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163 Moral Problem #9: a cosmic divertissement 0 You are the Creator. It is 1.82 seconds after the Big Bang and everything is going swimmingly. The other universe that could have happened at 10-1 seconds didn’t, in fact, happen (as You knew it wouldn’t) and You are in the first microseconds of being distributed through time and space. Electrons and positrons are zipping about annihilating one another. Every few minutes, just as a divertissement, You double in size. In a little while it’ll be every million years. At the tips of Your fingers and toes the first galaxies are beginning to form, and You are already looking forward to the details: stars, planets, life. It’s twelve billion years away but what the heck, You’re in no hurry. You’ve been through this before—expansion and contraction, bang and crunch—only this time, on some out-of-the-way planet, how about a race of ethical beings, someone to keep You company in the interstellar dark, not like the last universe with its clockwork animalism, its amoral squids—pah! all that instinct! You lean back and stretch Your toes, sip Your cosmic daiquiri . You can hardly wait. This is going to be a good one. This is going to be fun. ...

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