Transtemporalism

Overview

Transtemporalism is a religious outlook and the third largest set of religious beliefs of spacefaring crew. Fleet Control respects the religous beliefs of all crew-members and suggests that space-farers be knowledgeable, understanding and respectful of the religious beliefs of all crews.

Transtemporalism is a religious outlook that proposes human time and universal time progress in opposite directions, and that human time will eventually out-compete universal time, leading to a fully human-constructed universe past the boundary of time, which can be developed into an eternal utopia. Adherents focus on large-scale social order, human domination and organisation of physical spaces, teleological outcomes, and working collectively for future happiness.

Universal time

Transtemporalists propose that the arrow of time is most appropriately conceived of as progressing in the direction of ordered structure - that is, in the opposite direction to the general increase of entropy. This is a reversal of the generally accepted sense of the passage of time. When conceived of in this manner, the Big Bang is the endpoint of the universe, when all matter is brought into a condensed structure, and the beginning of the universe, generally conceived of as the Heat Death of the universe where matter is distributed more generally, exists in our future. This arrow of time is called the "universal arrow of time" because it accords with the progression of time as relevant to the vast majority of matter and energy in the universe, of which life is only a brief moment.

Living time

If the arrow of time moves from more entropic states to less entropic states, then life-oriented activities of consumption, growth, repair and organisation are activities that denote the movement of the arrow of time fowards. Thus, while a lifeless universe - or lifeless areas of the universe - are considered as moving from the heat death to the Big Bang/Crunch, pockets of life actually reverse this trend and local time runs in the opposite direction. This opposing arrow of time is known as "living time", and describes the experience of a living being as compared to the hypothetical time-experience of the non-living universe. By far, the majority of time runs from heat death to the Big Bang, but living time is unique and persistent in heading in the other direction.

Human time

Human time describes the specific organising capabilities of humans - not only does human biology buck the trend of universal time, but human organisation, including agriculture, technology, data storage, population expansion, infrastructure building and medicine all follow the arrow of living time. However, unlike living time, human time starts to impress the living arrow of time onto non-living matter, slowly redirecting the arrow of time of the local universe as a whole from progressing towards the Big Bang to progressing towards the heat death end-point of the universe.

Beyond the boundary of time

Transtemporalists believe that human time can fundamentally influence the nature of the local universe, creating a secure pocket where time continually progresses away from the Big Bang. Significantly, the belief also proposes that human time will rewrite universal time, so that the "past" of the universe is rewritten by human organisation. The teleological end of this formulation is that human time will allow the inhabitants of this local pocket to create a bubble universe that travels backwards in time beyond the boundary of time - that is, beyond the beginning of the universe as they conceptualise it. Once the bubble travels beyond the beginning of the universe it will no longer exist as a "pocket" within a larger universe, but will, in fact, be the entire universe. This belief therefore proposes that humans will not just persist beyond the heat death of the universe, but will end up with a universe wholly constructed by themselves for themselves. Some adherents even believe that the physical rules of this universe will be fully determined by human organisation (that is, entropic structures are an artefact of the previous universe and will not be present in this universe), leading to an eternal and human-configured utopian universe.

Practices

Transtemporalists engage in a wide variety of practices, largely focused on increasing living and human time. Any increase in living or human time will increase the probability that human time will conquer universal time, and lead to human utopia. Transtemporalists are generally concerned with collective outcomes on large scales and propose enormous projects such as terraforming, Dyson swarms and movement up the Kardeshev scale.