What Happened Before the Big Bang? 394
The Bad Astronomer writes to tell us that a recent advance in Loop Quantum Gravity theory appears to allow the mathematics of cosmology to be extended to the time before the Universe underwent the Big Bang. Bad Astronomer also attempts to simplify things a bit with his own explanation of the new discovery.
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, what do you think, the universe is a whore?
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Considering God had yet to create humans, this was a particularly difficult paper to write.
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I can't believe that. If God was a student, he wouldn't have taken six days to create the world and then rested on the seventh, he'd have spent six days partying, half the seventh hung over and stayed up all night to get it finished.
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So God is in grad school now? And He picked a research project that took ten billion years to start generating really interesting results? Man, I thought *my* thesis was taking too long...
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The Paper & Article (Score:5, Informative)
As Bad Astronomer noted, this isn't the first time something like this has been proposed. I think the first time I read about it was in a book by George Gamov [wikipedia.org] and then subsequent work/proposed theories done by Roger Penrose [wikipedia.org] & the well known Stephen Hawking.
Considering past results of my comments [slashdot.org] on matters I have little formal education on, I'll won't bother to remark on this work.
There is no before the Big Bang. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.
While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would be large than the current Universe at that size.
In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
Simon
Re:There is no before the Big Bang. (Score:5, Informative)
While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would be large than the current Universe at that size.
Time and length can be measured simultaneously without problem. Position, momentum and time, energy are the pairs that are subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and cannot be measured simultaneously to arbitrary accuracy.
In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.
But with high energy and momentum density, I think time and space make sense. And that's assuming that the Big Bang is a singularity with initial time origin.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not measurement that's the problem. It's existance. A quantum object does not have a well-defined position/momentum.
More information, please? This assertion is the fundamental problem I've always had with quantum theory, and every time I ask someone who thinks they know what they're taking about to explain it, they wave their hands around a bit, say "Heisenberg" a few times, then claim it's lunchtime and they really must go. The uncertainty principle as I've always had it explained to me (for instance, in my university physics course) is that observation of (ie. interaction with) a particle affects that particle in a wa
Re:There is no before the Big Bang. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not a physicist, I'm an EE. I took one semiconductors class in college that touched a bit on this, and we didn't go very deep, so take this with a grain of salt. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate very much if someone who knows more than I do can correct me. No experiment can ever, no matter how perfect, no matter how much technology improves, measure position and momentum so that the uncertainty on the measurement of momentum times the uncertainty on the measurement of position is less than the planck constant divided by 4 pi. This isn't due to the effect the observation has on the particle. Even if the observation has absolutely no effect on the particle, that's the best you can do. For example, if you two particles are entangled, and you make your measurement on one of them, your observation did not physically interact with the second particle. Nevertheless you still won't be able to measure the position of one of the entangled particles and then measure the momentum of the other and end up with values to a more precise degree than the one described in the equation above.
There are multiple interpretations for what is actually happening that prevents us from getting more precise measurements. Some of these interpretations assume that the reason we can't measure them is because the quantum particle honestly does not have its position and momentum well defined below that point. That seems to be the more accepted interpretation these days, although that wasn't always the case, which is why you were taught that the observer effect is responsible for the measurement uncertainty. Whatever is really going on however, we are sure that the uncertainty in measuring position and momentum is completely independent from the observer effect. Even if your experiment does not disrupt the particle, and even if your measurement device for position and your measurement device for momentum each are somehow individually more precise to values far below planck constant / 4 pi, you still won't be able to make a measurement on a particle without affecting the other measurement.
Einstein and Bohr had some some serious disagreements over the issue. Einstein believed as you do that you should be able to make those measurements given a proper experiment. Bohr held the opposite view. The Boh-Einstein Debates [wikipedia.org] are extremely interesting reading on the subject, and I recommend you take a look. These were two brilliant scientists trying to stump one another, so the arguments on each side were great.
Re:There is no before the Big Bang. (Score:5, Informative)
There are are lots of different ways to understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle physically -- most of them not very satisfying without acclimating to the lingo and concepts of quantum theory. Nevertheless, I think one can gain an intellectual foothold into the idea, before even digging into the quantum theory, by realizing that ALL wave behavior (sound, water, radio, light, etc.) obeys something akin to a HUP. If you can get the basic idea down for sound or water waves, then you can start to build a conceptual bridge to matter waves. Since you are an EE, the conceptual underpinnings will probably look quite familiar.
Lots of mathematical qualifications aside, basically ALL waveforms can be represented by a sum of harmonic waves (pure sine and cosine functions). A single pure sine or cosine has a well defined frequency, wavelength, and wave velocity. However, in contrast, an arbitrary waveform does NOT have a single wavelength or frequency -- it has many, given by the distribution of sines and cosines that were used to construct it. A handy variable to use is called the wavenumber, which is basically the number of cycles per meter (proportional to 1/wavelength) of a harmonic wave. An interesting thing to do is plot a particular waveform, say a snapshot of a water wave shaped like a lump at a moment in time, and then also plot the distribution of wavenumbers from all the sines and cosines making up that lump. They are two representations of the same object. One looks like a water lump in space, and the other will look like another lump telling you the distribution of sines and cosines in "wavenumber space." What you find is that if your water lump in space is narrow, then it takes many sines and cosines of many wavenumbers to make that happen. If the water lump is very spread out, you only need a narrow range of wavenumbers of harmonic waves to make this happen. Many engineers are very familiar with this bandwidth effect in the context of transmission theory, but the same will be true for ANY waveform. It is a byproduct of wave theory: the width of the spatial distribution of an arbitrary wave is inversely related to the width of its wavenumber distribution. If you allow the wave to change in time, you get a similar inverse relation for the distribution of the wave in time and the distribution of frequencies in the wave. You are probably familiar with all that in the context of Fourier analysis etc. One says that wavenumber and position are "complimentary" (so are frequency and time).
The big leap in quantum mechanics is that the momentum of a particle is inversely related to the wavelength of some harmonic wave "associated with" the particle. The larger the momentum, the shorter the wavelength of the matter wave and vice versa. That is, momentum and position are complimentary variables. Keep in mind, the wave isn't the particle itself but rather tells you where the particle is likely to be. Once you accept the rather odd idea that momentum and wavelength are inversely related, *wave theory alone* tells you that the more likely a particle is to be at a particular location in space, the wider its distribution of wavenumbers is -- and thus the wider range of momenta it can have. Similarly, if you have a very narrow range of wavenumbers, the wider the spatial extent of the matter wave -- thus for a well defined momentum the particle has a wider range of spatial positions available to it. This is basically the heart of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Since this matter wave tells you about probabilities, you need to prepare an ensemble of identical objects and do a statistical analysis of their positions and momenta to see the effect of the HUP. For example, lets say you prepare 100 particles each with a well defined position. Now you perform a position measurement followed by a momentum measurement for each particle. Taking your raw data, you made a plot of the number
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Re:There is no before the Big Bang. (Score:5, Interesting)
As humans, we have a hard time envisioning "eternity," but we have an equally hard time grappling with the idea that existence itself would have a finite beginning or end. Both of these concepts exist too far out of our experience to really grasp. I guess this is why people find so much comfort in faith in a divine being that both exists eternally and defines the beginning and end of existence as we know it.
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That depends what you view of time is. If you view time as merely a sequence of ordered events (which is how philosophers tend to view it), then there is no reason there can't be anything before the Big Bang. If you view time as part of space-time created at the Big Bang (as physicists tend to) then you can't have before the
Re:There is no before the Big Bang. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that it's a beautiful concept, but it might not be right. It's testable, and they're going to test it. If you want call your arguments scientific, you have to accept that in science, the most beautiful explanation is not always the correct one. I think that both geocentrism and flat-earth theory are beautiful in a kind of fairy tale aesthetic, but we had to let them go because they were wrong. If they run the experiments and conclude that time extended prior to the big bang, so be it.
Anyway, isn't it more appealing that time is cyclical rather than terminal? Consider the alternative: all the rich vibrancy of the universe slowly dying of metastasized entropy until it is an ever-expanding fossil of inert dust. How much nicer that there may be a cure for entropy, even if it is one that we will not survive!
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IMHO
Even though observations right now, suggest our Universe is "open" because things are accelerating outwards at an increasing rate, I think I have a simple explanation for that and what happened BEFORE the big bang.
Stars have an upwards limit to mass. Too much and you can get blowback that creates a black hole as gravity creates the same relativistic accelerations that motion can. So the speed of l
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I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole?
That analogy was put forth by Hawking in A Brief History of Time. People use it as an example of how a singularity is a "boundary" to spacetime: it's not smoothly connected to any prior spacetime.
However, most of those people also miss the fact that Hawking meant it quite literally. He wasn't actually speaking of the usual Big Bang singularity. Rather, he was speaking of his No-Boundary Proposal in the (now disfavored) Euclidean quantum gravity theory. In the NBP, the Big Bang singularity in 3+1 dimen
Re:North of the North pole (Score:5, Insightful)
you can not go north of the North Pole. Once you get to the north pole everything is quite literally south of you, no matter which way you go. If you leave the sphere in question(ie head into space) you no longer have a compass as the magentic field that the north pole is based on no longer exerts it's force on you.
What you think Astral(space) Navagation uses compasses for heading and bearing? That we can use the sun's magentic field t find our way across this planetary system?
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if you "walk along the pole" your still heading south.
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Only in the context of magnetic navigation does your comment relate to the magnetic north pole.
The magnetic pole is not fixed and is based upon the iron core of our planet. It has a deviation [noaa.gov] and changes over time and location.
There is the political north pole which cartography is based upon. This is where we get nautical measurements from. It is 5400 nautical miles from the North Pole to the equator.
90 degree right angle from pole to equator; 60 minutes each degree, 1 nautical m
Well, the last thing said before was... (Score:5, Funny)
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Who's going to notify the coroner that the our Diety is lying crumpled in a ditch along the Celestial Highway?
There was the sound of God asking for my zippo (Score:2, Funny)
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Other things are more pressing for me right now. (Score:2)
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Link [wikipedia.org]
Everyone knows.... (Score:4, Funny)
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The punchline (Score:5, Funny)
As a science-loving person, I almost fell in ecstasy by just reading this sentence. It really gets things straight regarding religious fanboyism. So "eat that, Intelligent Design".
Ahh... saying that felt so good.
But is LQG testable? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:The punchline (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fixed that for you.
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We'd have no problem with the various pseudosciences in the world if people had a little less faith and exercised a little more incredulity and skepticism. But instead you have huge segments of the population that don't even know what
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At the same time though science asks for as much if not more faith. Not of itself you are correct, but of the unwashed masses.
Twaddle.
We have things like clean water, roads, cars, planes, cities, computers, and fricking *space ships* all due to science.
What exactly can you point to that god did?
Oh, the universe. Any proof of that? Any evidence?
No, huh?
So apart from making yourself look very silly by telling lies so stupid a child could easily call you out on them, was there any point in making that entirely
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Ask them for evidence. They have not a scrap.
Ask me who built the CPU in this machine?
AMD corporation.
They have a website here [amd.com].
They maintain offices here:
Now, this could all be an elaborate hoax, but the more hard evidence I pile up, the sillier you look trying to twist it around to the "religious belief" point of view.
This is Seraphim_72's [autho
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No, I can't go and verify everything personally. But I would much, much rather have "faith" in a system that prides itself in retesting and modifying hypotheses than a system that says skepticism is wrong.
Every time we find out
You mean... (Score:5, Funny)
"What Happened 6001 Years Ago?"
Fixed that for you.
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The hangover would explain the half-assed job he did with mankind.
IF (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing, plus a little bit more
No Before (Score:2, Funny)
There is no "before".
There has to be a big bang to have a "before big bang".
Now, 6000 years ago, roughly, God spoke and the Universe lept into being.
All you techno-geeks need to accept that. Put away your computers. I have. I stopped using computers because they are the "Beast" (Beast is a Trademark of the RMS Corporation, a wholly, and holy, owned subsidary of FOSS, owners of the GNUniverse).
God will smite you computer using disbelievers for not accepting the 6000 year Universe. Your only salvation is
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Yeah whoever modded you Troll shouldn't be getting any modpoints. Hopefully I can metamoderate that into oblivion!
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I can only assume you posted this manually by sending your signal down the optic fiber with a laser pointer.
What happened before the big bang? (Score:5, Funny)
ereh ees ot gnihtoN (Score:3, Funny)
ob (Score:2, Funny)
Big Crunch vs Cold Death (Score:3, Insightful)
a one-shot deal? (Score:2)
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The Big Bang -is- The Big Crunch (Score:4, Interesting)
To explain this in the easiest way I can, I'm going to have to move from the multidimensional to the more easily understood dimensions. Save you have a sphere.
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/2081/asphereft7.
That sphere has a top, and a bottom. Assume that at the top of that sphere, water is formed. This water will want to flow down that sphere to the very bottom of that sphere. In the case of our simple world - due to gravity, and gravity wants those water droplets to flow ever-faster toward that bottom, etc... ignore this bit about gravity except for the ever-faster.. they accelerate.
Now let's say you slice this sphere into strips going from the top, to the bottom. Like fancy orange peels.
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/928/aslicedsph
Now if you uncurl all those strips, and align them all together at the top, you get a sort of radial spokes system of peels. The more strips you made, the cleaner the result, but what it comes down to is this. The top point of the sphere is still a point. But the bottom point of the sphere is now no longer a point - it is part of a large circular shape in a disc.
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/6959/anunfolde
So if we had the same water droplets going from the top of the sphere to the bottom of the sphere, in this new disc-shape projection, then from the frame of reference of the top point - the center of the disc - the drops of water would appear to be continually diverging and accelerating outward. The Big Bang.
But here's the kicker. If you uncurl the strips and align them all together at the bottom and repeat the same thing - then a bunch of scattered around water droplets would appear to be accelerating towards it, and converging. The Big Crunch.
Just a thought - probably not original, but I don't remember reading anything on the subject.. it's not one I'm too interested in
i never believed in the big bang (Score:2, Interesting)
i don't know. our current understanding of cosmology seems ope
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Might the Hubble Constant not be a factor in some insanely distant part of the universe? Sure, but if it looks to be in effect everywhere we can see, then how can we make any useful assumptions about where it ends?
I don't think that the Big Bang
you're right: i don't have proof (Score:2)
1. time and time again, anthropomorphization has informed our theories about how our surroundings work, and time and time again, anthropomorphization has turned out to be wrong
2. talking about the universe as having a birth, and a death, seems very anthropomorphic to me
therefore, our current understanding of the cosmos, ie: the big bang, and various theories of its "death" is probably wrong too, because it is so anthropomorphic
that's all i'm operating on, that's the sum total of my hunch.
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our brains are inescapably anthropomorphic (Score:2)
ship captains refer to their boats as "she"
we think like this because so much of our intellect is devoted to our relationships with our fellow humans, so much so that it infects nearly every way in think. not that i think we should or could ever think anthropomorphically and become emotionless robots, just that we should be aware of this subtle bias we have in all of our thoughts and perceptions
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I think anthropomorphizing language is a sometimes effective and often convenient way to relate to others, but I don't think this kind of language shapes the science.
2 things (Score:2)
2. therefore, our ability to transcend anthropomorphization in our development of science is a great credit to us all, so strong is our mental bias towards anthropomorphization
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History of science point 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
please laminate that (Score:2)
then we will hire a crop duster to spread the fliers all over various southern baptist strongholds in the usa, and the vatican
thanks for that
wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
should be
"People have made false anthropocentric statements in the past. People are making anthropocentric statements about the Universe now. Therefore, people are possibly making false statements."
hypocritical? (Score:2)
you should tone down your eagerness to shout hypocrisy when you fail at some pretty simple observations of the subject matter
Information? (Score:2)
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OT (Score:2)
Is this some kind of new URL hashing mechanism? Should I try and decrypt this with the 0x09 key? Does the link predate the universe (thereby making it inscrutable to those within the universe)?
Or is my connection/machine/browser just horribly, horribly FUBARed?
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Not sure that it's OT, since it's commenting on the actual posting
That's a freaky email hash... really complicated, it's the address in reverse with some extra dots and with @ spelled out... the real addy is "theBadAstronomer" @ "gmail.com"
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But why is it presented as an http URL? Since when do we want email links that are a) unfollowable because they're obfuscated, and b) unfollowable because they're set after http:/// [http] as lead-ins to stories?
And this is my first-ever complaint (in almost 10 years of hanging out here) about the editing on slashdot: if they're not even following the links to check they're valid, what the hell is their job? I mean, catching dupes is hard, since it presupposes yo
So Douglas Adams was right... (Score:3, Funny)
The universe DOES recreate itself, each time stranger than before...
Before the Big Bang? (Score:2, Funny)
"What's THIS button do?"
Moot, because it's inapplicable (Score:2)
So, why bother speculating? Yes, mathematically it's possible. Mathematically it's possible to reverse time.
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Right before (Score:2)
the Ancient device (Score:2)
some dialed 9 chevrons on a STARGATE (Score:2)
So God Does Too Play Dice (Score:5, Funny)
>One implication of this "cosmic forgetfulness," as Bojowald calls it, is that history does not repeat itself-the fundamental properties of the current era of the universe are different from the last, Bojowald explained. "It's as if the universe forgot some of its properties and acquired new properties independent of what it had before," he told SPACE.com.
So not only does God play dice, but He re-rolls to get a better attribute set.
A graint of salt (Score:3, Informative)
Didn't M-Thoery already explain this... (Score:3, Interesting)
... as brane colisions without requiring a singularity, therefore showing time before the actual "bang"?
info:
Burt Ovrut [wikipedia.org] M-Theory [wikipedia.org]
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We don't know where he is, but we can certainly tell you where he's not -- the universe. Whenever the next Horrendous Space Kablooie is, he can tell us about it while he safely watches from outside.
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Re:But time doesn't exists yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Time is a vector, not a scalar (Score:5, Insightful)
We just don't talk or think about time having some of the same properties as physical space since we only experience it in one direction. Our lives are a filmstrip that doesn't roll backwards. What happened before the beginning of the tape? That's like asking if there was a universe before I was born?
I think we'd do a lot better to rename it something less associated with it's common useage, such as the Temporal axis. Then you can start to discuss what the properties of that axis are, without running into issues with metaphorical associations.
(see also: Free Software, Free as in Libre, not as in Gratis)
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So what do objects in that 4-space behave like outside of the defined region of your temporal axis?
Does that really help?
obDrWho (Score:3, Funny)
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Well besides the fact that there are other languages in the universe besides English, but it is really hard for the human mind to comprehend really small numbers and really large numbers.
So it simply visualizes anything extremely small as 0 and anything exceedingly large (like the universe) as infinite.
But even then, the human mind cannot truly visual infinity without an approximation nor can it visualize nothi
science, philosophy, religion (Score:4, Interesting)
And then after studying philosphy on my own for a few years, I arrived at the conclusion that philosophy turns to religion because if we can never know these things for sure, we still have to make a decision how we are going to live our lives, and that is religion. In my opinion, real religion is when we consciously decide what to believe on our own (although it can be from reading about religions), fake religion is when someone makes the decision for us.
Why don't more people study Eastern religion's cosmologies? I think it's because people in general like information spoon fed to them instead of researching and processing it on their own. Western psychology is now appreciating many Buddhist ideas that can help certain people with psychological problems and many quantum physicists have felt that Buddhism may have good insights to the ultimate nature of reality [google.com]. In my view any theory that does not take consciousness into account is incomplete and not worth my basing a belief system around.
Re:science, philosophy, religion (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the only fallacy in your logic.
Beautiful post though.
> real religion is
Actually, "real" religion is putting your beliefs into action by the lifestyle you live. If you never do anything with your beliefs, they are just that, beliefs.
--
Teacher: "Question Authority!"
Student: "Says who!?"
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I thought Greedo posted first! You know, maybe it's the Big Bang special edition
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I think their would still be a linear concept because a human lifetime is so linear - you start at birth, grow old, then die.
I believe various non-Christian calendars counted off years (or even days) from a beginning point. I think the Mayan calendar even has a last day.
Seasons and cyclical events were important, but I don't know if
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Are you sure you aren't talking about the future instead of the past?