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In 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 "ou

In 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 ago
Someone 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 ago
Maybe 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.
- generic92034 1y ago
  If the big bang created space and time, "before the big bang" is not really well-defined.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    Unless you believe that this universe is just playing out holographic on the event horizon of an N+1d black hole in our parent universe. The Big Bang was just the singularity birth of that one object.
    - anticensor 1y ago
      Except not all dimension numbers have nicely defined physics and geometries. For example, 4+0 and 4+1 don't have symmetric pairwise particle interactions in the sense we have in 3+1.
      - joquarky 1y ago
        It's going to get really irrational if we discover that the universe is only 2.71828... + 1 dimensions.
    - generic92034 1y ago
      From inside that universe there still was no "before". Are you looking into our universe from the outside? ;)

pixl97 1y ago

Someone 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 ago

Maybe 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.

generic92034 1y ago
If the big bang created space and time, "before the big bang" is not really well-defined.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  Unless you believe that this universe is just playing out holographic on the event horizon of an N+1d black hole in our parent universe. The Big Bang was just the singularity birth of that one object.
  - anticensor 1y ago
    Except not all dimension numbers have nicely defined physics and geometries. For example, 4+0 and 4+1 don't have symmetric pairwise particle interactions in the sense we have in 3+1.
    - joquarky 1y ago
      It's going to get really irrational if we discover that the universe is only 2.71828... + 1 dimensions.
  - generic92034 1y ago
    From inside that universe there still was no "before". Are you looking into our universe from the outside? ;)