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I can’t be the only one who gets some pangs of anxiety reading about this stuff
by a_t48 4y ago
I can’t be the only one who gets some pangs of anxiety reading about this stuff
- senectus1 4y agoNot being an American, and watching the events in America and American politics has helped me realize there is some things i have Absolutely no control over.. and if I have no input or control over it then there is no reason for me to get stressed about it. Physics is one of those things. its too big and far away for me to stress about it. If its gonna kill me I cant stop it.. I might as well enjoy what I do have control over.
- quickthrower2 4y agoPhysics does indeed kill all of us
- NateEag 4y agonah, physics just describes processes from reality. It's the universe that kills us.
- curtainsforus 4y agoBiology kills us first, and in a manner that's contingent, not necessary; there are universes with physics similar to ours where life could continue forever. (Just add some rare non-energy-conserving interactions to be exploited). Eventually, over 10^100 years of operation you get into interesting problems with the number of possible states a mind of a given size has being finite; but if you can continually add more matter via non-energy-conserving interactions, you could add more memory/processing up to fundamental physical limits: you can only fit so much information in a given volume before it collapses into a black hole; you can only communicate at c, so if you make your mind bigger, it has to parallelize or slow down; Given the expansion of space, at some scale, light signals from one end of your mind can't reach the other (the space inbetween expands faster than C), which would be the the fundamental limit... except that gravity counteracts the expansion of space, and I'm not sure what the expansion properties of a visible-universe-filled volume of just-barely-black-hole-subcritical computronium is. I imagine you're in a big crunch regime at that point, except... Isn't that the same thing as a black hole collapse? Nonetheless, there's presumably some balancing density that perfectly avoids both expansion and contraction, though it's presumably unstable. Ignoring the instability-difficulties, though, that means you can continue growing the amount of memory you have by slowing down your processing speed to one clock cycle every ~2*the diameter of your mind in light-years years. I'm not sure what the ultimate limiting factor is here, given infinite time; does the amount of computation of this system in infinite time go to infinity as your scale goes to infinity, or does it asymptotically approach some finite upper bound?
- drraj32 4y agoCan you explain the reason for anxiety? I read through first few paragraphs where author talked about vacuum. "Nothing" about it is anxiety inducing. But then, I grew up in the subcontinent where the ancients postulated that everything came from Shunyata (nothingness).
- a_t48 4y agoI think it’s just imagining how big the universe is…and then imagining that, but multiplied with space in between. The possible collapse of it all is a fun bonus.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoA kind of megalophobia? Mixed with what cosmic horror invokes, the feeling that you are nothing in an indifferent universe. Knowing just enough about the universe to know you are nothing.
- barrenko 4y agoUniverse is not exactly indifferent. Neither indifferent nor not-indifferent. David Deutsch offered some consolation to me, because when you take in account multiple dimensions there is also a vast quantity of Earths out there "somewhere".
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThe idea that there are multiple parallel earths is fun to think about, but know that it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis and arguable is outside the realm of science (and close to the realm of meta-physics).
- mistermann 4y agoIs this knowledge particularly useful in some way in this case? Does it prompt any particular action in response?
- lvncelot 4y agoHave you ever "played" Space Engine? Zooming around the universe with a speed approaching megaparsecs always induces a sinking feeling in my stomach and a sense of insignificance, and it's a little bit what I'd imagine the Total Perspective Vortex from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe would feel like.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoTo me it feels like home. I'd love to be a particle zooming across the vast cosmos at light speed. Some of the best dreams I've ever seen.
- pixl97 4y agoUnfortunately if you were moving light speed you wouldn't experience time, so it would be rather less eventful than you imagine. If you kicked it down just below light speed existence would be a bright white/blue spot in front of you.
- danbruc 4y agoWith lightspeed you are going pretty much nowhere. If you are flying through intergalactic space zipping past galaxies you are probably at least going trillions or quadrillions times the speed of light. Even just crossing the Milkyway would take you a hundred thousand years.
- quickthrower2 4y agoreading the selfish gene also does this - “you can’t handle the truth” applies to all of us!