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As someone who doesn’t know much about this, I'm curious: If humanity survived far into the future, could we plausibly develop ways to slow or even halt the de
by terabytest 1y ago
As someone who doesn’t know much about this, I'm curious:
If humanity survived far into the future, could we plausibly develop ways to slow or even halt the decay of the universe? Or is this an immutable characteristic of our universe, meaning humanity will inevitably fizzle out along with the universe?
- saberience 1y agoSee The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
- Vox_Leone 1y agoIt's interesting to note, that the Universal AC in “The Last Question” did not hallucinate an answer. Instead, its response—"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER"—is a model of intellectual honesty.
- mykowebhn 1y agoWhy, so we can extend the 10^78 years? I'm not sure you truly understand how large 10^78 years is, or even 10^10 years.
- suddenlybananas 1y agoWhile it seems doubtful that people will last that long, in 10^78 years, one would think those people alive at the time would want the universe to continue.
- rswail 1y agoHumanity has existed for 3x10^6 years (give or take), which is 1 x 10^-72 of that time period. We don't need to worry, it is highly unlikely that humanity as we recognize it will exist.
- mykowebhn 1y agoAgreed. It is so highly unlikely that the probability is effectively zero. Let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that humanity can exist a thousand times longer than your estimate, say 3x10^9 years. That's about as long as we think life has existed on earth, which is a VERY LONG TIME. That said, it's still 1 x 10^-69 of that time period. I think you can see where we're going with this.
- cdelsolar 1y agoit won't be humanity, but it should hopefully be some sort of intelligence
- mykowebhn 1y agoNo offense intended, but I have a serious question: Why would you hope this? This hope seems to me a vestige of the desire of some humans for immortality. And why would it matter to folks whether some sort of intelligence existed this incomprehensibly far into the future?
- b112 1y agoImagine if we solve it. Then hope to preserve the answer long enough, that people will care. The first problem is data integrity and storage. Will the atoms the answer is on, still be around? The next is, what kind of search engine will we have, with 10^78 years of internet history?!
- pixl97 1y agoI think a bigger question is what will they do for that long? All the things like stars will be long gone and dead before that time leaving us with long lived black holes and radiation. So everything would be based on virtual world can computation by that point. Do you just cool everything to near absolute zero and run it as slow as possible to you can last as long as possible? The History of the Universe channel has an episode around this, but I'll have to figure out which one it was.
- b112 1y agoThey'll exist because of Wan-To. The World at the End of Time by Frederick Pohl.
- floxy 1y agoPresumably civilization will be using iron stars by then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_star#Compact_iron_star_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_star#Compact_iron_star_fo... ...although I'm not sure I've ever seen the expected temperature of iron stars. 1 milliKelvin?
- diego898 1y agoVery strongly suggest you check out Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
- markovs_gun 1y ago[flagged]
- didgeoridoo 1y ago[flagged]
- brazzy 1y agoOr, for an alternative and rather more in depth treatment, Stephen Baxter's "Manifold: Time"
- krapp 1y agoThe Second Law of Thermodynamics is an immutable characteristic of our universe. Entropy in a closed system (like the universe) is irreversible.
- exe34 1y agoIt was set to zero once, so somebody somewhere/somewhen figured it out before.
- WhatsName 1y agoOr rather we are a fork/thread somewhere is spacetime.
- VagabundoP 1y agogit branch
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- krapp 1y agololwut?
- yfontana 1y agoWe don't know for sure that the universe is a closed system.
- felipeerias 1y agoIf we survive far into the future, we will learn a lot more about the structure and evolution of the Universe. It might be that the questions that our scientists can ask now will turn out to be trivial or meaningless to our descendants. Perhaps the Universe is far stranger than we can imagine.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoThe origami of petal unfolding implies the rose blooms forever says all bugkind dwelling on the bud.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoWe can’t know yet.
- AnonC 1y agoI’m not an expert on this, but I read this by Lawrence M Krauss (theoretical physicist and cosmologist): “In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.” A billion is just 10 to the power of nine, and that number of years in time is itself a long, long time that’s difficult to imagine. Looking at 10 to the power of 78 is…it wouldn’t matter much for us if it were to the power of 60 either. (I think!) I seriously doubt humans (as we know of now) can meaningfully affect the expansion or decay of the universe.
- mellosouls 1y agoIn just 5 billion years? This surprises me, trillion I could understand, 5 billion is similar to the age of the earth. Incidentally, the obvious counter to "our time is special, we have access to everything" is presumably what future civilisations think as well; the implication being perhaps we have lost something over the aeons that would shed light on our current mysteries. I haven't read the book but it's an unconvincing extract, though I acknowledge a larger context may justify it.
- pixl97 1y agoSomeone made a miscalculation with 5 billion years, but with that said, it's only just over an order of magnitude more which isn't much >And what are presently the closest galaxy groups outside of the Local Group — objects like the M81 group — will be the last to become unreachable: something that won't occur until more than 110 billion years from now, when the Universe is nearly ten times its present age.
- andruby 1y agoMaybe there was a self-conscious "civilization" before the big bang. From my understanding we know very little to nothing about anything before the big bang.
- bee_rider 1y agoWell, the rest of us will likely die. However, you (the reader of this comment) will only have observed universes in which you don’t die. So, due to quantum immortality and all that, you’ll figure it out I guess. And in some sense humanity will not fizzle out; at least you’ll carry it along. It is a big project, but don’t worry, you’ve got quite a while to work it all out. I would start working on it in earnest in about a million years. If you wait a couple billion, more of the stuff in the universe might have decayed, and the end result might be less interesting, I guess. Please tell whatever else is around about the rest of us!
- subscribed 1y agoPBS Space Time vibes
- bee_rider 1y agoNever saw it!
- GistNoesis 1y agoTime is irrelevant. What matters are units of computations. When things are predictable they can be simulated fast : A spinning ball in the void can be simulated for 10^78 years in O(1). When things are fuzzy, they can be simulated fast : A star made of huge number of atoms is not so different than another star made of a huge number of atoms. When processes are too complex they tend to all follow the law of large numbers which makes the computations memoizable. What you want is a way to prevent the universe from taking shortcuts in its computations. Luckily its quite easy. You have to make details important. That's where chaos theory comes to the rescue. Small perturbations can have big impacts. Bifurcations like tossing a coin in the air create pockets of complexity. But throw too many coins in the air and its just random and boring. Life exists on this edge where enough structure is preserved to allow enough richness to exist. One way humans have found of increasing precision is the lathe, which lead to building computers. Build a big enough fast enough computer and you will run-out of flops faster than reaching the 10^78 endgame. But you have to be smart, because computation being universal it means that if you are just building a big computer what matters will be what runs on it. And your universe can be reduced to a recursive endgame state of "universe becoming a computer running universe simulation of a specific type", which doesn't need to computed more than once and already was, or isn't interesting enough to deserve being computed. That's why we live on the exciting edge before the Armageddon, boring universes having already been simulated. The upside being universe hasn't yet decided which endgame we may reach, because the phytoplankton aliens of k2-18b have not yet turned on their supercomputer.
- TOGoS 1y agoThis is a wacky, seemingly out-of-place philosophical comment, yet I have had similar thoughts, so I give you an irreverent upvote.
- thatguymike 1y agoThere's a very entertaining Dwarkesh podcast with Adam Brown about this: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown
- mensetmanusman 1y agoHumans are the universe contemplating this.
- BurningFrog 1y agoThe only serious answer is that we have absolutely no way of knowing that.
- zero_bias 1y agoHawking radiation is a very slow process; one can acquire additional matter (e.g., hydrogen atoms from interstellar or intergalactic space) to compensate for the matter loss
- anshumankmr 1y agoHere's some food for thought: there are perhaps some things that would be perhaps out of reach for all living beings for the conceivable future and beyond. We are barely able to handle technological progress that would seem like stone age or even worse to a potential species that may exist at that time (ie those that may have such technology to stop the death of the very universe they are living) They might just be indistinguishable from a god if there is one. And if they have enough power to perhaps prevent the death of the universe, they might have enough technology to just recreate another one. Or open a wormhole and transport to a new one or travel the multiverse or something. Basically I feel if such kind of technology can be created to bend the universe to your will, it would be misused so badly, it might be catastrophic for the existence of such a species.