There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe 205
StartsWithABang writes: The heat death of the Universe is the idea that increasing entropy will eventually cause the Universe to arrive at a uniformly, maximally disordered state. Every piece of evidence we have points towards our unfortunate, inevitable trending towards that end, with every burning star, every gravitational merger, and even every breath we, ourselves, take. Yet even while we head towards this fate, it may be possible for intelligence in an artificial form to continue in the Universe for an extraordinarily long time: possibly for as long as a googol years, but not quite indefinitely. Eventually, it all must end.
What joy! (Score:5, Funny)
Happy Sunday, everyone!
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Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". (Score:5, Interesting)
Eventually, it all must end.
Prove it. What's to say we don't figure out a way to harness cosmic expansion or the other 90% of the universe's energy in the vacuum and create a pocket dimension that traverses a Kerr black hole so that we wave to ourselves leaving before we enter the event horizon in an infinite loop?
Prove (mem)Brane theory is wrong, and we don't discover that dark matter is simply the universe next-door some number of us will be able to hop to, perhaps by constructing duplicates in the neighboring universes, and thus propagating across the megaverse (or true universe, since the brane world would then be considered the universal encapsulation medium).
For fuck's sake we haven't even figured out what happens at the event horizon of a black hole, let alone the singularity. For all we know every single galaxy has a super massive gateway to another universe at its center.
I'm not saying that the heat death won't end all intelligent life in this universe, just that it might not.
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Cosmologists know everything
Just ask them.
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No, your wrong. You need to ask the question carefully to Chuck Norris and observe ( from a safe distance ) the leg-kick-sweep
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It's a consequence of the laws of statistical thermodynamics: That entropy always increases. There is a practically zero chance of entropy decreasing, and intelligence would need to exist in an area of decreasing entropy all the time. The chance of this is zero. Boltzmann brains [wikipedia.org] are consequence of entropy decreasing, but these would survive for even shorter periods on average, as the universe they exist in will be closer to maximum entropy (on average).
One exception I can see to this, is if the state space [wikipedia.org]
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If the expansion of the universe ever reverses, entropy will (very very slowly) start decreasing.
I mean right now it doesn't look like that's likely to happen (I mean the expansion isn't just continuing -- its getting faster.)
But given that we have absolutely no idea what drives said expansion, we can't be completely sure that it won't stop or even reverse in the future. Or hell, even "jump" again like it did during inflation.. and if that happens.. would it jump in or out?
All we've got to work with is an
off tipic : Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". (Score:2)
I rather like what you said, so with that said.
I would like to know ( I don't know so I like to ask )
will gravity end at the " expected end of the universes life " ?
I mean tons of dead stars ( based on what I'm reading )
just push them together at the last 30 billion years or so
and restart the universe,
I'm guessing that if we lived that long, we should have
figured out how to push stars. but if gravity ends, then
i guess it won't work.
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Well gravity won't "end" as such, but assuming the expansion of the universe continues accelerating, we will eventually be in a state where individual atoms are being pushed apart by expansion faster than gravity can pull them back together.
The same argument will apply to the EM force eventually (breaking molecules apart into individual atoms and then ions.)
And finally to the strong force, though I'm not sure exactly how that one will work since quark binding works different from EM binding -- in particular
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thank you
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Right... I suspect that intelligence continues by spawning new universes with properties amenable to life and ultimately intelligence. Obviously the disproof that "Eventually, it all must end" is that something and intelligence exists now! The OP hypothesis contains an implied assertion in that this known universe is a one-off event that happened and now is just sputtering itself to its inevitable end - totally egocentric. If it were the case that entropy is inexorable, in an infinite time line it would h
Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously ? Once again we have an article that is pushing ignorance as wisdom. The truth is we can't say all that much with great certainty about the deep future or the deep past for that matter. We are still limited by our rather incomplete understanding. This situation is no different than Kelvin insisting the earth was between 20 and a 100 million years old based on his deep knowledge of thermodynamics but incomplete knowledge of physics.
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The parent posters' theories may be crackpot or science fiction, but it does seem that in absolute terms our knowledge of cosmology, while well grounded in theory, seems awfully speculative especially given our level of understanding of basic forces like gravity, let alone find concrete, experimentally verifiable theories for the beginning/end of the Universe.
I would argue that the size and timescales are also so vast relative to both our individual existence and existence as a species that we might not be
Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". (Score:5, Insightful)
I had this odd reflection recently: If you and your entire species never had eyesight, how would you know anything about light?
Think about this a minute. We know what light is so it seems extremely obvious. In fact, it almost *defines* what we mean by knowing in the first place: "To see the light"... "To illuminate" "Elucidate" Etc. Light is so synonymous with knowing, understanding, being aware of that we cannot just divorce our self from understanding it, or see from a perspective of there not being light (see? I can't even say a phrase like this without invoking light!).
But really think about it, and now think that there could be things in the Universe just like light which we simply do not have organs to perceive. How can we understand it? We have no conceptual framework for it perhaps. But it might be there. And it might be obvious - so obvious if we were beings who perceived it that it would be impossible to imagine existence being without it.
We are the primal tool. Just as Kant understood the limitations of knowing are intimately related with there already being the capacity to know inherent in the mind, so to the ultimate horizon of our understanding is primordially determined by our very being.
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I've heard a few good lectures on ontology and epistemology and every time I'm struck by the level of assumption and interpretation in what we know.
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"But really think about it, and now think that there could be things in the Universe just like light which we simply do not have organs to perceive."
I don't need to think. I *know* for certain that we don't have organs to percieve most of the electromagnetic spectrum, only a very short range we know as "light" and "heat".
"How can we understand it? We have no conceptual framework for it perhaps."
Maybe not. What a joy it would be if we could fathom something we could call -I'm going wildly speculative here
Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". (Score:5, Interesting)
I try every few years to "Feel" things differently :
Last year was Ultra-Violet light, it was amazing that with a UV-flashlight a neighbors garden was weird and wonderful
a few year back I hooked up headphones and tried listening to 30HZ sounds and below, could feel them but not hear them
and it seemed to make me feel sick.
I walk around with a blindfold a lot, makes me listen better
I try writing with my left hand and use tools ... their is almost no tools make for left handed people
this years test, I read somewhere that learning to discriminate time accurately is very hard to do.
So I bought an egg timer, and I am going to learn what 5 minutes really is. kinda like that ST-TNG where data try's to boil water.
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Don't be jackass. He's obviously eccentric. In the huge percentage case, he'll find nothing but personal amusement from this, at a real cost of time and money. But if he discovers something cool, you'll be lining up to slob his knob. He's playing a lottery with his time and money, but he's buying a ticket for society, not himself.
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Thank You.
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besides the thank you ... ( which I did as a separate item ) ... ...
here is an observation that might help
odd but interesting
rainy days people pick up the phone more, over 1000 calls made to location where it was raining and way over 3000 phone calls where it was sunny, of those 4000 calls 100 picked up in the rain, and only 60 picked up in sunny.
I've now been testing this out for positive or negative experience ( I'm a realtor by trade, so cold calling is important when I place a new property on the market
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We would still be able to sense radiative heat, so I don't think not having vision would be enough to blind us (heh) to the presence of light (as light is just a different wavelength of electromagnetic radiation).
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I think eventually, yes. Just as we are not able to sense the vast majority of EM radiation, we mapped the spectrum and can sense most of it - and all we started with was detection of radiative heat and visual light.
I do think it would have taken much longer to arrive at the understandings we currently hold, but I don't think being able to see visible light was critical to arrive where we are. We would come up with ways to communicate and think about information with the senses we had.
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It's very fair to point out that we could be missing something. In fact, we almost assuredly are! But it seems very unlikely to be something as fundamental as light.
If you were a member of a species that never used light in any way, you would eventually run into some phenomena that would require the experimental testing of this. For instance, your species would have dealt with heat through antiquity, and something very hot can transmit heat over a distance- but if you assumed this was all a fluid, or the
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Just look at dolphins. They suffer the unfortunate fate of having no hands and living in the water. Despite their enormous brains they haven't come far in understanding the universe and using that knowledge to their advantage.
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This question itself is very anthropocentric -- you have to define "eyesight," which is already based on our human experience of the world.
But if you break it down, "eyesight" is just specific cells reacting in specific manners to specific wavelengths of photons.
If you're in a system with little to no light, you simply wouldn't evolve that type of cell. Deep earth creatures are already known to have no eyes (or just have vestigial eyes left over from when their ancestors first crawled down a hole.)
Similarl
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Our physical makeup doesn't include an "extension" into the weak or strong nuclear forces -- at least not such that we'd recognize them using only our senses -- but we still have pretty solid theories on them which were discovered because the theories we already had (primarily QED at the time) simply weren't sufficient as we learned how to probe deeper and deeper into reality.
Or dark matter. We know there's something wrong with our physics because things don't line up. The exact same scenario Maxwell and
Medium.com (Score:5, Informative)
Again. It's like a plague.
Re:Medium.com (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot really needs to tag all story links with the destination domain, just like they already do in the comments.
Clickbait (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really just one notch above the "You won't believe what happens next when a single Mom discovers this one weird trick to lose a bit of belly fat!" clickbait. The theory of heat death of the universe [wikipedia.org] isn't even remotely recent news (unless you're living in the mid 1800's).
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I see it more as a simplistic children's picture book introduction to cosmology. It's good for that.
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I reckon Tesla and Bitcoin haven't been keeping up with their payola.
Re:Medium.com (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Medium.com (Score:5, Funny)
Intellectual Exercises (Score:4, Insightful)
These speculations are useful intellectual exercises, but should not be taken very seriously. Intelligent life may or may not last for 10^100 years, but the chances of any detailed theory of the long term future of the universe surviving 100 years is basically nil, and even 10 years is no sure thing.
For myself, I'd bet on a "big rip [arxiv.org]", except that I don't know how to collect on such a bet.
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These speculations are useful intellectual exercises, but should not be taken very seriously. Intelligent life may or may not last for 10^100 years, but the chances of any detailed theory of the long term future of the universe surviving 100 years is basically nil, and even 10 years is no sure thing.
The details may be a bit fuzzy, but entropy makes forever seem impossible and it doesn't rely on any particular macro model. The one exception is the Big Bang, which created a ridiculous amount of energy in a point source. It doesn't matter if we invent fission/fusion/anti-matter/warp drive to colonize the universe or Dyson's spheres to harness the power of entire stars, eventually all the stars run out of fuel and we die even if we've figured out how to rejuvenate and live "forever". Or we'll discover some
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In the last fifty years I've been following this stuff, I can remember several ideas. I may have been reading outdated books, but I remember arguments for the steady state Universe when I started hitting that section of the library. There was speculation on the "bang-bang-bang" theory, in which the Universe would end by collapsing back into a proto-Big Bang. The heat death of the Universe has been a popular theory for a long time, although the exact nature of the entropic Universe has varied, including
The last question (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The last question (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Siri's been drinking.
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Re:The last question (Score:5, Informative)
I prefer the last answer
"He threw the switch connecting all the galaxies computing power, and asked the question: " Is there a god""
From the speaker he heard the reply "Now there is"
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956 http://www.multivax.com/last_q... [multivax.com]
In our universe yes, but.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In our universe yes, but.. (Score:5, Informative)
Story in comic form:
http://bato.to/read/_/188371/t... [bato.to]
Big Rip (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought the top current working theory is that the expansion of space will eventually cause the Big Rip in roughly 25 Billion years from now. A slow "heat death" would be a step up from that.
Why not Just Link Textbook Chapters? (Score:5, Insightful)
The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.
Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
Mod parent down (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying. The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist. Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
the universe's expansion is accelerating...The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks.
Correct.
Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist. Now whether heat death or the 'big rip'
You jumped the gun!
/., by a wide margin.
The 'big rip' is a very specific model of accelerating expansion, one where the rate of acceleration itself is increasing, and the rip occurs at a finite time in the future. That model relies on dark energy being not the cosmological constant, but something known as phantom energy. There is no evidence whatsoever that the accelerating expansion we're observing corresponds to a type that will lead to a big rip. The more likely scenario is that gravitationally bound concentrations of matter such as the local cluster of galaxies will remain so including at the timescales where black holes would have all evaporated, baryons would have decayed, and quantum tunneling would have smeared out the structure of matter. In this case, the real issue becomes growing entropy within the Hubble volume.
The point your post should have made is that the solution proposed by Freeman Dyson and discussed in TFA — that of slowing down life/thinking processes at a rate slightly higher than the loss of available energy differential usable for driving these life/thinking processes — has two fatal flaws, which were pointed out almost immediately after Dyson came out with his proposal (but TFA, sadly, omits).
The first one is that, as time tends to infinity, the probability tends to certainty that a quantum fluctuation will cause any possible timing mechanism used to control the life/thinking processes to fail. Eventually, the expected tick will never come, and that will be it.
The second one is something much more severe than just failing to allow for life/intelligence to exist indefinitely. Since our Hubble volume will contain finite amount of matter-energy forever, the Bekenstein bound applies and thus the Hubble volume can only contain a finite number of distinguishable quantum states. After some point, all possible thoughts in that Hubble volume would have been thought, and any new ones will be repeats of ones that previously occurred. Even if you could be alive in this situation, would you want to?
PS I do agree that this blog is overrepresented on
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Conjecture (Score:4, Interesting)
baryons would have decayed
Actually that is conjecture as there is currently no evidence that protons decay. I'll grant that the expectation is that there are high energy processes which violate baryon number and if this is true then it should be possible for a proton to decay. However there is a simple way around this: suppose the initial conditions of the Big Bang just included a slight excess of baryons? No B violation is needed and protons are absolutely stable.
As you can probably guess I'm a particle physicist and not a cosmologist. However even in the dark energy models presumably a 'big rip' condition is reached in the voids between gravitationally bound objects since there is nothing to stop the acceleration? If so then surely the implications for the stable pockets is not really known since all our understanding of causal disconnection is based on GR which would no longer be valid in the regions between the galaxies.
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By the way, even if protons don't decay in the usual manner, there are alternate ways in which protons might eventually be destroyed, involving virtual black holes and other processes.
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But then how would StartsWithABang put food on the table? His blog clearly can't survive with every single post being reblogged on slashdot. We should be clicking on medium links for his greater good.
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It's Wrong (Score:2)
Because quantum mechanics.
If we end up in eternal de Sitter space (looks likely), then we can look forward to existing as an infinite sequence of Boltzmann Brains.
That's a great picture of Freeman Dyson.
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**See chosen answer at http://physics.stackexchange.c... [stackexchange.com]
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Poincaré recurrence probably applies to our universe**, so the sequence of Boltzmann brains
I don't buy that. Surely the horizon in de Sitter space is eternally expanding, so the entropy on the horizon's surface is always increasing. We can walk through an expanding phase space without needing to recur.
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How do we really know? (Score:2)
Eventually, it all must end
How do we really know, until we give it a try?
Sounds like (Score:2)
The opening to a Firesign Theater album.
An open letter to SWABB (Score:2)
Bennett and timothy are sugar-posters compared to you. Would you please in all sincerity fuck the fuck fucking OFF. Or die in a fire. Your shit-posts are an insult to any shred of intelligence in this finite universe.
Bennett Haselton (Score:2)
For a while I really missed Bennett Haselton's insightful and regular commentary. But I think we have finally found his reincarnation.
The prodigal son returns. Bask in his greatness and bow before him just as all slashdot editors have.
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I'll take this over Bennett any day. At least I don't have to scroll very far to get to the shit talking.
Pink Floyd said it best. (Score:2)
There'll be war, there'll be peace.
But everything one day will cease.
All the iron turned to rust;
All the proud men turned to dust.
And so all things, time will mend.
So this song will end
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nihilist arbys (Score:5, Funny)
+1 (Score:2)
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There is a limit (Score:2)
and apparently we've already passed it...
What about that theory... (Score:2)
...that says there might be a way to do an infinite amount of computation in a finite time?
No, I don't remember the details. No, IANAP. But I'm sure it was a thing, once.
Badly written (Score:3)
This is a very dumb article. First off, just because he argues that the livespan of intelligence is not infinite, it is finite, as if he knew the number. Second, his basic argument is that entropy reduces the differenctial between the energy levels of point A and point B. Sure it dies. And the amount of energy differential approchases zero. BUT IT NEVER GETS TO ZERO. And the level of energy differenctial needed to support intelligence will probably 'approach' zero also, but never get to zero. Even today artificial intelligence requires a tiny fraction of the energy (differential) that it needed five decades ago.
This guy must be assuming also that Physics will stop dead; that nothing will ever be discovered. What about alternate universes? How's your predictor function there?
No thanks; not well done.
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> is not infinite, it is finite
Yes, that's basically definition.
> as if he knew the number
Why would he have to know the number? I can tell you that your lifespan is finite, but I can't tell you the exact second you will die. Knowing that its finite doesn't require knowing exactly what finite number it will come to.
> IT NEVER GETS TO ZERO
Irrelevant, because we're interested in usable energy. If the energy differential is at its minimum (non-zero) value and you try to extract exactly that much ene
What if the time stops? (Score:2)
If there is no more change in entropy, there won't be any time. Is that then infinite?
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There will still be time. Figuring out how to measure it without any entropy is another question (perhaps you could measure the rate of expansion of the universe. Assuming its accelerating at a fairly consistent rate, measuring that rate at any particular point would give you a measure of the amount of time passed since your last measurement. Of course then you have the question of how you could figure out whether the rate of acceleration has changed.)
You could also perhaps measure the rate of zero-point
we don't understand the universe yet, so don't... (Score:2)
Is there any way to reverse entropy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Insufficient data for meaningful answer.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
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At the very end, all that will remain is a sign floating innocuously through space as a lonely reminder that yes, once intelligent life flourished here. The sign will read:
Burma Shave
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Asimov (Score:3)
Theres a short story by Isaac Asimov
The Last Question
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Make sure to also read The Last Answer, as well.
The Last Question (Score:2)
Can entropy be reversed?
No points for you if you don't get the reference.
Breaking news! (Score:2)
A theory that's been around since the 1800s [wikipedia.org] is still around!
I have nothing to back it up, but... (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:2)
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Exactly; there's nothing here that's not in the Wikipedia page "Ultimate fate of the universe." It's not even entertainingly or uniquely presented.
Wait.... (Score:2)
...I thought with Facebook we were already past the point of intelligence existing!
As opposed to what? (Score:2)
an Infinite Limit?
Just remember ... (Score:2)
Time is relative (Score:2)
Intelligence. (Score:2)
So, this intelligence thing, when does it start?
"Five Ages of the Universe" physics book (Score:2)
Re:God exists outside these limits (Score:4, Informative)
Evidence please.
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But not really, because there's an unfathomable amount of time until this matters and humanity are some determined sons of bitches.
Life finds a way?
Speaking of a determined son of a bitch, you let me know when you find anything that can survive a black hole.
Re:Well that's depressing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Black holes dissipate over time.
Yes, but very slowly. A black hole of one solar mass would take about 2e67 years to evaporate [wikipedia.org] through Hawking radiation. The time to evaporate goes up as the cube of the mass, and some black holes are 10 billion solar masses, so they would take more than 1e97 years to evaporate.
Any current black hole with a mass larger than earth's moon would actually be growing, since the cosmic microwave background being absorbed is more than the Hawking radiation being emitted. They will not start to shrink until the universe cools off and the CMB dissipates, far in the future.
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So then we have a long lasting energy source!
Re:Well that's depressing. (Score:5, Interesting)
So then we have a long lasting energy source!
Yes, very long. But a solar mass black hole would have a temperature of 60 nano-Kelvins, and would emit 1e-30 watts. If you used all the emitted energy from the black hole to charge a AA battery, many of the protons in the battery might decay [wikipedia.org] before it is fully charged (assuming protons have a half-life of ~1e33 years, which has not been experimentally verified).
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In general human intelligence tries to turn back natural entropy. And we are getting better at it.
I expect given time and we don't kill ourselves out of some silly social/political disagreements we cold in time find ways to "repair" the universe.
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In general human intelligence tries to turn back natural entropy. And we are getting better at it.
Only within limits. Think of human ignorance as a doughnut. It is shrinking because the "hole" of things we are learning to do is expanding. But it is also shrinking from the outside as we learn more and more things that are impossible to do. The more human knowledge grows, the more confirmation there is that some things, such as faster than light travel, reversing entropy, etc. are fundamentally impossible.
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And then there is brain dead simple stuff, like "dark matter", which happens to be so red- or blueshifted that we can't directly observe its existence. How hard is that grasp? Yet no one does.
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There's nothing special about our universe
Not easily impressed, are you?
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That particular method won't work, since stars "burn" fuel and eventually all will be gone. However, combining general relativity with quantum physics might allow us to control the shape of spacetime in a way that basically amounts to creating new "baby" universes.
Alternatively, an expanding universe can not actually experience heat death, since the expansion itself causes the ambient tempe