The Eternal Tale

— J. Chr. de Vries

Omega Point

The truth is that I have never been able to read, 
But I console myself with the thought 
That the imagined and the actual have become the same by now.

— El guardián de los libros [The Guardian of Books] — Jorge Luis Borges

In the autumn of 1994, I received a letter from Taunis Haas. I don’t remember the exact date, but I do remember that it was a letter delivered by mail; this seems almost unimaginable in our time, but in those days email and the internet were still in their early stages.


Haas’ letter contained an enthusiastic description of a very peculiar book he had read by Frank J. Tipler: The Physics of Immortality. It had just been published.


I had met Haas a year and a half earlier at a book fair in Germany, and since then, we had exchanged letters sporadically. I wouldn’t call us ‘friends’ because there was not enough empathy between us; we corresponded solely about matters close to our hearts but never about personal issues.


Tipler’s book begins as follows: This book is a description of the Omega Point Theory, which is a testable physical theory of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God who will one day in the far future resurrect every single one of us to live forever in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven. That sounds like the text of a religious fanatic, but Tipler is a renowned mathematician and physicist. He studied at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. To support his theory, the book is filled with mathematical formulas that I, being a layperson, don’t understand at all; they can, however, be thoroughly checked by experts in the field. In his letter Haas omits the mathematical aspects; the only thing that matters for him is the underlying idea of the eternal now.

The Eternal Tale

The basis of Tipler’s Omega Point is the Big Bang theory, the theory explains the origin of our cosmos from a primordial moment, the Big Bang. From that moment on, our universe began to expand. This process is still ongoing and will continue for billions of years. However, there will come a point when this expansion stops and the process begins to reverse: the universe will gradually start contracting and eventually it will dissolve into its original state of nothingness.


During this contraction process, the pressure and temperature in our universe will increase. The closer we get to the original core, the higher these values will become. This means that at some point, life on Earth will become impossible. We will need to move to the outer regions of our universe. This is the simplest problem to solve. We will build a so-called Von Neumann machine, a device that carries all our information, techniques, and knowledge to a location further away from the core of our universe, and rebuild everything there. One of the convenient properties of this machine is that it can self-replicate. This is useful because it allows us to gradually move farther away from the core. We can rebuild our society step by step. With billions of years at our disposal, our technology will undoubtedly be sufficient. The chips used in computers have become significantly smaller and more powerful in just a few years. The development of our technology occurs in an exponentially accelerating process. In 1990, Raymond Kurzweil predicted in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines that the boundary between the human and technology would blur.

This was step 1. Step 2 is of a different nature: we will be confronted with the fact that we can no longer maintain our current physical state; we must assume a different form: that of a fluid superbrain called the Omega Point by projecting ourselves onto the so-called ‘Higgs field’ that exists in space, a field that is highly suitable for data storage.


One of the necessary conditions for this, is the fact that although there are incredibly many different DNA combinations possible, resulting in an equal number of different individuals, this number is nevertheless finite. Tipler calculated that the number of possible different brain connections leads to a count of 10,100,000,000,000,000,000 ‘possible’ individuals. (That number is a digit with 19 zeros.) A piece of cake for the Omega Point. As humans, we experience this point as being both God and Heaven.


However, there is still a third necessary step, which is the problem of God’s eternity. The superbrain does not have eternal life. When the universe eventually implodes into nothingness, everything is over, and the Omega Point ceases to exist. However, Tipler provides a brilliant answer to this problem. In the last moment before the ultimate implosion, light has the property of being able to move an infinite number of times between two points. (Tipler supports this with his calculations.) Thus, an infinite amount of information can be exchanged among all the various possible individuals. This gives us the feeling of eternity. Now, in this final moment of existence, due to that eternity, we experience ourselves as God; we then have eternal life, which we experience in an eternal now.

Mnemosyne and Lethe

The story of Haas, despite its brilliance, has a venomous sting hidden beneath its surface, or perhaps even two, or better yet: a snake with two (extremely venomous) heads, an Amphisbaena.


The first head concerns the infinitely fast memory, which reminds us of the river Mnemosyne, which, according to certain sources, flows in the underworld. In the Omega Point, we have drunk from this river. An infinitely fast memory is an absolute memory. And, as we can learn from Funes, the Memorious, it is a catastrophic ability. When we remember everything and forget nothing, we will remember all the leaves on a tree in every position the wind moves them at any given moment as separate objects; we will lose the ability to reduce them to, for example, an ‘oak leaf’ or a ‘chestnut leaf.’ We will lose the ability of abstraction. We will no longer recognize ourselves.


The second head is that of silence. We will hear everything at all times and be unable to listen to the silence. Does silence still exist before the storm? What is music without silence? In the experience of music, the ability to forget is of fundamental importance in order to establish musical connections and be surprised by, for example, an unexpectedly recurring motif. The beauty we experience is born out of our ability to forget.


The God that Tipler has devised for us is not a ‘Judeo-Christian God’ but the goddess Mnemosyne, after whom that river in Hades is named. After drinking from her waters, we will likely long for a sip from the Lethe, another river in the underworld: the river of oblivion.

— Den Haag, Februari 29, 2002