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Science

There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe 205

Posted by timothy from the never-outlives-the-ballot-box dept.
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.
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There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe More

There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe

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  • What joy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31, 2015 @03:53AM (#49808155)

    Happy Sunday, everyone!

  • Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31, 2015 @03:58AM (#49808167)

    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.

    • Cosmologists know everything
      Just ask them.

      • No, your wrong. You need to ask the question carefully to Chuck Norris and observe ( from a safe distance ) the leg-kick-sweep

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jamu ( 852752 )

      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]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altrag ( 195300 )

        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

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altrag ( 195300 )

        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

    • 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

  • Medium.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by narcc ( 412956 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @03:58AM (#49808169) Journal

    Again. It's like a plague.

  • Intellectual Exercises (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mbone ( 558574 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @03:59AM (#49808171)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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

    • 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)

    by Mats Svensson ( 1745652 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @04:25AM (#49808229)
    I asked The Siri about that, and it said: -I dont know what you mean by : How ban the not account couch entropy of he universe beer ass lively deceased?"

  • In our universe yes, but.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by LongearedBat ( 1665481 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @04:37AM (#49808255)
    ...with the help of MultiVAX [multivax.com] intelligence will... (Won't spoil it for those who haven't read it yet.)

  • Big Rip (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @04:39AM (#49808257) Journal

    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)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @04:39AM (#49808259) Journal
    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

    • Mod parent down (Score:5, Informative)

      by Prune ( 557140 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @06:02AM (#49808401)

      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!

      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 /., by a wide margin.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Prune ( 557140 )
        So much for proof-reading. I didn't intend to quote the full post, just the subsequent selections.

      • Conjecture (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @12:01PM (#49809421) Journal

        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.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Prune ( 557140 )
          Proton decay is a really minor point, because it doesn't affect any of the more fundamental barriers (tunneling, quantum fluctuations, the Bekenstein bound). If all baryons decayed, and that was the only problem, life could potentially still exist in some other form, until larger timescales when the other problems take over.

          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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Prune ( 557140 )
      Poincaré recurrence probably applies to our universe**, so the sequence of Boltzmann brains is not going to be infinite. On a more subjective note, I think that (at least the perception of) continuity is a central aspect of conscious existence, so Boltzmann brains highly dispersed throughout eternity lacks appeal.

      **See chosen answer at http://physics.stackexchange.c... [stackexchange.com]

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Prune ( 557140 )
          Wrong, the horizon is not eternally expanding! As you asymptotically approach de Sitter space, the horizon becomes purely a function of the cosmological constant (because it's a function of the curvature, which is determined by the cosmological constant in de Sitter space). You can see the equation, and some even tighter bounds in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/00... [arxiv.org]

  • Eventually, it all must end

    How do we really know, until we give it a try?

  • The opening to a Firesign Theater album.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • I'll take this over Bennett any day. At least I don't have to scroll very far to get to the shit talking.

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Prune ( 557140 )
      I was so disturbed by having ended up rummaging through yet another medium.com slashvertisement thread that I wondered about the provenance of these lyrics and searched for them, without noticing the title of your post until just now, after I've been listening to the album online for the past ten minutes.

  • nihilist arbys (Score:5, Funny)

    by bitrex ( 859228 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @06:23AM (#49808451)
    Put my corpse in a canoe. push it through the drive thru as a lit arrow sets my rotting flesh aflame. Curse the godless sky. Bury me at Arbys

  • and apparently we've already passed it...

  • ...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.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Altrag ( 195300 )

      > 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

  • If there is no more change in entropy, there won't be any time. Is that then infinite?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Altrag ( 195300 )

      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 you should not assume that we cannot live forever, because if you assume that we cannot live forever, then you are making a decision that could end your life prematurely. You see, I am a cryonicist, and I assume that it is possible I can live forever. If I assume right now that I cannot live forever, I may make some decision that forecloses immortality. We do not really understand the universe yet. It may be possible to live forever. Yeah, yeah, I understand thermo

  • Is there any way to reverse entropy? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lunchlady55 ( 471982 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @08:39AM (#49808703)

    Insufficient data for meaningful answer.

    http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xyrus ( 755017 )

      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

  • Asimov (Score:3)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Sunday May 31, 2015 @08:44AM (#49808713)

    Theres a short story by Isaac Asimov

    The Last Question

  • Can entropy be reversed?

    No points for you if you don't get the reference.

  • A theory that's been around since the 1800s [wikipedia.org] is still around!

  • Every species becomes extinct, eventually. Human arrogance doesn't want to hear it, but rest assured, some day it will all end.
  • If this is "news" shouldn't it be new? I saw Freeman Dyson give this talk in 1979.

    • 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.

  • ...I thought with Facebook we were already past the point of intelligence existing!

  • an Infinite Limit?

  • ... to turn out the lights.
  • The perception of time negates the concept of "end". If I were sufficiently intelligent to read every word of a novel in one instant, the way I can recognize letters as a word, the novel would still be the same length as if I had to read it a word at a time.

  • So, this intelligence thing, when does it start?

  • This 1990s book comes to a similar conclusion, but illustrates it with how life and intelligence might work. Baryons decay after 10^40 years. Black holes of every size evaporate by 10^100 years. There would be a near absolute sea of leptons remaining in the universe, some that might form positronium atoms the size of a current galaxy. A single bit of computation might take eons to effect in this scenario. (There may be a revision for new physics since the 1990s say the authors.)

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