The title of this article isn’t that creative on purpose; it helps drive home the point I wanted to make. That everything we think, know, talk about… it’s no more than a rehash of everything we already know. Here’s a little example I whipped up (but really didn’t, because it’s nothing new, it’s just something that already exists); If  I were to ask you to think of a completely new colour, and then describe it to me, you could only ever tell me that it’s kind of brown, but more rhubarb, and it sounds like cheese falling on a tin roof and it’s kind of that, but it’s also mixed with cornflakes. You could even try to tell me that it’s ‘quijamastatlakka’, but you would have only chose those words or sounds because they are a subset of everything you already know.

So, she asks… what was there before the whole universe existed… what was in that big empty nothing? Well.. the answer isn’t in a science book hidden at the back of the library, or hidden within the ancient teachings of some religion that was made up because they were shit-scared of not having any answers. It’s a trick, it’s not the answer which we need to figure out, it’s the question. It’s why we try to explain things in the same way that we experience life. It’s why we’re so focussed on asking why.

There are things in this universe that we don’t know, like colours that we’ve never seen, or  some concept that I can’t explain to you, because I don’t know what it is. I believe that whatever there is/was/to before the universe is out of our understanding simply because we ask this question in terms of things we know; before, during, after, exist, not-exist.

I’m not saying that we’ll never understand, but I feel like we’re not doing ourselves any favours by asking these questions. Instead, I suggest we just observe more; increase the number of tools we have to relate to things. Once we know Everything (seeing = knowing??), we’ll be able to explain Everything. Until then we’re still going to be wastefully treading water, when we could be just sitting on the edge of the rapidly expanding universe watching the beautiful stars unfold a billion years in the past before our very eyes.

Even though there is a 100% chance that I am wrong, I won’t tell my niece any of this, even though there is also a 100% chance that I am right. Perhaps she’ll figure out something completely new and different and won’t need those decaying jetpack blueprints after all. We can only hope.

Well, it’s a trick question, because I don’t even HAVE a green t-shirt.

In a crazy alternate universe, where I did own a green t-shirt and where I stepped into my mystical time machine and simply prevented my previous self from purchasing this jade garment… then what colour t-shirt would I be wearing then?

Also, I wonder… would it morph slowly, like one of those heat-reactive things from the 80′s? I hope not, because that would mean that there is such a thing as Time Memory, which I just made up, but now have to copyright in case Showtime decide to make a TV programme of the same name and I have to sue them for damages. This Time Memory that I profess wouldn’t be a past memory, but a memory of the future. If my t-shirt just jumped colour without involving any Time at all, it would make sense to the current way we generally see time; as this linear object travelling in a single direction.

In Back to the Future, this morphing/fading stuff happens a lot; in a photograph, or when Marty McFly starts to vanish on stage mid-Earth-Angel. Theoretical or not, this concept would be an alpha-transparency of two alternative universes, happening simultaneously in the same place, based on something that happens in the future. So Time would have to know about this event, and possibly all events. Which leads us to a very important question;

If Time was to know everything that will ever happen, do you think that it would act in the opposite way that we do, in that it could never remember anything in the past?