Cosmic memory

Humanity’s sense of location and identity has been influenced in no small fashion by the relatively recent discovery that we exist within an expanding universe of immense size and complex structure. More pertinently, scientific discoveries made over the past five decades have made it quite clear that the universe (“our” universe?) is experiencing a continuing metamorphosis. The present appearance of the physical universe (from a human viewpoint) reveals how the past of the physical universe has shaped the present. The canonical phases of the process of memory: Encoding, storage and retrieval, are applied to our current understanding of cosmic evolution in a way that leads to the conceptualization of “cosmic memory”. The bearing that such a cosmic memory has on human existence is summarized, leading to some reflections on the unique meaning that our existence might, in turn, bring to bear on this concept.