The Velocity of Universal Resurrection
It seems quite the shame that all the information we amass throughout our lives should be lost at the moment of death.
It also seems quite the shame that the universe is so incomprehensibly large: finite and bounded, yet appearing quite the opposite. That we humans have such a limited lifespan in view of the information about the universe going unanalyzed makes the loss even more profound and disquieting. It is the height of absurdity.
Yet perhaps resurrection is just nothing more than data transfer between two parallel points that never meet, by design. At the moment of death, information is moved from one corporeal storage mechanism to another, or at least stored for some indeterminate period of time before the second storage unit is activated. For this, one needs an infinitely indexed memory bank that can retrieve that information and use it again. God no longer has a Book of Life, but a Database of Life.
With such a mechanism, the universe itself could be the storage medium, attuned to the transfer of organic data deriving from sentient sources. It now becomes an issue of “elsewhere, elsewhen.” The reason the universe is so large is so that data points never meet. Once a loved one dies, the information is stored, then retrieved and given form on some other world. That person wakes up from a dream, a terrible nightmare that he was in a car accident and expired. Then he gets up, showers, shaves and goes to work.
The author of the Apocalypse of John gave a finite number of the elect in Heaven after all the drama of the fight with the Anti-Christ and the Final Judgement: 144,000 young, virgin (Jewish) men. It seems beyond ridicule that an all-powerful being would need to limit the population of the celestial kingdom, much less to one gender. How can He run out of room? Even on this temporal plane, there would certainly be enough space for every modern human being that’s ever lived. Once our species had crossed the threshold of intelligence, then things became interesting, so why lose that data? Why cut it off and proscribe the experiences of the active minds that created them? The number of souls in Heaven is not an arbitrary one (the square of 12, the number of the tribes of Israel), but the concept is a conceit, and not a healthy one. The known universe is large enough to house all that data that comes in the form of life experience. Even banishing people to the eternal torments of hell is a waste of information. Call it the Law of the Conservation of Data.
What does this mean for human free will? Is this a deterministic and wholly materialistic viewpoint? If we are resurrected in this manner (organic memory transfer), are we condemned to repeat our mistakes for untold generations? What is the point of sustaining the human species for a potentially infinite amount of time? For the wicked pleasure of a cosmic fiend?
This resurrection process has nothing to do with the choices one makes in life, for good for for bad, but ultimately serves the purpose of continuing the stream of information. And of course, it *is* materialistic because it limits the prolongation of this information stream (in the form of life experiences of a sentient being) to the temporal realm. But it should not be considered a cruel joke, or endless Sisyphean repetition: the key is to store and retrieve the information and allow it to continue. Where? We come back to the “elsewhere, elsewhen” idea. We are not speaking of parallel worlds, but the migration of data into different storage units that continue uninterrupted, as it were, until the need arises again to store it all when death comes, all in this universe.
To what end? Perhaps to fill the universe with as much information as possible before this massive storage unit itself meets its own end, to return back, perhaps, to an even larger, more mind-boggling organic information collector, like quantum foam. If the universe sprang from such a structure, then perhaps all the information contained in that universe is released back into the foam which later rebirths a universe. For those universes that have no such information (dead ones), the cycle of emptiness also continues, maybe indefinitely, or until its physical laws may allow for the emergence of sentient life. Like a module being removed and replaced, the universe slides back into the quantum foam and releases whatever energy and information it has managed to accumulate. Think of it as an act of fertilization.
The velocity of universal resurrection could be instantaneous, moving data between different points that will shall never meet. We have vague memories of places we have never been, or experience déjà vu when seeing a stranger. A side effect of the data transfer, because we have indeed met these people or been to similar places. Elsewhere, elsewhen. We may be colonizing the universe without even knowing it.