The Universe Has Been Sending Us Messages for Countless Years. Most of Them Haven’t Arrived Yet.
By Futurist Thomas Frey
A Message Sent Before Earth Existed
On September 14, 2015, a pair of detectors in Louisiana and Washington State registered a disturbance so small it measured a fraction of the width of a proton. The instruments — two L-shaped tunnels each four kilometers long, built at a cost of over a billion dollars and decades of scientific labor — had detected a ripple in the fabric of spacetime itself. The signal had traveled 1.3 billion light-years to reach us. It was generated by two black holes, each roughly thirty times the mass of the sun, spiraling into each other and merging in a collision of incomprehensible violence. That event happened when the most complex life on Earth was a single-celled organism drifting in a shallow sea. The signal from that collision spent more than a billion years crossing the universe before it passed through the Louisiana pine forests and registered on a human-built instrument for the first time in history.
We called it GW150914. We called it a discovery. But it wasn’t a discovery in the conventional sense. The event had already happened. The signal was already in transit. What changed on that September morning was not the universe — it was us. We finally built an instrument sensitive enough to receive what had been traveling toward us for longer than multicellular life has existed on this planet.
That is the foundational insight of this series, stated in its most cosmic form: the future is not something that happens to us. It is something already traveling toward us. Our relationship to it is determined entirely by the quality of our instruments and the sophistication of our ability to read what those instruments receive.
Continue reading… “The Future Is Already in Motion – Part 1: Signals From the Deep”