The complete collection of James Bond DVDs, contained in an attache case worthy of the man himself were amongst our son’s Christmas presents.  The title ‘You Only Live Twice’  always provoked thought.

“You only live twice: once when you are born, and once when you look death in the face”, says Fleming’s character.  Maybe Fleming is right, people in extremis seem to have a heightened awareness of their existence; there are stories of the whole of a person’s life passing before their eyes.

But what if living twice existed not as a concept from religion or literature, but as part of a scientific process?

Einstein conceived of space and time as one, it was not a question of space existing in time, but space-time being a single continuum; the whole of time exists in a single moment that embraces the whole of space.

Conventional scientific thought believes the universe began 13.5 billion years ago with a massive explosion of matter and space to fill the nothingness that previously existed, or didn’t exist as the case may be, nothingness having no existence.

Since that moment, space has been getting bigger, and time, being part of a single continuum, has expanded with space.  Human lives have been led in a single direction, beginning at the cradle and ending at the grave.

But, some thought suggests, there will come a point when the outward momentum of the universe comes to an end, when inertia will slow down and eventually halt the progress of the galaxies.  Eventually, the gravity that holds the universe together will exert a pull that is stronger than the last remnant of momentum left from the Big Bang and the universe will begin to contract.

As the process of the creation of space is reversed, time, being one with space, will also be reversed.  At some point, perhaps billions of years hence, space-time will be at the point where it is at this moment, except the journey will be a return one rather than an outward one and time, as part of reversing space, will presumably be also reversed: life will begin at the grave and end with our birth.

The logical way to behave, if such a theory proved correct, would be to put everything into the early part of one’s life and not to worry about the later years because when time is reversed life will then go from the bad to the good.

Of course, there are theories that the universe goes through a series of expansions and contractions, but if there are tens of billions of years between each of our appearances, there will be plenty of time to work out the best strategy.

My dogs think now it is time to progress through some space.