Quantum Contemplations: Dialog Echoing In Eternity

I have decided to post some of the e-mails from the volumoinous, dusty archives of the ongoing conversation between D.S. Martin and myself. Here is the next installment.

From: Scott Starr To: D.S. Martin Date: Fri, 26
May 2006 08:23:06 -0500

Well, I have gone fishing about every night this week. I have found some prime locations all right in or real close to the city. I had great luck yesterday in a dirty flood control pond off of Meridian and I-40- back behind the Waffle house. I am going camping this weekend out at an awesome lake I found near Geary an hour to the west. We need to get together and catch some....and finish figuring out the cosmos.

Here it is, if your interested in the relative age of the universe.

A quick approximation for the age of the Universe can be approximated by the inverse of the Hubble constant. The calculated age turns out to be

Current best estimates of h₀ are

so the Universe is most likely somewhere between 12 and 16 billion years old, at least according to this method of estimation.
But recall that according to relativity, time is relative. We can guess the amount of time likely to have elapsed since the time when time was a meaningful quantity that could be measured. But we can't say anything about any processes that might have occurred before the notion of time made sense. In some sense, quantum gravity could be an eternal stage of the Universe, and the Big Bang could be regarded as the end of eternity and the beginning of time itself.

I like the end of eternity analysis.

But, it seems to me, it would only be the end of eternity for those of us who, may happen to be stuck in this quaint little space/time universe.

However, for the rest of us who exist, only temporarily in this temporally composed training facility, i.e. the Universe, we see eternity as still existing outside the bounds of this tiny, but ever increasing sphere.

Which leads to the question, can space eventually exceed or overtake eternity?

How much eternity exists beyond the bounds of space?

Is there a limited eternity, (maybe only 25 miles of eternity, that would certainly affect the effect of the title of the movie classic "From Here to Eternity", kind of like "From here to Shawnee" or to keep it in tropical paridise "From Peral Harbor to Waimea Bay)?

Or is eternity always just beyond the reaches of space/time, (and well, we might say eternal and infinite)?

Scientists, often naively limit reality to only what is thought to be knowable, or at least may be tested by empirical (carnal) tests.

DSM