Far Future Will See No Evidence of Universe's Origin 340
Dr. Eggman writes "According to an article on Ars Technica and its accompanying General Relativity and Gravitation journal article 'The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology', in the far future of the universe all evidence of the origin of the universe will be gone. Intelligences alive 100-billion-years from now will observe a universe that appears much the way our early 1900s view of the universe was: Static, had always been there, and consisted of little more than our own galaxy and a islands of matter. 'The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise--the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin. Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe.'"
Assuming of course... (Score:1, Insightful)
This really makes you wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
If the far future will see an absence of this information then we have a responsibility to persist the data beyond the demise of our culture, whether or not another civilization will arise that can interpret the data. The information we can gather now would appear to be a limited resource given our current understanding of cosmology, and we who have access should derive what we can and pass the value on as others will not be able to do so.
Can you imagine the ID vs Evolution argument in an apparently static universe? Oh wait.. just pick up a history book and check out the executions, exiles, pariahs, and all the other fun stuff that happened to/became of our scientific forefathers back when the Earth was considered the center of a static universe.
Regards.
The authors make some questionable assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
- Currently observable stars, background radiation, etc., are all we or anyone else will ever be able to observe. Almost surely, we'll come up with better technology to observe the stuff we already know to look for; quite possibly, we'll discover entirely new things (different forms of radiation, etc.) to use in forming a more complete picture. The same goes for our hypothetical observers in the far future.
- Human perception is as good as it gets. Anything living 100 billon years from now will be so different from us that it may perceive the world around it in completely different ways, and will accordingly have different technology for astronomy and everything else.
Re:But even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
But here's an interesting question--if documents were discovered from some ancient civilization that had a completely different cosmology, describing that cosmology, would you take those documents at face value? Suppose they contained measurements and recorded observations, as well as a prediction that future observations would differ in a certain way. I'm not sure the far future would believe us, so we would have some convincing to do.
The upside is, the people of the future can believe in a static universe, and insofar as their universe is compatible with that hypothesis, they're no worse off for not knowing the truth. If it turns out that the universe's origin does make a difference to them, there will no doubt be some observations that don't correspond with their static universe hypothesis, forcing them to adopt a hypothesis similar to ours. So by preserving our data and our theory we are indeed providing a possible solution to a future scientific problem.
Re:But even worse (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, given that we've probably got another, say, 20 billion years till the information goes away, I guess I don't really feel the need to mark it as high priority on my to-do list.
No it doesn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically we have no responsibility to anyone but ourselves. Any species which exist in 100 billion years can go and get stuffed.
Re:What Do We *Already* See No Evidence Of? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only are we the first civilization, but we are likely to be the last. Any future society is unlikely to progress beyond an agrarian feudal society due to dearth of natural resources. We can't screw this one up!
Re:But even worse (Score:2, Insightful)
Do we know the truth? Maybe there's another important factor in the equation which is as invisible for as now as dark energy domination would have been earlier in the universe's history. Or maybe there's something interesting in the universe's history of which all traces are already invisible now, just as the expansion of the universe will (probably) be invisible to the future people.
And BTW, who knows what they will be able to measure? We don't know the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Thus how do we know that examination of those (which might follow finding it e.g. in advanced accelerator experiments, independent from any astronomic observations) wouldn't reveal other signs of the origin of the universe, signs which are currently hidden from us (because we miss the required knowledge to observe them), and which would tell those future observers about the history of the universe anyway?
Re:But even worse (Score:3, Insightful)
The ancient Stoics believed the universe was born out of fire, and will return to fire. The reason we don't believe this is because they apparently made this up instead of making observations like we do and applying a scientific method. I'm sure that a future civilization with our data, along with their data, will come closer to an accurate theory so long as (a) our data are accurate, (b) they accept our data as accurate, and (c) their data are also accurate. We would of course be better off with data from before now, but unless ancient Atlantis had radio telescopes and teams of physicists studying cosmology, we're pretty much stuck with what we've got. You're right--we can never be omniscient anyway.
Re:Peak hydrogen (Score:3, Insightful)
Will usage decrease? Well, that wouldn't make it that horribly much better, because that means, in a nutshell, less main-sequence stars.
It will also mean more hydrogen which technically still exists, but is going nowhere: it's trapped in brown dwarfs that never start fusion, Jupiters, black holes, etc. Those things don't blow up, so basically short of some cataclismic event like head-on star collisions, it won't end up in a star. So expect the number of main-sequence stars to drop even faster. If the hydrogen use is, say, roughly 1/t past a point, then expect the main sequence stars to drop like 1/t^2. (Also pulled out of the arse, I don't have the time or inclination to do proper research at 1:30 AM
So, basically increasingly less places where life can evolve or move to. We might end up with the next inhabitable place being on the other end of the galaxy before the 100 billion years are up.
Also, going by the number in your example, 7.5% hydrogen means you're pretty much screwed. It's like getting your gasoline 7.5% in <insert inert liquid of the same density>: your engine won't work on it any more, a long time before that. A star with 7.5% hydrogen just won't produce any significant amount of hydrogen fusion. Stars die, one way or another, a long time before they get anywhere _near_ that kind of a composition.
So basically at that point, to get a main sequence star, you're betting on some _incredibly_ low odds of getting a freak fluctuation where you had a big pocket of hydrogen that somehow didn't accrete into a star earlier. We're talking odds akin to winning every single lottery on Earth on the same day. Repeatedly. There won't be many of them around.
One within close enough range to evacuate humanity to? Heh. I wouldn't bet on that.
Re:What Do We *Already* See No Evidence Of? (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientific idea becomes non-scientific (Score:3, Insightful)
Can the claims of the ancestors be trusted, when they suggest such preposterous experiential data as a "sky full of galaxies" and "background radiation"?
If they can, then science is not the only valid way to learn about the universe. We can also learn from the experiences of those who came before us, even if we cannot experience the same thing they did.
Science is a useful way to pursue truth, but it is not the only way. I think people need to see that, and this is a good example of how that is true.
Re:You'll be dead anyway. Here's why (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Yes, energy indeed cannot be destroyed. It does, however, get trapped in the mass of the heavier nuclei synthetised during a supernova blast (E = mc^2) or, basically, lost as photons traveling around an ever increasing universe. Especially the latter is, really, the whole point in this topic. There'll be increasingly more photons which are (A) traveling the ever increasing space between galaxies, and never getting anywhere, and (B) getting red-shifted to such ridiculous wave lengths that they will _not_ be doing anything to any nucleus they encounter.
Basically the incoming power decreases with the square of the distance, and the whole point is that the distance is increasing. Accelerating even. So even as more energy piles up, there's more and more space (and red-shift) for it to go through and never hit anything. If you pointed a flashlight upwards outside, only an infinitesimally tiny fraction (or more likely none at all) of the photons will ever hit _anything_, because there's simply an incredible amount of empty space out there.
And if it does hit another star, chances are it'll be infrared or even microwave, so don't expect it to split any nuclei.
2. Yes, technology will continue to advance, but I'm not sure what it's going to do about it. Unless it discovers a way to produce energy out of _nothing_ whatsoever, it's still stuck at the same point we are. To create a main-sequence star at that point, it would have to split trillions of tonnes of heavier elements into hydrogen. Where is it going to get the energy for that? Solar is out, fusion _and_ fission are out (most nuclei will be iron at that point, so neither yields an energy gain), fossil fuels aren't _nearly_ packing enough energy, etc. Where's that energy going to come from?
Basically to build a main-sequence star, you're looking at needing as much energy as that star will produce during its billions of years of lifetime. Where are you going to get that, in an universe that's already running out of energy? How are you going to get that in a burst? Even if we were talking about building a sun in 10 million years (which is already an ludicriously large interval: humans never stuck to a plan for 0.01% of that time), you're looking at needing 1000 times the sun's raw power output, and that's at 100% efficiency and 0% losses (a.k.a., never gonna happen.) Where are you going to get that in an universe that, really, is running out of fuel?
3. At any rate, for all we know now, there'll be noone alive at that point. If technology ever gets better, let them worry about that then, not now.
4. Finally, we're talking about a freakin' _huge_ interval. The Homo Sapiens species is only 200 million years old. Worrying about what happens in in 100 _billion_ years is just nuts. Whole empires rose and fell in a _billionth_ of that time. Whole social models or indeed whole civilizations disappeared in a tiny fraction of that, and great libraries turned to ashes in what's really just a tiny blip on that scale. Planning what to do for the next 100 billion years is just nuts.
Re:But even worse (Score:3, Insightful)
That's pretty much implicit for everything we claim to know. You could just as well say, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, force is the derivative of momentum with respect to time, while momentum is mass times velocity divided by a factor that converges to 1 unless you are traveling at very high rates of speed." Or, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, energy cannot be created nor destroyed." Or, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, this comment will appear on Slashdot if I click 'submit'."