4 ms·

Anything can happen != Everything will happen A universe of infinite possibilities does not have to include a particular possibility or set of possibilities.

• eterm 11y ago
  Infinity can be surprisingly sparse.
• michaelcampbell 11y ago
  Seen from the other side, given a universe of infinite possibilities, what's the probability that a given thing WON'T happen?
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    The universe is actually quite bounded in time. Almost anything weird we can think of ... will never happen. Not enough time.
    • stingraycharles 11y ago
      How is the universe bounded by time? Perhaps it's bounded by our perception of time, but that doesn't mean time cannot be infinite.
      • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Because things can only happen until entropy heat-death. Then there's not enough energy to do anything. Stuff stops happening. And that's in, what, 20 trillion years? So bounded. { edited: trillion } Ha! 10^30 years by some estimates. So, a thousand billion billion billion years. Anyway, bounded.
        • lomnakkus 11y ago
          I believe heat death is something like on the order of trillions of years. ... but there are also built-in assumptions in that calculation. For example that certain constants will remain constant. EDIT: Typo
        • jacquesm 11y ago
          > And that's in, what, 20 billion years? So bounded. That's not even close to the most conservative estimates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Bang_to_Heat_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba...
        • raattgift 11y ago
          Glad you did the edit. Still off by a lot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
    • raattgift 11y ago
      Numbers aside, there is nothing in our universe that suggests that we shouldn't take the concept of future timelike infinity seriously, and some evidence that we should, notably the accelerating metric expansion of space. That in turn gives us a receding horizon, which gives us Unruh radiation, which gives us fluctuations (and there are other sources for those), and that in turn poses all sorts of theoretical problems ranging from outright Poincaré recurrence to "mere" Boltzmann brains. Getting rid of these when you take infinity seriously is a theoretical challenge. If we could prove that the universe will not expand forever, that would be a nice outcome of research in physical cosmology.