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I exist forever.

I exist forever.

There’s a concept in the physics of relativity called a “world line” or a “world sheet”.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line

As you move from here to there through the three dimensions of space, you also move through the fourth dimension of time.  Of course, your travel through time is much more constrained than your travel through space.  You can move as fast or as slow as you want through space, in any direction. But you are traveling through time at the speed of light (it’s true) in the futureward direction, and there’s really nothing you can do about that.

So as you describe your journey through space, you are really describing a journey through a 4-dimensional universe.   For a person, the path of You in your successive positions from your birth to your death looks something like this:

Credit: George Gamow, One, Two, Three, Infinity)

http://www.leptonic.com/skip/WLMblog/WorldLine-3.jpg

I call this path a World Worm (not to be confused with a wormhole).  My World Worm started when I was born and will end when I die … right?  Well, sure, from the limited point of view of another one of us poor humans.  All that any of us can see is a single instant in time, and we can only remember the past.  So someday You and I will no longer exist.  Unless of course we step outside of the 4 dimensions and look at things from a timeless point of view.

From outside the 4 dimensions, the World Worm is simply ‘there’.  It is there, was there, and will always be there – if one looks from outside of time. The diagram above shows a World Worm as it ‘is’, and will remain there whenever you care to go back and look at it.

You’re the same way, and so am I.  Although we were born and will die, our existence is, has always been, and will always be a fact.

I exist forever.