Informant38

notes, cosmology-
At any given point on an infinite line the distance to either end is the same, because it's infinite. So it doesn't matter where on the line you are, it's the same in either direction, equal, measureless. This applies to planar surfaces and solids as well, but with implications for human perspective that are more difficult to grasp than the abstraction of a line that goes on forever. And it works on a spiritual level, as far as power and size are concerned, in a way that's unexpected but feels intuitively right. But that's for later.
The two end points, or places, or infinite markers in the solid landscape, are hard to picture for most of us - an infinite space is, at least for me, this one, the space around me, only bigger. But that's not an accurate description of the solid version of that point-on-an-infinite-line idea, with two equally infinite lines leading away from it in either direction. The terminology involves something like infinite orders of planar magnitude, both greater and smaller.
Trying to make that fit the idea of an infinitely smaller landscape especially short-circuits something in my head. But it's important, these open-ended border-crossings are attributes of where we are as much as the stellar vastness and the sub-atomic wilderness are.
It's suspicious, the way we're raised to think of space as dark and empty, and then also, more recently the stop-gap "discoveries" of end-points in the interior world, the small should-be infinite that we're told just stops abruptly down there somewhere, where matter and time and thought all melt together - or something like that.
At the other reach - the macro, the large space outside us - we're not only given the tacit idea that it's empty and cold and basically dark, but again, out there at some bizarre semi-abstract place-moment, time and matter and thought all melt together; while the Hubble and its cohort bring us images of grandeur that surely speak of life, of something living that's glorious beyond our telling made up of stars in profusion, of which our single sun is a tiny constituent, and that tiny sun the source of all energy here on earth.
The schema at present is:
infinite nothing < us < earth-life < sun < galaxies, nebulae etc < infinite nothing.
What I want to replace it with is:
infinite something < us < earth-life < sun < galaxies, nebulae etc < infinite something.
The universe is not cold, dark, and empty, is the idea. Yet we're taught that it is by tacit assumption - that's common knowledge, outside the disciplines of astronomy and astrophysics anyway. And we're taught that we're small and insignificant in the midst of that cold dark emptiness.
We're also taught at the same time that down inside us is a place where the stuff we're made of is reduced to nothing at all, cold dead matter with absurd names and properties, past which is nothing but emptiness, pretty much the same as what we're supposed to believe is at the limits of the exterior "out there". Not only are we insignificant in the face of the universe, the stuff we're made of is so insignificant it doesn't really exist.
This results, without it ever being overtly stated, in a vise of assumed futility - meaninglessness, dark emptiness at both ends of the infinite volume we inhabit. That assumption isolates us as individuals from everything but ourselves, increasing our susceptibility to the temptations of selfishness. And that's why I think it was accomplished.
Another, corollary assumption, is that our collective knowledge, the growth of our racial/cultural comprehension, has been a steady progression from another kind of darkness, unknowing ignorance, toward the present light of knowledge.
I don't believe that, not as a general picture - I think it's inaccurate, and part of the same ruse. It's the creation of a false darkness; there are ways of knowing things as fundamental as the infinite nature of the universe that don't require the ability to rationally articulate things like a concept of infinity. People can know things they can't put into words; words are secondary to comprehension. I'm not suggesting that all our primitive ancestors knew more about the universe than we do - just that some of them at least were less confused about the fullness of reality than most of us are, now.
Again we have the assumption of darkness - here, the ignorant darkness of our ancestors being replaced with the illumination of our own superior intellectual reach. And again I believe it's a false assumption, an intentionally perpetrated illusion. Because there's an inferiority built into that assumption of darkness, the insignificance of being someone who doesn't know
The darkness at the beginning of our history, the darkness at the end of the universe, the darkness at the center of the mystery of our physical being. All of that combines to drive us into ourselves - and it's frightening, it's the opposite of comforting.
Fear is a kind of reactive, autonomic selfishness, there's nothing altruistic about it; altruism has to overcome fear and selfishness to succeed. Fear separates us, and a cold dark emptiness on the scale presented by these assumptions is very frightening.
We see in the current political climate how fear divides people and makes them helpless, prey to manipulation. Creatures repeat what works. Making people afraid, and keeping them afraid, can be a wonderfully successful strategy, especially when your goals have nothing to do with human things.