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Humans are doomed to die at the Heat Death of the universe. Science tells us our universe had a definite beginning, the Big Bang, and that this event will not r

Humans are doomed to die at the Heat Death of the universe. Science tells us our universe had a definite beginning, the Big Bang, and that this event will not repeat: there will be no Big Crunch, no reboot. SciFi authors prefer to ignore science so they can imagine immortal humans who survive the cycle of infinitely rebooting universes. If we colonize the stars and galaxies we can postpone our death a few trillion trillion years, but eventually the last star will snuff out, the last black hole will evaporate, and there will be no energy left to power the phenomena of intelligence and consciousness, and life shall be no more. The last humans will have to bravely face certain and inevitable death just as our prehistoric ancestors did, and just as you and I must.

deanCommie 6y ago
That's choosing an arbitrary finite point on an infinite spectrum. What is beyond the universe? What is beyond time? What IS the universe? We simply do not know the answers to these questions. Hell, we barely understand what consciousness and sentience is. Maybe by the time we make it to the heat death of the universe, we will have answered these questions, and can reverse entropy. Maybe not. But the quest to get these answers and to overcome our elements is what gives us purpose. Everything we do in our mortal lives stuck on the rock of our birth, is in one way or another, in the quest to achieve that. Some people find that too overwhelming, and choose either religion or nihilism. I think there is a middle ground.
- orbgirlgi98 6y ago
  You don't need to fully understand something to know that it will die. I don't need to know what the billions of transistors in a MacBook CPU do in order to understand that the CPU will cease to compute if placed in an incinerator and burned to gas and ash. I don't need to understand how the human brain works in order to understand that it will no longer work when our star balloons to a red giant and incinerates the brain to gas and ash. You don't need to understand things in order to understand that they will end when physically destroyed. Everything in our universe will be physically destroyed at the Heat Death. Time, Space, Matter, and Energy will all end. There is no "middle ground". It will all end. If there is an eternal God who exists outside the universe and who will sustain the immortality of souls, as Plato thought 2400 years ago and all noteable Judeo-Christian philosophers have held, then something of humans will exist after the Heat Death. Otherwise, we know it will all die, and we don't need to know how it works to know that it will die.
  - deanCommie 6y ago
    If there is an eternal god, why couldn't we become it?
jmfldn 6y ago
Science tells us no such thing, and when you're talking the ultimate fate of the universe then there is no consensus, just different theories. There's the big freeze, the big rip, the big crunch... all manner of ideas. Then there is the universe itself. Well what is that? What about multiverses etc? Just to take one such theory emerging from heat death ideas. Once the fundamental touchstones of mass and structure disappear, scale also disappears. The infinitely large universe becomes physically identical to an infinitesimal one, and is reborn in a new Big Bang — with all the mass and energy of the previous universe once again jammed together into a tiny space. These sort of cyclic cosmology ideas are held by prominent physicists including the recent Nobel prize winner, Roger Penrose. Like all us, I have no idea what is true but its hardly a closed subject.
- orbgirlgi98 6y ago
  Scientific observation has ruled out the Big Crunch. The Big Rip happens in the remote future if the equation of state parameter w is less than -1, where w is the ratio of dark energy pressure to its energy density. If this is true it is only a minor detail of the Heat Death as far as life within this universe is concerned: all biological life and biological consciousness will end whether the Big Rip happens before the Heat Death or does not happen. (If there is non-biological Life after Death as various religions maintain, then consciousness will survive the Heat Death, but otherwise it will not.) The Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) of Penrose is speculative and has zero strong empirical evidence to support it. They've studied the CMB but it has made no testable and verifiable predictions. The astrophysics community at large sees the observational inevitability of the end of the universe as we know it: the universe is flying apart and cooling, and nothing can change this.
  - jmfldn 6y ago
    The universe flying apart and cooling doesn't contradict Penrose, it's part of the theory just to address that point. An infinite structureless, massless universe is a singularity, or so the theory goes. Assuming this was "settled" (whatever that means in science let alone theoretical physics), mavericks like Penrose are frequently proven right. 'Kuhnian' paradigm shifts are the norm in science, particularly in a field like this. Expect many more...
hermitcrab 6y ago
"In the long run we are all dead." Keynes.

deanCommie 6y ago

That's choosing an arbitrary finite point on an infinite spectrum. What is beyond the universe? What is beyond time? What IS the universe? We simply do not know the answers to these questions. Hell, we barely understand what consciousness and sentience is. Maybe by the time we make it to the heat death of the universe, we will have answered these questions, and can reverse entropy. Maybe not. But the quest to get these answers and to overcome our elements is what gives us purpose. Everything we do in our mortal lives stuck on the rock of our birth, is in one way or another, in the quest to achieve that. Some people find that too overwhelming, and choose either religion or nihilism. I think there is a middle ground.

orbgirlgi98 6y ago
You don't need to fully understand something to know that it will die. I don't need to know what the billions of transistors in a MacBook CPU do in order to understand that the CPU will cease to compute if placed in an incinerator and burned to gas and ash. I don't need to understand how the human brain works in order to understand that it will no longer work when our star balloons to a red giant and incinerates the brain to gas and ash. You don't need to understand things in order to understand that they will end when physically destroyed. Everything in our universe will be physically destroyed at the Heat Death. Time, Space, Matter, and Energy will all end. There is no "middle ground". It will all end. If there is an eternal God who exists outside the universe and who will sustain the immortality of souls, as Plato thought 2400 years ago and all noteable Judeo-Christian philosophers have held, then something of humans will exist after the Heat Death. Otherwise, we know it will all die, and we don't need to know how it works to know that it will die.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  If there is an eternal god, why couldn't we become it?

jmfldn 6y ago

Science tells us no such thing, and when you're talking the ultimate fate of the universe then there is no consensus, just different theories. There's the big freeze, the big rip, the big crunch... all manner of ideas. Then there is the universe itself. Well what is that? What about multiverses etc? Just to take one such theory emerging from heat death ideas. Once the fundamental touchstones of mass and structure disappear, scale also disappears. The infinitely large universe becomes physically identical to an infinitesimal one, and is reborn in a new Big Bang — with all the mass and energy of the previous universe once again jammed together into a tiny space. These sort of cyclic cosmology ideas are held by prominent physicists including the recent Nobel prize winner, Roger Penrose. Like all us, I have no idea what is true but its hardly a closed subject.

orbgirlgi98 6y ago
Scientific observation has ruled out the Big Crunch. The Big Rip happens in the remote future if the equation of state parameter w is less than -1, where w is the ratio of dark energy pressure to its energy density. If this is true it is only a minor detail of the Heat Death as far as life within this universe is concerned: all biological life and biological consciousness will end whether the Big Rip happens before the Heat Death or does not happen. (If there is non-biological Life after Death as various religions maintain, then consciousness will survive the Heat Death, but otherwise it will not.) The Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) of Penrose is speculative and has zero strong empirical evidence to support it. They've studied the CMB but it has made no testable and verifiable predictions. The astrophysics community at large sees the observational inevitability of the end of the universe as we know it: the universe is flying apart and cooling, and nothing can change this.
- jmfldn 6y ago
  The universe flying apart and cooling doesn't contradict Penrose, it's part of the theory just to address that point. An infinite structureless, massless universe is a singularity, or so the theory goes. Assuming this was "settled" (whatever that means in science let alone theoretical physics), mavericks like Penrose are frequently proven right. 'Kuhnian' paradigm shifts are the norm in science, particularly in a field like this. Expect many more...

hermitcrab 6y ago

"In the long run we are all dead." Keynes.