Scale of the Universe

I love the end of it, just a big circle of random static noise. Looking at stuff like this always brings up the question of why does anything exist at all?

The counterpoint to that thought is why we should think non-existence is even possible. There doesn't seem to be any indication that nothing could exist other than our capacity to imagine it being so.

It's what's so annoying with people arguing about "something from nothing."

Even a vacuum has zero point energy. The idea that there could even be 'nothing' at any point in time is arguably a bigger leap of faith than the notion of some deity for whose sake it is being argued as a presupposition.

"Something from nothing" is a flawed argument, I agree. It's just like saying everything came from ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ , because 'nothing' doesn't represent anything at all.

However, the idea that "'nothing' is impossible" still doesn't make sense to me. If the reality allows for infinite possibilities then one of the possibilities must be of 'nothingness'. This is what Buddhists argue, that reality is śūnya or 0/null/void, and that we exist only momentarily in this nothingness somehow but you can see how that argument is flawed too.

Then comes sāṁkhya that says there are 2 entities: The observer and the thing which is being observed. The observer (individual consciousness or puruṣa) is eternal, has no point of origin and no end. Similarly, prakṛti or nature also exists at the same time because the observer needs an observation but prakṛti's nature is to change all the time, it manifests and unmanifests (just like our bodies or everything else in this universe made of dead matter). However, even though prakṛti keeps this constant of change, the observer or puruṣa himself is unchanging (just like how our bodies and every single cell in it keep changing but the sense of 'I' remains the same somehow). On top of that, it says the prakṛti and puruṣa are mutually exclusive. They do not mix like oil and water but remain in contact at the same time, just like how we have material bodies that keep changing but the 'I' or the observer inside it is not made of prakṛti and hence remains detached from it. It is only the false-ego (or false-'I') of puruṣa that forces it to identify itself with prakṛti (like I'm a male, I have this job, this is my family, I have this body and face, etc.).

It's really simple.

The universe is based on Murphy's 1st Law: Anything can go wrong, including nothing.

"In the beginning there was nothing… Then something went wrong."