My niece has started asking questions about what existed before the universe, at the tender age of 6. It’s a pretty early start, so by the age of 26, I figure she may have either found a way to break through the mile thick concrete cell that she’s just put herself in, or hopefully she will get tired at some point, invent a commercially viable jetpack and fly off in the opposite direction.

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.