You must log in or register to comment.
Yet all this energy and electromagnetic phenomena
from our very limited vantage point and experiments
feels like it bathes everything as it decays gradually
in slow motion, one rung at a time, towards entropy,
zooming down an exponential thermodynamic curve
that aims and trends towards zero, beyond our view,
beyond the horizon, touching infinity itself.
And here’s the craziest part: the space itself where
this is all taking place, is accelerating its’ expansion.Like living in a slow motion explosion on a spec of dust
I just had a moment of what is everything
I don’t know how to explain it but from nothing to something to nothing again but no why
The ‘why’ is us.
Without consciousness in the universe, there might as well not be a universe.
Typically something a consciousness would say.
The cosmos can’t ponder itself so excuse us for being self centered lol
We are the cosmos pondering itself.
Carl Sagan said it more or this way and he was right.
Well if its just backhoes life will evolve to see infrared/sonar
And dig plenty of holes
One minor problem is that life as we know it is supported by the continuous input of energy from a nearby star. Without it, no photosynthesis, and nearly all primary energy production in Earth life comes from that.
The slightly bigger problem is that by the time there are only black holes, there are no planets. Because, you know, there’s only black holes. So nothing outside of black holes for life to be on, and the vacuum of space isn’t really the most conducive to life or interaction of any kind.
Want to live forever? Tough. Cos even if you could stop your body from growing old and dying, the planet is going to get too warm and nothing will be able to live on it. Then the sun will expand and destroy the planet. But even if you could leave the planet, theres no where close by to get too that wont have the same problems later on. But even if you could get to another solar system, same thing happens again. But then eventually the universe runs out of hydrogen and its fucked. Or the universe gets spread too thin, and its fucked. Or some fucking quantum field takes a shit, and creates a bubble of true vacuum that expands at the speed of light and everything’s fucked.
Im fucked, youre fucked, the earth is fucked, the solar system is fucked, the galaxy is fucked, the local cluster is fucked, its all just fucked. One way or another. At some point nothing exists except an endless absence of anything. Not even nothing will exist…
And people say there are no good arguments for weekly drug fuelled sex orgies…
Slaanesh endorsed this message.
Wait I’ve heard of the vacuum one but never understood it. Do you have a link (or the name of the doomsday theory) so I can read?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-false-vacuum
Long read, but it should have the answers for all your questions. Have fun! lol.
Honestly, this factoid is the closest thing to a real Total Perspective Vortex in hat I’ve ever felt.
We’re doing a pretty bang up job of making that one second as stupid and painful as possible.
One second of light illuminating a torture chamber
What happens after the 10^106 years of black holes?
The black holes evaporate eventually.
After that, depends on who you ask. Most physicists would say something like “as close to nothing as possible”. Penrose would say at a certain point when nothing can interact with anything else, distance loses meaning, which makes the universe and a singularity equivalent, so then things restart.
Not sure about the “restart” bit.
Yeah I also think it would take a lot more than just one single bit of discrete information in an universe of completely uniform and homogeneous nothingness, to restart the universe lol /s
Because things haven’t progressed linearly with the universes evolution, and, as the op stipulates, we are part of one second vs countless billions of years (relatively) till it’s theoretical demise, it is possible/probable that we don’t know what will happen down the line.
Certain things might change to make it possible that we simply can’t predict due to lack of information (the future) and technological difficulties.
If it’s mathematically equivalent to the starting conditions of our universe, why would it behave differently?
I don’t think you can argue that it’s mathematically equivalent. Just because space and time become so spread that they are effectively meaningless is not the same as them having not meaningfully existed and then existing. Neither can you really say that since any baryons that have not decayed are so far apart none of them interact that they behave like the concentration of all matter in the known universe. At those scales of time I’m not even sure that there are any left.
It’s like arguing that one tiny piece of something in one place is the same as all the matter and all of space and time being in one place: it’s I guess analogous but not equivalent. I will of course caveat and say that my undergrad physics degree did not cover end of the universe timelines lol. Kurzgesagt does have a video though.
The cyclical universe approach as I understand it is predicated on an eventual big crunch which I don’t think is being argued anymore.
Unless it’s been disproven it’s not “not being argued anymore”
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s right. I just thought the objection was to the “restart bit”, and I thought that part reasonably followed if the earlier parts were accepted.
But Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is pretty much the opposite of a Big Crunch.
I guess I’ll have to read up. I have potentially had a long running misunderstanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0
The cyclical universe approach as I understand it is predicated on an eventual big crunch which I don’t think is being argued anymore.
The universe is definitely cyclical, the only real question is: how?
There’s lots of theories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoCYY9sa2kU
Nothing really. And since nothing is happening and nothing ever changes time itself becomes meaningless.
From what I understand, the universe would just be in equilibrium. Nothing but cold particles floating around.
A recent discovery might suggest that we happen to be in a big void, and that a great amount of the universe is much much denser than where we are or what we have observed. If true, Big Crunch time bby
Yes.
Alternately, no.
Yoink
Tangentially related great sci-fi short story: “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Thanks for that. I’ve read it before, long ago, but completely forgot about it. Still a great story.
I feel like reading this story is an internet nerd Rite of Passage. It had a huge impact on me when I read it as a teenager and I think about it a lot.
Probably my favorite short story. This is another one of my favorites, definitely more obscure:
coulda said trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion and saved us a little time
we still have 120 trillion years left. we can spare the time for a few extra words
No no, it will be over just like a second! Blink for 120 trillion years and you’ll miss it.
Comparison is truly the thief of joy. Of course, once we know how long the slow fade of an empty universe will last, the first thing we most do is make 120 trillion years of insane, glorious, beautiful existence seem inadequate.
No! We must be absolutely positively as terse and brief as possible. Concision is the watchword, my friends.
Fucking this.
Why use lot words…?
The last stars will burn out in 120 trillion years
We think. We still haven’t solved things like the dark matter/energy problem. The answer to that alone could drastically change what we estimate will happen in the distant future.
Stuff only burns for so long. We might learn more about the geometry of space and that there is more out there at greater distances where maybe even other Big bangs are possible but there is a certain maximum amount of time that a star can exist.
Over the time scales of the life of a proton the maximum variability in the amount of time a star can burn is a rounding error against the scale of numbers needed to express the amount of time it takes for hawking radiation to reduce black holes to ultra long wavelengths of infrared radiation.
Yes, but we don’t have proof that universe can’t generate new matter. For all we know there is a mechanism in universe not yet observed that can create new matter out of little vacuum and more stars will keep forming.
So technically all we can say is, it’s likely that stars will die out in 1000 trillion years.
Yes, but we don’t have proof that universe can’t generate new matter.
True… we also don’t have proof there isn’t a tea pot orbiting our Sun since it’s creation, either.
However, there’s also a complete lack of evidence of it.
You cannot prove a negative. The evidence says no new matter can be created. No evidence that new matter gets created. Therefore, we work on the model of no new matter creation.
But in this case, this “theory” has a precedent. This energy and matter we have now must have come from somewhere. Whatever your personal belief on the matter is, what’s to say that event can’t happen again? If a god created the universe, then surely he can pump some more into it.
On these scales, the accuracy of our observations should reduce our confidence though. It doesn’t make sense to confidently say that, in 200 trillion years there will be no stars, because our observations of the rate of new matter creation (approximately zero) have a margin of error which allows for there to still be some
Until evidence shows otherwise, new matter being created doesnt fit our observations.
Go prove that wrong! Win yourself a Nobel prize in physics! That’s what science is about!
I do also want to point out that stuff like “The conservation of energy” law, in other words, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, does not hold for our universe with our current models. An expanding universe violates the time-translation symmetry
This is our current models. This is what our current physics says. And we know it’s incomplete.
When it comes to scientific predictions, you always, always, need the caveat, “under our current model of”.
New matter being created with extremely low probability fits perfectly with our observations.
So if all the existing matter came from the big Bang, is it possible to condense it all back into one place?
pretty sure that is the big crunch hypothesis
Sure! Big crunch is a possibility! Crunch or heat death, all matters on how much matter is in the universe.
Google “big crunch hypothesis”
like how we thought black holes were ever-growing inescapable masses and then we learned about hawking radiation.
We also haven’t tried every possible configuration of atoms to see if anything creates a portal to an infinite energy dimension or a perpetual motion machine or something we can use to make our own stars
Infinite energy is cheating. Same with travelling backwards in time.
My intuition tells me the universe doesn’t allow cheaters.
But then I’m just an evolved bag of water cells clinging onto a clump of rock so what the fuck do I know?
Yeah for all we know stars are black hole poop
Nah, that’s the heavier elements.
wait, i thought the heavier elements were star poop, and black holes poop either electrons or positrons i can’t remember.
Only up to iron is star poop. Anything heavier tends to be created by novae of various sizes. Technically nothing comes from the black hole, but many of the very heavy elements are birthed along side black holes.
Gravity and time come from every black hole. Neither of those are “things” in the sense that they aren’t matter. So don’t think I’m saying that you are any kind of wrong. Perhaps “thing” might be to vague to be technically accurate, though.
Everyone here seems oblique in a vision of nothing in perspective, though. Come on, where do you think a big bang came from?
There’s a cap limit to the size of a black hole because it will pop. Moreover, “The” is rather an inappropriate reference to a big bang. You might say “our” but infinity doesn’t mean what you think it means. Not due to any “limit” but due to math through adjacent dimensions you’re only just start to deduce the “obvious” nature of and think to look at. “How” is a whole other Giggle Maestro.
If you need to understand how many dimensions there are…then you will never stop looking. Infinity is way more than we can but get a notion of.
Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain.
every soul has its dark
Just like every Knight praise the sun.
Unless that Knight is onion flavored, they just die :(
Unless, of course, that onion knight has a lot of experience in other professions, in which case they can easily punch gods to death.
That’s neat, stars are just the sparks after the big bang, and “soon” that energy will be gone. Even with all the bad shit happening, it makes me happy to be alive in this beautifully short window of time in the universe, even if our little dust speck circling a spark is a bit fucked up sometimes
Also see Dyson’s Eternal Intelligence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson's_eternal_intelligence
Basically, if you assume it’s possible to upload our intelligence to a computer and run it, then you can keep the energy going to run it for a very, very long time. Well past the heat death of the rest of the universe. It depends on running things in an on and off state to conserve energy for trillions of years. Subjectively, the people in there wouldn’t notice that and would simply see their active lifespans go for trillions of years. It’s not clear what the limit would actually be.
It’s something like Zeno’s Paradox. You cut things in half each cycle, but never quite get to zero.
that explains Pantheon really well
with only a finite initial store of energy, only a finite number of thoughts can ever be processed. This “thermal death” of the universe prevents the infinite hibernation and computation trick from working, thus rendering Dyson’s eternal intelligence scenario impossible in a universe with a positive cosmological constant.
My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
Eternity would get boring, a few trillion years would give you plenty of time to not miss out on anything life has to offer
How would you know ? Maybe life really only gets interesting after trillions of years, and nobody has experienced truly great life yet, who’s to say…
I see someone else is a Kurzgesagt fan https://youtu.be/VMm-U2pHrXE
I like to watch them when I need a good existential crisis
May I introduce you to exurb1a
I saw that pop up as a recommendation the other day but forgot to watch it until you posted that. Cool video! Weird how they come up with this crazy shit.
I cannot express in words just how much I do not want my consciousness to persist, trapped, for trillions of years of darkness. That would be unimaginable hell.
What if there’s cookies?
I’d delete them at the end of session, like any lemming would.
For there to be cookies one must assume an eternal cookie banner / pop up telling you this site uses cookies.
There’d only be dark chocolate chip. That’s just science
Does thinking about the long dark make anyone else feel like they are going to vomit?
The chances of me living long enough to actually be effected by it are so slim that I’m completely unconcerned about it.
I do like how you haven’t ruled it out yet.
And if you could live so long it would invalidate basically everything we know of physics. So the long dark wouldn’t actually come.
Depends on what you mean by living.
I don’t know, I thought it was pretty fun.
Nope, I think humanity will be long gone by then, so it doesn’t really matter what happens after that.
It makes me feel like all the suffering people inflict for the sake of selfishness jand greed just pointless.
Why’s that? If humanity presumably nearly couldn’t be around then?
More like head spinning, like when you look at the stars are you loose your reference frame
