Universe Closer To Heat Death Than Once Thought 237
TapeCutter writes "In a paper soon to be published (PDF) in the Astrophysical Journal, Australian researchers have estimated the entropy of the universe is about 30 times higher than previous estimates. According to their research, super-massive black holes 'are the largest contributor to the entropy of the observable universe, contributing at least an order of magnitude more entropy than previously estimated.' For those of us who like their science in the form of a car analogy, Dr. Lineweaver compared their results to a car's gas tank. He states, 'It's a bit like looking at your gas gauge and saying "I thought I had half a gas tank, but I only have a quarter of a tank."'"
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
OMG!!! (Score:5, Funny)
So as well as peak oil now we have to worry about peak universe?
Re:OMG!!! (Score:5, Funny)
...don't worry, the free market will save the universe (by making it so damned expensive to live here that corporations will arise and find us other universes to exploit, naturally...)
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Forget global warming. Your SUV is causing universal warming!
Re:OMG!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Al [wikipedia.org]? Is that you?
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No you get more just like the universe but much smaller. Think super novas vs the big bang and how they get less frequent over time...
Re:OMG!!! (Score:4, Funny)
So as well as peak oil now we have to worry about peak universe?
Worrying isn't enough--it's time to ACT!
Assuming, of course, that this is anthropogenic entropy...
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Entropy increasing, Slashdot-style (Score:5, Funny)
So how much entropy does the fact that this story is a duplicate add to the universe?
Re:Entropy increasing, Slashdot-style (Score:5, Insightful)
[Grrr. Have to thwart the anti-caps filter. Thx Slashdot - Destroyer of Jokes.]
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Shoulda' brought a bigger bottle.
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Re:Entropy increasing, Slashdot-style (Score:5, Informative)
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Transhuman bullshit.
Thank god people die. Look how they treat each other, as it is.
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Hmm, let's put this together shall we? When people's lifetimes were extended they had more time to think, become wiser, less concerned with death and the future of their p
Re:Entropy increasing, Slashdot-style (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh-huh. The humans only become 'transhumanist' once they've already discovered Hyperspace and are colonizing the galaxy. The transhumanism/immortality is used as a device to explore the fact that even "immortal" humans must die along with the universe. It's a brilliant way to consider entropy and heat death and a cyclical universe and even what it means to be God... ... not endorse that Kurzweil slop. Sorry you can't see past that.
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Nice link, thanks.
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Mod parent +1, Multivac
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4 .
Re:Entropy increasing, Slashdot-style (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna cry if entropy ever becomes "the new CO2".
Well, we were going to stage a protest to have the government stop the eventual heat death of the universe, but then we realized the energy spent in actually carrying through with the protest and the bureaucracy needed to legislate it would hasten the eventual heat death of the universe by a factor of 100.
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Re:Entropy increasing, Slashdot-style (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody(outside of physicists doing thought experiments and Kurzweil planning his next move) really cares anymore; because subsequent research has uncovered such a long list of stuff that will almost definitely kill us before the heat death of the universe does.
30x higher than whose estimate? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:30x higher than whose estimate? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, you now have about 3 weeks.
Please get your affairs in order , and top up your central heating tank.
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If enough of us get our affairs in order maybe we can reverse the process! Let's all go party^H^H^H^H^H conference in Copenhagen and work it all out.
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Plan: To use a global increase in entropy to generate a local decrease in entropy.
Not so sure... (Score:3, Interesting)
...given the not-quite-set-in-concrete nature of theoretical physics, string theory, and especially M-theory (...don't like this universe? we got more!), I don't think I'm going to sell the house and walk around in animal skins just yet.
(definitely not saying that entropy itself doesn't exist - that much has been proven. OTOH, I suspect there's a whole lot more going on out there/here/everywhere that we simply do not know about yet, eh?)
Besides, the universe had damned well better not die - at least not until I get my flying car, copy of Duke Nuken' Forever (running on HURD), and an army of Linux fembots with a penchant for evil, damnit!
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...given the not-quite-set-in-concrete nature of theoretical physics, string theory, and especially M-theory (...don't like this universe? we got more!), I don't think I'm going to sell the house and walk around in animal skins just yet.
I agree. Given the number of times the word "theory" is used, I'm leaning more towards questioning any "facts" here...Just sayin'.
I believe there's a theory that states the true definition of theory as "guesstimate", but don't quote me on that.
Singularity (Score:2)
Ah well, in a few decades we'll have the technological singularity and the entity resulting of that will be so smart that not only it'll exist out of the entire universe, but it'll also prevent its death or make sure its death will result in a new Big Bang!
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It may be that all the black holes collapse on each other resulting in another big bang. What is causing the expansion of the universe may be that the universe is round in some unseen dimention, and it's actully gravity pulling it apart.
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Death is a misnomer. Physical processes will be different and much slower as entropy increases, but there is no hard limit which is ever reached. In 30 billion years the descendants of humans might have a million year lifespan which seems to them to be the same length as ours does to us. They just have less available free energy. The beings that lived a few seconds after the big bang had whole civilizations which lasted microseconds.
As far as we need to go? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
And where is it that we're going?
Re:As far as we need to go? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
And where is it that we're going?
Oblivion.
Re:As far as we need to go? (Score:5, Funny)
to the grave
Re:As far as we need to go? (Score:5, Funny)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, of course.
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the apple tablet announcement tomorrow.
Does it bother anyone else (Score:5, Funny)
Does it bother anyone else that a guy named "Lineweaver" is making a car analogy that doesn't involve alcohol?
"Fortunately"?! (Score:5, Funny)
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
Yes, fortunately for us, maybe... but what about our children's children's children's ... (* 10^80) children? Won't someone please think of them?!?!
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you gotta be kidding, in less than half a billion years the expansion of the sun will make life impossible on earth, the oceans will boil away. Ironic that the time scale to attain life with civilization to evolve on a place like earth is almost on the order of how long a sun makes life possible before it roasts the life incubator. Maybe intelligent life is possible on a place like oceans of moons of jupiter, they might have longer.
If you think we'll go somewhere else, that's very optimistic considering
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Oh noes! (Score:5, Funny)
- seeing a computer which can run Crysis?
- Duke Nukem: Forever release date?
- Hurd 1.0?
- kdawson leaving a story alone and publishing something accurate?
:-O
Good news, there is hope (Score:2)
One down, four more to go:
http://www.pidjin.net/2010/01/25/iwish/ [pidjin.net]
The universe could go back to low entropy (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because the laws of physics IN THIS UNIVERSE prevent that doesn't mean it can't happen since by definition the low entropy state the universe started in was created (in some form) by alternative laws of physics possibly outside this universe since the laws we know didn't exist at that point.
There's no reason why these alternative physical laws couldn't suddenly kick back in when the universe reaches a certain entropy state and start to reverse the whole process back to zero. Some people would say time would then be going in reverse but this doesn't need to be the case.
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That's a good story, but it provides absolutely zero insight into the questions that the parent post asked.
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Unfortunately completely different laws of physics are no more conducive to human survival than heat death is.
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When someone says "in this universe/reality," I'm always reminded of http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1595 [smbc-comics.com]
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What if the universe right now is like water, and everything in behaves consistently for the state, but what if some 'universal' threshold is passed, and the universe 'freezes'? The 'frozen' universe would be physically consistent as well, but in a completely different way. However, it's impossible to know how, because we can't 'freeze' the universe ourselves and observe the difference.
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This, BTW, is how physicists describe what happened after The Big Bang when the One Universal Physical Force began to split into strong, weak, electromagnetic & gravitational. Fudd's second law of opposition, I belive.
The Universe is an infinite loop (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Universe is an infinite loop (Score:4, Funny)
So on the previous iteration, a man named, coincidentally "Douglas Adams", in a language totally unrelated to but oddly identical to English, wrote a series of books where he concluded that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 41?
Re:The Universe is an infinite loop .. here's why (Score:2, Interesting)
no problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that red dwarfs are expected to last trillions of years (no red dwarf has ever died. The universe is too young), we just need to move to a planet around one of them, assuming they have habitable planets.
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"(no red dwarf has ever died."
How about the BBC comedy series with Craig Charles and Chris Barrie?
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How far do we need to go? (Score:2)
You're saying that now. :-P
two possible futures now cut shorter.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Star formation is believed to end about 10^14 years from now, the total entropy of universe only affects events after that. Not a worry. If protons decay with 10^32 year half-life, then practically all nucleons decay after 10^40 years, which leaves all black holes to evaporate after about 10^99 years.
If protons don't decay as we suspect, then universe slowly tunnels to iron-56, (light nuclei via fusion and heavier via fission) in about 10^1500 years, which coalesce into black holes or neutron stars in about 10^10^76 years (yup, double exponent).
So quite frankly, this bit about more entropy means little for life as we know it, though if life can arise by some heat-engine powered means (due to temperature differences only). still the time scales are staggering.
but all mute if Big Rip is possible, we might only have 22 billion years left!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip [wikipedia.org]
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We'll just adapt.
I mean time goes slower when you're closer to a black hole, amiright?
(in theory)
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can't adapt when there is no way at all to do work, and moreover no way to store information. Pud should make website FuckedUniverse, that's what it will be
heat death (Score:2)
I liked the post above a lot.
Heat death arguments are all about the laws of thermodynamics and there are probably three good criticisms.
the experimental basis last i looked was some system in equillibrium with a container around it and instrumentation outside the container. so in the heat death argument there is an implication that the universe is in equillibrium and the idea of a container and an observer outside the universe is a meaniful concept. To be clear, I am not particularly looking here at somet
Re:heat death (Score:4, Informative)
emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong. consider events around the end of the 19th century. thermodynamics was around. the equations were established. in fact, there was, based on a flakey idea that physics was finite, the thought that we knew everything. There were a few unimportant oddities. One of them was radioactivity. so the thermo equations on the blackboard got rewritten. right at that point, thermodynamics did not hold. so what does this say about the fundamental nature of the universe?
The only thing that thermodynamics can't explain is why aren't we already at maximum entropy? Everything else that we know of (such as radioactivity) is fully consistent with thermodynamics.
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The new hot theoretical speculations hold that gravity is a thermodynamic effect too, not a regular force. This dude explains. [scientificblogging.com]
Still highly speculative, mind you, but definitely hot stuff.
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as far as "machine", "reductionist" might be more useful if you know a bit
on what thermo explains, you miss the point that 19ty century thermodynamics did not explain the universe and while very radically I do not expect that kind of truth from science, the possibility that for humans, fundamental science truths change says something about the universe that is in conflict with thermodynamics. the question might be approached from say objective truth, espistomology, or what I like, the existence of creativ
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actually, thermodynamics just was expanded to include work by radiation, work by changing quantum energy level, and also information theory. Heat death of universe refers to inability to do meaningful work over any non-quantum time period.
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hmm, nice response
just talking, suppose i laborously create some order and stick in an out of the way place. presumedly there would necessarily be a material substrata. if we do not think protons decay, the order might be around for even the time scales under consideration. then at any point, the order could be used to do work, then the universe up to that point has not reached heat death
also, heat death assumes I think physics is finite. emperically, the detailed claims of finite have not held up. and
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emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong.
Why do people say dumb shit like this? There's probably nothing more empirically right.
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I did some underraduate physics through say quantum electrodynamics. You can figure that I once knew something about thermodynamics. On the other hand, that you do not recognize your assumption that the universe is made up of hard little balls of shit does not mean that is what the universe is made of.
So One Theory says to another... (Score:2)
...but all mute if Big Rip is possible, we might only have 22 billion years left!
Er, from Big Bang to Big Rip?
Cue sexual innuendo and large space fart jokes in 3...2...
Re:two possible futures now cut shorter.... (Score:4, Funny)
10^640 years should be enough for anyone.
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Only 22 billion years left? Nobody panic! ...We still have time to exit the Universe in a "disorderly" manner.
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it's a pun, which fell on deaf ears
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Oh no! Call Diane Duane! (Score:2)
Quick! slap a tax on black holes (Score:2)
Oh noes! (Score:2)
He states, 'It's a bit like looking at your gas gauge and saying "I thought I had half a gas tank, but I only have a quarter of a tank."'
Yes, that's *exactly* what it is like. (eyeroll)
You know, not everything in science needs to or should be translated into every day terms.
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I'm not clear on what you mean by this... can you please explain it in terms of a car analogy?
Re:Oh noes! (Score:4, Funny)
It's like when you have a car, but the car is only useful for driving around in, not so much for explaining to people how you got there, and why you're naked and covered in potato peels, and why there are 17 empty cans of beer on the passenger seat, and why an alien baby is breaking out through your stomach and ellen riply is too busy fighting off the terminator from the future so she can't help you, but "new spock" is speaking in some weird irish accent for no apparent reason. We've all been there.
Should be in "idle" ? (Score:2)
I have a few problems with this post.
1) It's a dupe.
2) The article it refers to hasn't been published/peer reviewed yet.
3) Finding out we have 350 quadrillion years to go instead of 700 quadrillion years, is utterly meaningless at this point, since estimates that far wide and ranging will doubtless change a LOT in the X million years it will be before it becomes even remotely meaningful to human science.
Our ignorance about super massive black holes, and the number of them in the universe, already set the er
OMG, Universal Warming^H Climate Change (Score:2)
don't worry (Score:2)
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html [multivax.com]
Facts not in eviedence (Score:3, Insightful)
Black holes can contain lots of usable energy, for those that might be in the black holes.
Re:Facts not in evidence (Score:4, Informative)
Black holes can contain lots of usable energy, for those that might be in the black holes.
No, there's a large amount of energy inside, but it's all in the form of a high temperature, and there's no colder heat reservoir available to anyone down there that would try to extract useful work from it. (Since nothing outside the singularity is reachable once you're there.) Useful work could be extracted from outside the hole by letting stuff fall in, like the way a hydroelectric generator works, but not if there's nothing outside left to fall in.
There's an asymptotic limit to the universe's entropy that is approached but not necessarily reached, where everything would have fallen into one massive hole, free to explore an immensely large number of quantum states available to it at its high temperature. When you fall in your mass contributes to the number of states (and the temperature). The entropy rises with the logarithm of the number of states. A black hole singularity is postulated as being some single particle with a complicated wave function composed of a large number of available component states.
Deep Space 9 (Score:3, Funny)
Patrick: "How much time do we have left?"
Jack: "Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most."
Patrick: "Oh, no."
Speed increase or decrease? (Score:2)
how far? (Score:2)
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
And just how far is it that we need to go?
I understand that the universe will out-live me by several orders of magnitude... And my children... And my children's children... Etc...
I understand that the Earth will be consumed by our sun long before the universe dies...
But I'm just wondering what "as far as we need to go" means...
So... (Score:2)
Warming isn't just global, its universal!
As my professor said... (Score:2, Funny)
No Problem (Score:3, Funny)
We'll just have the Logopolitans open a charged vacuum emboitment to E-Space. Entropy problem solved!
"...will get us as far as we need to go..." (Score:3, Insightful)
And just how far is that?
Re:bah (Score:4, Funny)
WHOOOOOOSH!!! (Score:2)
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it is... in base 2.
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C'mon man, at least give the Hawk-man [mchawking.com] his credit.
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Entropy is a statistical thing. When you consume energy, it looses order. A charged capacitor is very ordered: You have a positive charge on one side, and a negative charge on the other. When you hook it up to a lightbulb, the energy will transform into heat and light. But try as you might, warming and shining light on a lightbulb hooked up to a capacitor will not charge it up again, because out of all the ways this light and warmth can go, very few of them act towards charging the capacitor.
Ordered energy