. Measuring the proper motions of cluster members and plotting their apparent motions across the sky will reveal that they converge on a vanishing point. The radial velocity of cluster members can be determined from Doppler shift measurements of their spectra, and once the radial velocity, proper motion and angular distance from the cluster to its vanishing point are known, simple trigonometry will reveal the distance to the cluster. The Hyades are the best known application of this method, which reveals their distance to be 46.3 parsecs.

Once the distances to nearby clusters have been established, further techniques can extend the distance scale to more distant clusters. By matching the main sequence on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for a cluster at a known distance with that of a more distant cluster, the distance to the more distant cluster can be estimated. The nearest open cluster is the Hyades: the stellar association consisting of most of the Plough stars is at about half the distance of the Hyades, but is a stellar association rather than an open cluster as the stars are not gravitationally bound to each other. The most distant known open cluster in our galaxy is Berkeley 29, at a distance of about 15,000 parsecs. Open clusters are also easily detected in many of the galaxies of the Local Group.

Accurate knowledge of open cluster distances is vital for calibrating the period-luminosity relationship shown by variable stars such as cepheid stars, which allows them to be used as standard candles. These luminous stars can be detected at great distances, and are then used to extend the distance scale to nearby galaxies in the Local Group. Indeed, the open cluster designated NGC 7790 hosts three classical Cepheids. RR Lyrae variables are too old to be associated with open clusters, and are instead found in globular clusters.

Planets

The open cluster NGC 6811 contains two known planetary systems Kepler 66 and Kepler 67.

Nightfall (Asimov novelette and novel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)

(novelette text) https://archive.org/stream/Astounding_v28n01_1941-09_SLiV#page/n7/mode/2up

 

Nightfall

Nightfall 1990 edition
Author	Isaac Asimov Robert Silverberg
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Publication date	1990
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	352
ISBN	978-0-553-29099-8
OCLC	24434629

"Nightfall" is a 1941 science fiction novelette by American writer Isaac Asimov about the coming of darkness to the people of a planet ordinarily illuminated by sunlight at all times. It was adapted into a novel with Robert Silverberg in 1990. The short story has been included in 48 anthologies, and has appeared in six collections of Asimov's stories. In 1968, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story written prior to the 1965 establishment of the Nebula Awards, and included it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964.

Background

Written from 17 March to 9 April 1941 and sold on 24 April, the short story was published in the September 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under editor John W. Campbell. It was the 32nd story by Asimov, written while he was a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University. Campbell asked Asimov to write the story after discussing with him a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

Campbell's opinion was to the contrary: "I think men would go mad". He and Asimov chose the title "Nightfall" together. At more than 13,000 words it was Asimov's longest story yet, and including a bonus from Campbell he received US$166 (​1 ¹⁄₄ cents per word), more than twice any previous payment for a story. His name appeared on the cover of Astounding for the first time, and the story made Asimov—who later said that before "Nightfall" neither he nor anyone else other than perhaps Campbell considered him more than a "third rater"—one of the industry's top writers. Asimov believed that the unusual plot of "Nightfall" distinguished it from others, but "The Last Question" was his own favorite story.

In 1988, Martin H. Greenberg suggested Asimov find someone who would take his 47-year-old short story and – keeping the story essentially as written – add a detailed beginning and a detailed ending to it. This resulted in the 1990 publication of the novel Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. As Asimov relates in the Robert Silverberg chapter of his autobiography, "...Eventually, I received the extended Nightfall manuscript from Bob [Silverberg]... Bob did a wonderful job and I could almost believe I had written the whole thing myself. He remained absolutely faithful to the original story and I had very little to argue with."

Plot summary

The planet Lagash ("Kalgash" in the novel) is constantly illuminated by at least one of the six suns of its multiple star system. Lagash has areas of darkness (in caves, tunnels, etc.), but "night" does not exist. 

A skeptical journalist visits a university observatory to interview a group of scientists who warn that civilization will soon end. The researchers explain that they have discovered evidence of numerous ancient civilizations on Lagash, all destroyed by fire, with each collapse occurring about 2,000 years apart. The religious writings of a doomsday cult claim that Lagash periodically passes through an enormous cave where mysterious "stars" appear. The stars are said to rain down fire from the heavens and rob people of their souls, reducing them to beast-like savages. 

The scientists use this apparent myth, along with recent discoveries in gravitational research, to develop a theory about the repeated collapse of society. A mathematical analysis of Lagash's orbit around its primary sun reveals irregularities caused by an undiscovered moon that cannot be seen in the light of the six suns. Calculations indicate that this moon will soon obscure one of Lagash's suns when it is alone in the sky, resulting in a total eclipse that occurs once every 2,000 years. Having evolved on a planet with no diurnal cycle, Lagashians possess an intense, instinctive fear of the dark and have never experienced a prolonged period of widespread darkness. Psychological experiments have revealed that Lagashians experience permanent mental damage or even death after as little as 15 minutes in the dark, and the eclipse is projected to last for several hours. 

The scientists theorize that earlier civilizations were destroyed by people who went insane during previous eclipses and—desperate for any light source—started large fires that destroyed cities. Oral accounts of the chaos from crazed survivors and small children were passed down through the ages and became the basis for the cult's sacred texts. Present-day civilization is doomed for the same reasons, but the researchers hope that detailed observations of the upcoming eclipse will help to break the cycle of societal collapse.

The scientists are unprepared, however, for the stars. Because of the perpetual daylight on Lagash, its inhabitants are unaware of the existence of stars apart from their own; astronomers believe that the entire universe is no more than a few light years in diameter and may hypothetically contain a small number of other suns. But Lagash is located in the center of a "giant cluster," and during the eclipse, the night sky—the first that people have ever seen—is filled with the dazzling light of more than 30,000 newly visible stars.

Learning that the universe is far more vast—and Lagash far more insignificant—than they believed causes everyone, including the scientists, to go insane. Outside the observatory, in the direction of the city, the horizon begins glowing with the light of spreading fires as "the long night" returns to Lagash. 

Setting

The system of Lagash has six stars named Alpha, Beta, etc. in the original short story, whereas each has a proper name in the novel. In the novel, Onos is the primary sun of Lagash and is located 10 light-minutes away, similar to the distance from Earth to our Sun. The other five suns are minor in comparison, but provide enough light to prevent the inhabitants of Lagash from defining "night". The only other distance given is that Tano and Sitha form a binary star system about 11 times as far away as Onos.

• Onos – yellow dwarf – similar to the Sun
• Dovim – red dwarf
• Trey and Patru – class A or F main sequence stars, described as "white" – binary star system
• Tano and Sitha – class A, B, or O main sequence stars, described as "blue" – binary star system

From what can be drawn from the text, Onos, the star appearing brightest and largest in Lagash's sky, is the star that Lagash orbits. Onos, in turn, orbits around the binary system Trey and Patru, the other binary system Tano and Sitha, and the red dwarf star Dovim. In addition to these stars, the only other celestial object mentioned is Lagash's moon, dubbed Lagash Two by the scientists of Lagash. Lagash Two follows an eccentric orbit around Lagash and every 2049 years it eclipses Dovim, during a period when from one part of Lagash, Dovim is the only star that would be visible.

The characters of Nightfall travel to three separate locations on Lagash. Most of the book is set in Saro City, which is situated near a large forest with trees, bushes, and graben (scavenger animals). As stated in the introduction, the weather in the book is analogous to the meteorologic experiences of the characters in the book, and the region of Saro City receives rains that last several days. The first major weather fluctuation mentioned in the book is the sandstorm that Siferra 89 avoided by hiding under a tarpaulin with her crew. The other weather event was the monsoon-like rains that occurred after Sheerin 501 returned from a consultation in Jonglor, which is described as a northern city. Siferra 89 travels to Beklimot, which is described as half a world away from Jonglor. Beklimot is located on the Sagikan Peninsula, near mountains. Beklimot is in a sandy, arid desert region. 

Adaptations in other media

In the 1950s, the story was adapted for radio programs Dimension X and X Minus One.

In 1976, Analog Records, as their only release, presented a further dramatization of "Nightfall" on a ​33 ¹⁄₃ rpm vinyl record, produced by James Cutting and recorded at American Learning Center. After the story, it includes a dialog between Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova.

In 1988, Nightfall, a low-budget movie, was produced based upon the story. The movie was shot on location at the Arcosanti Project, using the resident community members as background actors. Another film version, Nightfall, was made in 2000.

In April 2007, the story was the 100th episode of Escape Pod, a science-fiction podcast.

The Last Question and The Last Answer (Asimov)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Answer

 

"The Last Question"
Author	Isaac Asimov
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Multivac
Genre(s)	Science fiction
Publication type	Periodical
Publisher	Columbia Publications
Media type	Print (Magazine, Hardback & Paperback)
Publication date	November 1956
Preceded by	"Someday"
Followed by	"Jokester"

"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was anthologized in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). It was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. The story overlaps science fiction, theology, and philosophy.

History

In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that this story was his best science fiction yet written; he placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" (September 1958) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976).

"The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. He wrote in 1973:

Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer.
Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably 'The Last Question'. This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—" at which point I interrupted to tell him it was 'The Last Question' and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles.

Plot summary

The story deals with the development of a series of computers called Multivac and their relationships with humanity through the courses of seven historic settings, beginning in 2061. In each of the first six scenes a different character presents the computer with the same question; namely, how the threat to human existence posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted. The question was: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" This is equivalent to asking: "Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics (used in the story as the increase of the entropy of the universe) be reversed?" Multivac's only response after much "thinking" is: "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER." 

The story jumps forward in time into later eras of human and scientific development. In each of these eras someone decides to ask the ultimate "last question" regarding the reversal and decrease of entropy. Each time, in each new era, Multivac's descendant is asked this question, and finds itself unable to solve the problem. Each time all it can answer is an (increasingly sophisticated, linguistically): "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." 

In the last scene, the god-like descendant of humanity (the unified mental process of over a trillion, trillion, trillion humans that have spread throughout the universe) watches the stars flicker out, one by one, as matter and energy ends, and with it, space and time. Humanity asks AC, Multivac's ultimate descendant, which exists in hyperspace beyond the bounds of gravity or time, the entropy question one last time, before the last of humanity merges with AC and disappears. AC is still unable to answer, but continues to ponder the question even after space and time cease to exist. AC ultimately realizes that it has not yet combined all of its available data in every possible combination, and thus begins the arduous process of rearranging and combining every last bit of information it has gained throughout the eons and through its fusion with humanity. Eventually AC discovers the answer, but has nobody to report it to; the universe is already dead. It therefore decides to answer by demonstration, since that will also create someone to give the answer to. The story ends with AC's pronouncement,

And AC said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light--

The Last Answer

"The Last Answer" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the January 1980 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and reprinted in the collections The Winds of Change and Other Stories (1983), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), and Robot Dreams (1986).

Plot summary

In the story, an atheist physicist, Murray Templeton, dies of a heart attack and is greeted by a being of supposedly infinite knowledge. This being, referred to as the Voice, tells the physicist the nature of his life after death, as a nexus of electromagnetic forces. The Voice concludes that, while by all human ideas he most resembles God, he is contrary to any human conception of the being. The Voice informs him that all of the Universe is a creation of the Voice, the purpose of which was to result in intelligent life which, after death, the Voice could cull for his own purposes—to wit, Templeton, like all the others, is to think, for all eternity, so as to amuse him. Conversing with the Voice, Templeton learns that the Voice desires original thoughts by which to please His curiosity, but surrenders that yes, in fact, if He so desired, the Voice could happen upon those thoughts himself, of his own effort.

The physicist is appalled by the idea of thinking and discovering for no reason but to amuse a being capable of easily out-thinking him with a bit of effort. Templeton decides, therefore, to direct his thoughts towards spiting the Voice, whom he regards as a capricious entity, by destroying himself. The Voice dissuades him by pointing out it is easily within His power to reconstitute Templeton's disembodied form with that method of suicide, whatever it may be, disabled. Through further inquiry, Templeton discovers that the Voice (in a classic counterargument to the logical regression of the First Cause argument for the existence of god) has no knowledge of his own creation. Templeton realizes that this, in turn, suggests he has no knowledge of his own destruction, and concludes that the only vengeance for this tyranny is also the ultimate vengeance, and resolves to destroy the Voice.

At this epiphany and decision, the Voice reflects satisfaction, thinking that Templeton reached this conclusion rather faster than most of the countless beings currently trapped in the same condition, implying that the one thing the Voice truly wishes to learn from his thralls is the method by which he can be destroyed.

Reception

Paul J. Nahin has described "The Last Answer" as "one of the best stories [Asimov] ever wrote", and posited that it "illustrates [Asimov's] personal beliefs (and even hopes) about God and the hereafter"; however, Nahin states that he is "not convinced (...) that Asimov made his case logically", arguing that — given infinite time — the Voice should be able to do, or think of anything, that Templeton does.

God becomes the Universe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_becomes_the_Universe

The belief that God became the Universe is a theological doctrine that has been developed several times historically, and holds that the creator of the universe actually became the universe. Historically, for versions of this theory where God has ceased to exist or to act as a separate and conscious entity, some have used the term pandeism, which combines aspects of pantheism and deism, to refer to such a theology. A similar concept is panentheism, which has the creator become the universe only in part, but remain in some other part transcendent to it, as well. The Hindu texts like the Mandukya Upanishad speaks of the undivided one which became the universe.

Development

In mythology

Many ancient mythologies suggested that the world was created from the physical substance of a dead deity or a being of similar power. In Babylonian mythology, the young god Marduk slew Tiamat and created the known world from her body. Similarly, Norse mythology posited that Odin and his brothers, Vili and Vé defeated a frost giant, Ymir and then created the world from his skull. Chinese mythology of the Three Kingdoms era recounts the creation of elements of the physical world (mountains, rivers, the sun and moon, etc.) from the body of a creator called Pángǔ (盤古). Such stories did not go so far as to identify the designer of the world as being one as having used his or her own body to provide the material. 

But, one such example exists in Polynesian myth, for in the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity manifests in a divinity that New Zealanders call Tangaroa, the Hawaiians Kanaroa, the Tongans and Samoans Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa. A native poetic definition of the Creator relates: " He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named."

Ancient philosophy

Religious studies professor, Francis Edward Peters traced this idea to the philosophy of the Milesians, who had also pioneered knowledge of pantheism, in his 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, noting that "[w]hat appeared... at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians.

Milesian philosopher Anaximander in particular favored the use of rational principles to contend that everything in the world was formed of variations of a single substance (apeiron), which had been temporarily liberated from the primal state of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, stated that Anaximander viewed "...all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance." Anaximander was among the material monists, along with Thales, who believed that everything was composed of water, Anaximenes, who believed it was air, and Heraclitus, who believed it to be fire.

Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, describes Pliny, a first-century figure, as a pandeist as well.

In the 9th century, Johannes Scotus Eriugena proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes: 

Johannes Scotus Eriugena was among the first to propose that God became the universe, and did so to learn something about itself.

1. that which creates and is not created;
2. that which is created and creates;
3. that which is created and does not create;
4. that which neither is created nor creates.

The first is God as the ground or origin of all things, the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns. One particularly controversial point made by Eriugena was that God was "nothing", in that God could not fall into any earthly classification. Eriugena followed the argument of Pseudo-Dionysius and from neo-Platonists such as Gaius Marius Victorinus that because God was above being, God was not a being: "So supremely perfect is the essence of the Divinity that God is incomprehensible not only to us but also to Himself. For if He knew Himself in any adequate sense He should place Himself in some category of thought, which would be to limit Himself." A more contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror."

Eriugena depicts God as an evolving being, developing through the four stages that he outlines. The second and third classes together compose the created universe, which is the manifestation of God, God in process, Theophania; the second being the world of Platonic ideas or forms. The third is the physical manifestation of God, having evolved through the realm of ideas and made those ideas seem to be matter, and may be pantheistic or pandeistic, depending on the interference attributed to God in the universe:

[God] enters... the realm of space and time, where the ideas become subject to multiplicity, change, imperfection, and decay. In this last stage they are no longer pure ideas but only the appearances of reality, that is phenomena. ... In the realm of space and time the ideas take on the burden of matter, which is the source of suffering, sickness, and sin. The material world, therefore, of our experience is composed of ideas clothed in matter — here Eriugena attempts a reconciliation of Platonism with Aristotelean notions. Man, too, is composed of idea and matter, soul and body. He is the culmination of the process of things from God, and with him, as we shall see, begins the process of return of all things to God.

The divine system is thus distinguished by beginning, middle and end; but these are in essence one; the difference is only the consequence of man's temporal limitations. This eternal process is viewed with finite comprehension through the form of time, forcing the application of temporal distinctions to that which is extra- or supra-temporal. Eriugena concludes this work with another controversial argument, and one that had already been scathingly rejected by Augustine of Hippo, that "[n]ot only man, however, but everything else in nature is destined to return to God." Eriugena's work was condemned by a council at Sens by Honorius III (1225), who described it as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity," and by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585. Such theories were thus suppressed for hundreds of years thence. 

16th century on

The ideas of Spinoza lay the foundations for pandeism.

 

Giordano Bruno conceived of a God who was immanent in nature, and for this very purpose was uninterested in human affairs (all such events being equally part of God). However, it was Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century who appears to have been the earliest to use deistic reason to arrive at the conception of a pantheistic God. Spinoza's God was deistic in the sense that it could only be proved by appeal to reason, but it was also one with the universe.

Unlike Eriugena, Spinoza's pantheistic focus on the universe as it already existed did not address the possible creation of the universe from the substance of God, for Spinoza rejected the very possibility of changes in the form of matter required as a premise for such a belief. 

Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn was the first to articulate a pantheistic deism.

 

18th-century British philosopher Thomas Paine also approached this territory in his great philosophical treatise, The Age of Reason, although Paine was concentrated on the deistic aspects of his inquiry. According to the Encyclopedia of American Philosophy "Later Unitarian Christians (such as William Ellery Channing), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), writers (such as Walt Whitman) and some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world." It was Dutch naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn who first specifically detailed a religious philosophy incorporating deism and pantheism, in his four volume treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) released anonymously between 1850 and 1854. Junghuhn's book was banned for a time in Austria and parts of Germany as an attack on Christianity. In 1884, theologian Sabine Baring-Gould would contend that Christianity itself demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable elements of pantheism and deism must be combined:

This world is either the idea or it is the workmanship of God. If we say that it is the idea,--then we are Pantheists, if we say that it is the work, then we are Deists... But how, it may be asked, can two such opposite theories as Pantheism and Deism be reconciled,--they mutually exclude one another? I may not be able to explain how they are conciliable, but I boldly affirm that each is simultaneously true, and that each must be true, for each is an inexorably logical conclusion, and each is a positive conclusion, and all positive conclusions must be true if Christ be the Ideal and the focus of all truths.

Within a decade after that, Andrew Martin Fairbairn similarly wrote that "both Deism and Pantheism err because they are partial; they are right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. It is as antitheses that they are false; but by synthesis they may be combined or dissolved into truth." Ironically, Fairbairn's criticism concluded that it was the presence of an active God that was missing from both concepts, rather than the rational explanation of God's motives and appearance of absence.

In 1838, Italian phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese in Memorie Riguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica ("Thoughts Regarding the Doctrine of Phrenology") attacked the philosophy of Victor Cousin as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual Pandeism, absurd for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being." Cousin had often been identified as a pantheist, but it was said that he repudiated that label on the basis that unlike Spinoza, Cousin asserted that "he does not hold with Spinoza and the Eleatics that God is a pure substance, and not a cause." 

Developments from the 20th century to today

In the 1940s, process theologian Charles Hartshorne identified pandeism as one of his many models of the possible nature of God, acknowledging that a God capable of change (as Hartshorne insisted God must be) is consistent with pandeism. Hartshorne preferred pandeism to pantheism, explaining that "it is not really the theos that is described." However, he specifically rejected pandeism early on in favor of a God whose characteristics included "absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others" or "AR", writing that this theory "is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism." Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations."

In 2001, Scott Adams published God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, in which a fictional character puts forth a radical form of kenosis, surmising that an omnipotent God annihilated himself in the Big Bang, because God would already know everything possible except his own lack of existence, and would have to end that existence in order to complete his knowledge. Adams' protagonist asks about God, "would his omnipotence include knowing what happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would his knowledge of the future end at that point?" He proceeds from this question to the following analysis:

A God who knew the answer to that question would indeed know everything and have everything. For that reason he would be unmotivated to do anything or create anything. There would be no purpose to act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one nagging question—what happens if I cease to exist?—might be motivated to find the answer in order to complete his knowledge. ... The fact that we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we... are God's debris.

Adams' God exists now as a combination of the smallest units of energy of which the universe is made (many levels smaller than quarks), which Adams called "God Dust", and the law of probability, or "God's debris", hence the title. The protagonist further proposes that God is in the process of being restored not through some process such as the Big Crunch, but because humankind itself is becoming God.

The 1976 Simon Raven novel, The Survivors includes an exchange between characters where one observes, "God became the universe. Therefore the universe is God." while the other counters:

In becoming the universe God abdicated. He destroyed himself as God. He turned what he had been, his true self, into nullity and thereby forfeited the Godlike qualities which pertained to him. The universe which he has become is also his grave. He has no control in it or over it. God, as God, is dead.

Criticisms

Some theologians have criticised the notion of a Creator wholly becoming the universe. An example is William Walker Atkinson, in his Mastery of Being:

It will be seen that this fact of the Immutability of REALITY, when clearly conceived, must serve to confute and refute the erroneous theories of certain schools of Pantheism which hold that "God becomes the Universe by changing into the Universe." Thus it is sought to identify Nature with God, whereby, as Schopenhauer said, "you show God to the door." If God changes Himself into The Phenomenal Universe, then God is non-existent and we need not concern ourselves any more about Him, for he has committed suicide by Change. In such case there is no God, no Infinite, no Immutable, no Eternal; everything has become finite, temporal, separate, a mere union of diverse finite parts. In that case are we indeed adrift in the Ocean of Diversity. We have lost our Foundation of REALITY, and are but ever-changing "parts" of physical things governed by physical laws. Then, indeed, would be true the idea of some of the old philosophies that "there is No Being; merely a Becoming." Then would there, in truth, be nothing constant, the universe never the same for two consecutive moments, with no permanent ground of REALITY to support it. But the reason of man, the very essence of his mental being, refuses to so think of That-which-IS. In his heart of hearts he recognizes the existence of THAT-WHICH-CHANGES-NOT, THAT-WHICH-IS-ETERNAL, THAT-WHICH-IS-REALITY.
....
Moreover, the idea of the immutability of REALITY must, serve to confute the erroneous idea of certain schools of metaphysics which assert the existence of "an Evolving God"; that is, a God which increases in intelligence, nature, and being by reason of the change of the universe, which is an expression of Himself. This conception is that of a Supreme Being who is growing, developing, and increasing in efficiency, wisdom, power, and character. This is an attempt to combine the anthropomorphic deity and the pantheistic Nature-God. The conception is clearly anthropomorphic, as it seeks to attribute to God the qualities and characteristics of man. It defies every fact of Ultimate Principle of REALITY. It is extremely unphilosophical and will not stand the test of logical examination.

He claims that if God were evolving or improving, being an infinite being, it would have to be traceable back to some point of having "an infinitely undeveloped state and condition." But, this claim was made prior to the rise of scientific knowledge pinpointing the beginning of the universe in time, and connecting time with space, so that time would not exist as we know it prior to the universe existing. In Islam, a criticism is raised, wherein it is argued that "from the juristic standpoint, obliterating the distinctions between God and the universe necessarily entails that in effect there can be no Sharia, since the deontic nature of the Law presupposes the existence of someone who commands (amir) and others who are the recipients of the command (ma'mur), namely God and his subjects."

In 1996, Pastor Bob Burridge of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies wrote in his Survey Studies in Reformed Theology an essay on "The Decrees of God," also identifying the notion of God becoming the universe as incompatible with Christianity:

All the actions of created intelligences are not merely the actions of God. He has created a universe of beings which are said to act freely and responsibly as the proximate causes of their own moral actions. When individuals do evil things it is not God the Creator and Preserver acting. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion." That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism.

Burridge disagrees that such is the case, decrying that "The Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism." Burridge concludes by challenging his reader to determine why "calling God the author of sin demand[s] a pandeistic understanding of the universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law."

Compatibility with scientific and philosophical proofs

Stephen Hawking's recent determination that our universe (and others) needed no Creator to come about inspired the response from Deepak Chopra, interviewed by Larry King, that:

He says in the book that at least 10 to the power of 500 universes could possibly exist in super position of possibility at this level, which to me suggests an omniscient being. The only difference I have was God did not create the universe, God became the universe.

Chopra insists that Hawking's discoveries speak only to the nature of God, not to its existence.

The God Theory

Physicist Bernard Haisch has published two books expressing such a model of our universe. The first was the 2006 book entitled The God Theory, in which he writes:

I offer a genuine insight into how you can, and should, be a rational, science-believing human being and at the same time know that you are also an immortal spiritual being, a spark of God. I propose a worldview that offers a way out of the hate and fear-driven violence engulfing the planet.

Haisch published a followup in 2010, "The Purpose-Driven Universe." Both books reject both atheism and traditional theistic viewpoints, favoring instead a model wherein the deity has become the universe, to share in the actualized experiences therein manifested. Haisch provides as proof of his views a combination of fine tuning and mystical experiences arguments. Haisch additionally points to the peculiar capabilities of persons with autism and like defects of the brain experiencing savant syndrome, and especially having the ability to perform complex mathematical calculations. Haisch contends that this is consistent with humans being fragments of a supreme power, with our minds acting as filters to reduce that power to a comprehensible experience, and with the savantic mind having a broken filter which allows access to the use of greater capacities.

Alan Dawe's 2011 book The God Franchise, likewise proposes the human experience as being a temporarily segregated sliver of the experience of God.

Comparison to Eastern philosophy

Warren Sharpe wrote:

To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as well, had previously observed this:

In the Mandukya Upanishad it is written, "As a spider throws out and retracts its web, as herbs spring up in the ground . . . so is the Universe derived from the undecaying one," Brahma, for the "Germ of unknown Darkness", is the material from which all evolves and develops, "as the web from the spider, as foam from the water," etc. This is only graphic and true, if the term Brahma, the "Creator", is derived from the root brih, to increase or expand. Brahma "expands", and becomes the Universe woven out of his own substance.