Cosmic Inflation, Sex and Cheerios®
Or, How To Avoid Living a Meager Life and Dying Alone
Cosmic inflation is the term for our universe expanding. The universe, right now, is expanding at every point. The actual distance between ANY two points is continuously getting bigger everywhere all the time.
How? Why? WTF? Yes, all very valid and common reactions to this fact. The simplest analogy to use is raisin bread. When raisin bread is baking, all of the raisins are moving away from each other because the entire loaf is expanding.
And, like with raisin bread, the raisins that are near each other don’t move away as quickly as the raisins that started further away. Again, this is because the entire loaf is expanding.
Ok, fine. That’s f’ed up, but when do we get to the sexy stuff? Patience. We’ll get there in a few more paragraphs.
Thank you for not skipping forward. Our best estimates for the current rate of expansion is about 7% per billion years. That’s why you don’t have to chase your Cheerios® across the galaxy. Just after the big bang, the rate of cosmic inflation was crazy high, about 10²⁸% in 1/10³³ seconds. Yes, a truly incomprehensible expansion in an unimaginably short time. Being young is always so mind bending.
Ok, great. So what? Why should we care? Well, it turns out that we humans suffer from a kind of cosmic inflation. We are all drifting away from each other moment by moment. No, not in the physical sense, in the psychological sense.
You see, when we first meet someone, they are a mystery to us. Sure, we might know a few things through a friend, or through work, or a Tinder profile. But, we know that we don’t know them that well. We’re holding them more carefully because we’re discovering who they are.
It’s that sense of discovery, being open to surprises, being curious, playful and nonjudgmental. That’s what makes us attentive and open-minded.
Now are you getting it? Keeping that same sense of adventure, of playful discovery and suspension of judgment. That’s what keeps sex (and relationships) fresh and intoxicating.
When we start walling ourselves off with “knowing” people. We are sealing ourselves in our self-constructed tomb.
“Knowing is the death of discovery.” — Improv Cowboy
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