Is the Universe Pointless?

So imagine the universe as a kind of cosmic office building that has been running for approximately 13.8 billion years and whose management has, frustratingly, never posted a clear mission statement in the lobby.

There are stars exploding, galaxies colliding, quasars belching radiation like caffeinated dragons, and here we are — featherless bipeds who invented calculus, spray cheese and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour — trying to figure out whether all of this is for something or just the thermodynamic equivalent of a long, elaborate shrug.

The question of purpose in the universe is like being hired for a job where no one explains your role, your supervisor is invisible and the company might not even exist.

Either the universe has a purpose or it doesn’t. This seems straightforward in the same way that “either the elevator will arrive or it won’t” seems straightforward — right up until you realize you’ve been standing there for 20 minutes watching the numbers blink like a passive-aggressive slot machine. Waiting for Go. D’oh!

Start with the first option: the universe has no purpose at all. Maybe, as Bertrand Russell believed, “the universe is just there, and that’s all.” In this scenario, everything — from supernovae to the rules of pickleball — is essentially the accidental byproduct of blind physical laws playing cosmic billiards with matter and energy.

Particles collide, stars ignite, galaxies swirl into baroque shapes that look suspiciously like cosmic latte foam, species evolve and eventually a clever ape invents existential philosophy and the novelty socks so beloved by Justin Trudeau, which is sort of like a Roomba becoming self-aware and writing a memoir about vacuuming.

The result is what such philosophers as Kierkegaard and Camus liked to call the Absurd. Not absurd in the sense of Chuckles the Clown falling to his death out of a tiny car (though that’s not entirely unrelated), but absurd in the sense that beings capable of asking “Why?” exist in a universe that answers only with the crackling of background radiation.

It’s like asking a calculator what the meaning of life is and having it respond with: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants. (Calculator? Memo to myself: It could be time to upgrade to a Camcorder or an iPod. And I will, too, just as soon as I find that darn Palm Pilot.)

This produces a peculiar psychological situation. Imagine working in a gigantic office building whose employees are all frantically performing tasks — sending emails, filling spreadsheets, attending meetings — while no one can quite remember what the company actually does.

Every once in a while someone asks the obvious question (“Wait, what’s it all about, Alfie?”) and the room becomes very quiet before someone suggests ordering pizza. (Note: Any similarity to the operations of a contemporary daily newspaper is purely coincidental.)

The Absurd universe is like that office building, except it contains black holes. Oh, and the occasional evening breeze that caresses the trees. Tenderly.

If the universe truly has no purpose, then technically there is no significant difference between curing a disease and perfecting the art of aggressively mediocre karaoke. Yet people keep curing diseases anyway (or did, until RFK Jr. commandeered the medicine cabinet and filled all the vials and ampoules with leeches, roadkill and Ivermectin). They volunteer. They raise children. They go to work on Monday.

This is either deeply admirable or an evolutionary glitch that tricked us into caring about things long after caring ceased to be cosmically justified.

But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the universe does have a purpose.

Perhaps existence is aimed at some grand objective: the emergence of perfect consciousness, the realization of ultimate moral goodness, the production of a flawless smoked meat sandwich like the ones I remember from Schwartz’s Deli. The details are negotiable. What matters is that there is a goal toward which the entire process of extramundanec history is oriented.

Once we grant this, however, a new problem appears with the quiet inevitability of a second raccoon emerging from the same trash can.

If there is a purpose, then it must fall into one of two categories: either the purpose is never achieved, or it is achieved eventually.

Consider the first: a universe with a purpose that is never fulfilled.

This is the cosmic equivalent of writing “To-Do List” at the top of a page and then spending eternity staring at it while slowly aging into dust.

The cosmic equivalent of an odometer whose display perpetually reads “0.01 miles remaining.”

The cosmic equivalent of watching curling at the Olympics. Or did that eventually end? Sorry, I must have dozed off. Has the hockey started?

Perhaps the purpose is to produce perfect moral goodness, or ultimate knowledge, or a healthy lasagna of unimaginable deliciousness — but for whatever reason, the goal remains perpetually out of reach. Sort of like the Leafs’ playoff hopes.

A universe like this is futile. It has a task but never completes it. Imagine a treadmill that runs for infinity while a motivational poster above it reads “Almost There.” Eternity passes. Stars burn out. Trump finally gets that 60-foot sculpture on Mount Rushmore but no one can ever get the tiny, bruised, grasping fingers quite right. Oh, wait. That’s not a finger.

There is something uniquely tragic about a never fulfilled possibility because it combines intention with permanent failure. At least the purposeless universe has the dignity of not pretending to have a plan. The futile universe is like the final level of a video game that no one has ever managed to unlock. Damn your eyes, Donkey Kong!

Now take the second possibility: the universe has a purpose and eventually accomplishes it.

This sounds initially like the best-case scenario. The cosmic mission — whatever the goal was (glorious bangs for the bald, the ultimate Stanley Cup parade along Ste. Catherine St., a Seinfeld finale that doesn’t suck) — is completed. A zenithal paradise hoves into view. A nadiral hell recedes. The box is checked. Somewhere in the metaphysical breakroom a jingle sounds, as when you win $20 on a 6/49 ticket (Canada’s true national anthem in any language). The sultry voice of Marilyn Monroe purrs, “Congratulations, everyone. Purpose achieved. Happy birthday, Mr. President!”

E basta.

But now a strange problem arises. If the purpose of the universe has been fulfilled, then what exactly is the point of anything that happens afterward?

Imagine baking a cake whose sole purpose is to exist as a cake. Once the cake is baked, the oven continuing to run for another megatrillion years doesn’t add anything meaningful to the cake. It merely becomes an expensive way to heat the kitchen. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again ... oh noooo!

Likewise, once the universe’s purpose has been fulfilled, any further existence becomes pointless. The goal has been reached. The narrative arc has resolved. The old men are playing checkers by the trees in their pairs of stripèd pants. The universe is now the metaphysical equivalent of a television series that refuses to end despite the fact that every major plotline was wrapped up three seasons ago. Working title: How Dexter Met Your Walking Dead Mother Once Upon a Time on That ’70s Show.

At this stage you might reasonably ask why the universe wouldn’t simply stop once its purpose is fulfilled. Perhaps it does. Perhaps the lights go out. But the premise we started with was an eternal universe, which means the cosmic projector keeps running indefinitely, showing an empty screen.

So here we are with three possibilities:

1. No purpose → the universe is absurd.

2. Purpose never achieved → the universe is futile.

3. Purpose achieved → the universe eventually becomes pointless.

   
   

This is not the sort of menu that inspires great confidence in the management. It eerily mirrors what appears to be the Trump war room’s strategy for the Iran War, if you throw in → punch them when they’re down.

And yet — and this is where things become both philosophically interesting and mildly inspiring — human beings continue behaving as though none of this logical gloom is particularly decisive, even as our species as a whole seems hellbent on shuffling toward extinction. People still fall in love, plant trees, write long boring blogs almost nobody reads and spend shocking amounts of time arguing about whether the Habs need another right-handed shot on defence.

Which suggests a final, slightly mischievous possibility: that meaning might operate at a scale smaller than the universe. Maybe asking for the purpose of the universe is like asking for the purpose of a forest fire or a thunderstorm. The question assumes that the whole shebang must have a single tidy goal when in fact it might just be a gigantic stage on which countless smaller purposes play out.

Maybe asking for the purpose of the universe is like asking for the purpose of a man or a woman. (Other than the ostensible purpose of a man being to love a woman and the purpose of a woman being to love a man. Or some combination thereof. Thanks for coming in, Dr. Mindbender.)

Maybe the point of the universe was to throw a bunch of celestial mud at the cosmic wall until a lifeform evolved, somewhere on an insignificant blue dot stranded in a remote outer arm of one of at least two trillion galaxies, with enough chutzpah to ask what the point is. Was. Whatever.

Maybe, as the Reverend Andrew Mackerel opines in Peter De Vries’s 1958 witty novel The Mackerel Plaza: “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”  

In short, even if the universe as a whole is absurd, futile, or eventually pointless — even if in asking teleological questions we’re essentially moths stunning ourselves against locked windows we can’t possibly fathom — that doesn’t automatically make Tuesday afternoon pointless.

The cosmos might be an endless bureaucratic maze with no final objective, but that doesn’t stop friends relaxing on a Sunday afternoon at the Penny Farthing from saying: “Anyhow. You got time for another?”

Perhaps that is the most human response imaginable: to inhabit a universe that may ultimately make no sense and to proceed anyway — caring about things, building things, loving things — as if the local meaning we create somehow matters even if the cosmic ledger remains blank.

Which, if you think about it, is either a profound act of existential defiance or exactly the sort of thing a doomed, perpetually muddled species of primate would do while drifting through space on a damp rock.

Possibly both.