Far Future Will See No Evidence of Universe's Origin 340
Dr. Eggman writes "According to an article on Ars Technica and its accompanying General Relativity and Gravitation journal article 'The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology', in the far future of the universe all evidence of the origin of the universe will be gone. Intelligences alive 100-billion-years from now will observe a universe that appears much the way our early 1900s view of the universe was: Static, had always been there, and consisted of little more than our own galaxy and a islands of matter. 'The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise--the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin. Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe.'"
But even worse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
If the far future will see an absence of this information then we have a responsibility to persist the data beyond the demise of our culture, whether or not another civilization will arise that can interpret the data. The information we can gather now would appear to be a limited resource given our current understanding of cosmology, and we who have access should derive what we can and pass the value on as others will not be able to do so.
Can you imagine the ID vs Evolution argument in an apparently static universe? Oh wait.. just pick up a history book and check out the executions, exiles, pariahs, and all the other fun stuff that happened to/became of our scientific forefathers back when the Earth was considered the center of a static universe.
Regards.
Re:But even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
But here's an interesting question--if documents were discovered from some ancient civilization that had a completely different cosmology, describing that cosmology, would you take those documents at face value? Suppose they contained measurements and recorded observations, as well as a prediction that future observations would differ in a certain way. I'm not sure the far future would believe us, so we would have some convincing to do.
The upside is, the people of the future can believe in a static universe, and insofar as their universe is compatible with that hypothesis, they're no worse off for not knowing the truth. If it turns out that the universe's origin does make a difference to them, there will no doubt be some observations that don't correspond with their static universe hypothesis, forcing them to adopt a hypothesis similar to ours. So by preserving our data and our theory we are indeed providing a possible solution to a future scientific problem.
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I can see it now.. the philosophical debates about who these ancient creatures might have been... about how they were doomed from the get-go by their flawed and quaint interpretations
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Do we know the truth? Maybe there's another important factor in the equation which is as invisible for as now as dark energy domination would have been earlier in the universe's history. Or maybe there's something interesting in the universe's history of which all traces are already invisible now, just as the expansion of t
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The ancient Stoics believed the universe was born out of fire, and will return to fire. The reason we don't believe this is because they apparently made this up instead of making observations like we do and applying a scientific method. I'm sure that a future civilization with our data, along with their data, will come closer to an accurate theory so long as (a) our data are accurate, (b) they accept our data as accurate, and (c) their data are also accurate. We would of course be better off with data from
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Here's what's always annoyed me about astronomers/cosmologists/telescope jockeys of all stripes. They love to talk about how what they do is science, and to the extent that they apply the scientific method to their work, they are right. But simply because they are applying the scientific method does not make what they produce a fact. After crunching some numbers, the space geeks come back to us and let us know that the Universe is 4 billion years old, not 5 billion years old like we thought.
What? Only an
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That's pretty much implicit for everything we claim to know. You could just as well say, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and
Re:But even worse (Score:5, Interesting)
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I mean, given that we've probably got another, say, 20 billion years till the information goes away, I guess I don't really feel the need to mark it as high priority on my to-do list.
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No it doesn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, the bigger problem would seem to be that as far as we know we are the only sentients capable of taking advantage of the information currently available... which places a huge responsiblity on our shoulders.
Christ, stars don't last that long, what chances do you think there are for information we can store? We can barely archive it for 20 years never mind 100 billion. Then there's the issue of finding a way of transmitting it or making it available.
Basically we have no responsibility to anyone but ourselves. Any species which exist in 100 billion years can go and get stuffed.
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Christ, stars don't last that long, what chances do you think there are for information we can store? We can barely archive it for 20 years never mind 100 billion. Then there's the issue of finding a way of transmitting it or making it available.
But it's insanely simple...Just transmit the entire archive using some encoding using EM radiation. Your "archive" is thus stored in a volume of space as a media stream. As long as it can be intercepted and eventually decoded by whoever "finds it", you're good.
The difficulty lies in transmitting it at a high enough power to still have a workable signal elsewhere in the galaxy. To this end, one could build a Dyson sphere around a sun, then block or transmit the star's light according to your signal.
Yeah,
You'll be dead anyway. Here's why (Score:5, Interesting)
The universe itself is 13.7 billion of years old. Our Sun is only about 5 billion years old.
In this interval, the universe already burned a heck of a lot of Hydrogen to Helium, and even a lot of Helium to Carbon and so on until iron. You can't really have a star powered by fusing anything heavier, because fusing heavier stuff actually takes energy.
(Anything higher than that is formed in a supernova blast. Basically some of the immense energy of the supernova is used to fuse some of the ejected elements into even higher density stuff.)
Hydrogen is really the low hanging fruit of star fuel. It's for stars what the coal mines were for the industrial revolution. It's damn easy to start fusing hydrogen. (Easier if you have some heavier elements as catalysts to start the reaction, but the hydrogen will be the fuel anyway.) It's damn hard to start fusing anything else.
Even helium is tricky. It requires some _immense_ pressures and temperatures, and a state that's already degenerate matter. It even starts to happen somewhere between 100 and 200 million Kelvin. It's also a bloody unstable process. The released power is proportional IIRC to the temperature raised to the _30th_ power, so it's easy for it to run away: more power released rises the temperature some more, which rises the power some more (and rather abruptly at that), which rises temperature, etc. A star the size of our sun would just blow itself up almost instantly if it was made of Helium and actually ignited Helium fusion.
Where I'm getting is that the universe has a finite budget of hydrogen and keeps using it fast. (Well, "fast" by cosmic scales.) And then some of it gets buried in black holes and the like too. So planning to have main sequence stars in 100 billion years, is sorta like planning to still be using the oil in the middle east by then: chances are it will have run horribly thin, long time before that.
In 100 billion years, probably the best you could get is a brown dwarf, a.k.a., a star that doesn't actually fuse anything, but it heated up when collapsing into a star, and will need a horribly long time to cool down. And hopefully a planet that's close enough to it, to be just warm enough.
They'll be few and far in between though, so no telling if one will be close enough to move to it.
Also, lemme say: the only chance of life there will be that someone moves to it. If you look at long time Earth history, the Sun started a lot cooler when the Earth atmosphere was made of methane, so the massive greenhouse effect just helped keep temperature in the right band for life to appear. Then as the Sun heated up, life switched atmosphere to oxygen. We've been walking a tightrope on the border between turning into Venus (if life appeared just a little later) or turning into a deep-frozen snowball that kills everything (if photosynthesis started just a little earlier.) And we actually had a damn close shave with complete extinction, the planet-sized snowball kind.
A brown dwarf just doesn't follow that pattern. It doesn't gradually warm up, it actually starts (very very slowly) cooling down as soon as it formed. But you can pretty much approximate it as constant temperature, for the purpose of this discussion. And therein lies the problem: if it's cool enough for a methane-atmosphere planet to evolve life, that will turn into a permanent deep-frozen wasteland as soon as it evolves photosynthesis. And if it would be warm enough for an oxygen-atmosphere planet, then it's way too hot early when that planet is still methane-based. That planet will turn into Venus before it has half a chance to evolve life.
So pretty much in 100 billion years we're looking at a dead or dying universe anyway. Worrying that they'll have witch hunts is kinda silly, when, you know, there won't be anyone alive there.
Peak hydrogen (Score:5, Funny)
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Will usage decrease? Well, that wouldn't make it that horribly much better, because that means, in a nutshell, less main-sequence stars.
It will also mean more hydrogen which technically still exists, but is going nowhere: it's trapped in brown dwarfs that never start fusion, Jupiters, black holes, etc. Those things don't blow up, so basically short of some cataclismic event like head-on star colli
Oh no, I agree (Score:3, Interesting)
I just wouldn't call that "fast", even by (currently) cosmic scales. For example, I'm 37. If you told me I could get to some destination in 74 years (for example), I wouldn't call that "fast".
Now, here's a real calculation, albeit one that's still based on completely unfounded assumptions: if the decay is exponential, then 100 billion years from now (when the universe is apprxomately 114 billion years old), there will be approximately 0.75^(114/14) or 9.6% of the hydrogen left.
On the other hand, if the
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On the other hand (Score:2)
Re:Peak hydrogen (Score:5, Informative)
While 25% of the universe's hydrogen may have been converted to heavier elements, about 24% was converted in the first second or so, and then about 1% in the ensuing 13.7 billion years. At that rate, there will be plenty left in 100 billion years time.
Forgot that little detail (Score:3, Interesting)
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All of this is moot if there the latest ideas involving the "Big Rip" turn out to be correct.
In this scenario, Dark Energy continues to cause accelerating inflation of the universe until that inflation begins to effect objects of smaller and smaller scale. At first the galaxies will all go away, too far away to see. Later, nearer the end stars will be flung beyong our view. Very near the end, the sun will suddenly shrink out of existance and the space between the earth and the sun grows infinitely. At the
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1. Yes, energy indeed cannot be destroyed. It does, however, get trapped in the mass of the heavier nuclei synthetised during a supernova blast (E = mc^2) or, basically, lost as photons traveling around an ever increasing universe. Especially the latter is, really, the whole point in this topic. There'll be increasingly more photons which are (A) traveling the ever increasing space between galaxies, and never getting anywhere, and (B) getting red-shifted
Cold death of the universe (Score:2)
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Look at it this way: What if intelligences similar to ourselves were alive five billion years ago? Would they have any easier or more difficult understanding their u
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Hmm. That really put our existence and it's long term futility into sharp perspective for me. Dammit.
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It's probably in Google's cache by now. Problem solved.
Re:But even worse (Score:4, Funny)
Well, let's narrow it down; the bigger problem is -I'll- be dead. That I think is something we all can agree is the biggest problem.
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Maybe he's a Mormon?
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I can see it now -- penis enlargement then just a snap of the fingers away...
Finally, a solution to spam! 100 billion years!
Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
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Perhaps (Score:2)
Re:Perhaps (Score:5, Interesting)
That theory has always appealed to me as it solves once of the major questions of the universe. What led up to the big bang? The idea that the universe expands and collapse suggests that before the big bang there was another universe.
To me, the idea that there needs to be a start-point for the universe seems a little too human. We have the start of our lives, the start of the day and ultimately it all ends for each of us. But the life of an inanimate object isn't quite like that. Why can't the universe have always existed? What is time anyway, other than an abstraction of counting how often something vibrates? Isn't the idea that "it's always been there" far easier to grasp than "once there was nothing, now there is everything"?
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You know, the state where we had (at plank-second zero) 0% entropy?
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Just off the top of my head, I'm not a physicist but I like to read. If the universe is expanding then it must be a finite area.
Nope. The rest of your logic is sound, but unfortunately it depends on that false assumption. The standard analogy is to imagine a 2d universe existing on the surface of a balloon. As you inflate the balloon, all points on the surface move away from each other. Now, realize that this is completely independent of the volume of the balloon, and it does not even require a finite surface area. Then extrapolate to three dimensions.
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i know it might be a little counterintuitive, the concept of escape velocity (getting enough energy that you'll go fa
Re:Perhaps - Information from the near-future (Score:3, Funny)
2. Space is a field which is created by matter/energy.
3. The space field has multiple properties included time, gravity, electromagnetism, and magnetism.
4. The equation which unifies what we percieve as space-time, gravity, and electromagn
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This really makes you wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Has He looked down the back of the sofa? That's where I usually find things.
Well, maybe not with current methods, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
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This is because, according to our best measurements, the universe it not only expanding, but the rate of expansion is increasing with time. Thus t
The authors make some questionable assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
- Currently observable stars, background radiation, etc., are all we or anyone else will ever be able to observe. Almost surely, we'll come up with better technology to observe the stuff we already know to look for; quite possibly, we'll discover entirely new things (different forms of radiation, etc.) to use in forming a more complete picture. The same goes for our hypothetical observers in the far future.
- Human perception is as good as it gets. Anything living 100 billon years from now will be so different from us that it may perceive the world around it in completely different ways, and will accordingly have different technology for astronomy and everything else.
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Human perception is as good as it gets. Anything living 100 billon years from now will be so different from us that it may perceive the world around it in completely different ways, and will accordingly have different technology for astronomy and everything else.
The eye has developed independently several times on earth. You only need two for distance perception. We are bipedal because a 3rd leg would be unnecessary, and 1 wouldn't be up to the task of allowing us to survive. We needed to free up two limbs to act as manipulators. Ears allow us to hear prey and predators, again only two required for distance and direction perception.
Basically, there's good reason to believe that any intelligent technologically sophisticated life which exists won't be entirely dissi
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All those arguments were made by astronomers and physicists, and before the genome revolution. Go ask a genetic biologist why we look the way we do and you'll find that the quadratic configuration has more to do with fish DNA than it has to do with what's simplest.
If a genetic biologist gives that answer, then they are wrong. It's clear that humans have changed vastly from fish. Fish don't have the advanced characteristics that make us unusual. Eg, high intelligence, grasping hands, linguistic ability,
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The evidence will be... (Score:2)
A brief glimpse (Score:2, Interesting)
Honestly I never understood what gave scientists the idea that they would ever have enough of a clue to know what was going on with the universe. I'm not saying it's wrong to do. Perhaps so
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Universe is 14 billion years old (Score:2)
Interesting to ponder but of not much use even to the theoreticians at this stage.
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I doubt the article is seriously implying we should be planning for anything. But still, I think you a being presumptuois so think the death of the sun would terminate humankind (or our robotic decendents). That's an awful long time from now, we've come up with a lot of technology in the last hundred years, imagine what we can have in a billion or two.
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The assumption that the rate of technological progress will continue exponentially is also flawed. There are physical limits and things improve in rapid spurts with lulls inbetween
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I think that's basically it. Something "Interesting to Ponder".
It's a nice little mental exercise pondering the future of the universe, and contrasting that with our place in it now. That's all.
Copyright? (Score:5, Funny)
How do we know... (Score:2)
IANAP, but if we are using our current understanding of the universe to make this claim, how do we know there is not some yet-to-be-discovered method of detecting the evidence of the origin of the universe in the far future?
Y100B Compliant (Score:5, Funny)
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Looks like you are safe!
Finally, I got it. (Score:4, Funny)
2. wait 100 billion years.
3 profit.
Seriously this implies all information from now will be lost. Pretty Dim view.
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What Do We *Already* See No Evidence Of? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just as an example, current thinking is that we're the first technically advanced society on earth, because we see no archaeological traces of previous societies. But, what if the previous society (or societies) had advanced technology that (a) was used to scrub the earth of their low-tech origins, and (b) left no traces when the society vanished, much as ice sculptures leave no traces when they melt?
Is there any real evidence against this sort of thing? (Occam's Razor, I know. But that's an incredibly pitiful rebuttal...)
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Not only are we the first civilization, but we are likely to be the last. Any future societ
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That a civilization which has an abundance of oil, coal and natural gas would use it, doesn't imply that it is necessary. Water wheels and wind mills have been in use for a long time, and could be used to generate electricty once someone invented the generator. The steam engine only relies on a bo
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What about disasters? We should have abandoned NOLA, and didn't; perhaps the ancients did abandon the planet back when the extinction rock hit?
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Essentially, in order to continue this reasoning means you'd have to conclude the
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Any previous advanced civilization on earth would have depleted its mineral resources in its rise to high technology, just as we have.
This is a good point. Consider though--if the civilization grew sufficiently advanced, perhaps they would gain the ability to erase signs of their existence with great ease. If they had that, plus a sort of cosmic Sierra Club mentality ("Take only pictures...") or Prime Directive mindset, perhaps they simply decided to leave the planet in the condition it would have been in had they not advanced.
(Keeping simulism [simulism.org] in mind, I can't take either position very seriously.)
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Further Reading: End of the Universe (Score:3, Interesting)
Topical? Yes!
Tipping encouraged. I'll be here all week.
Only if we keep expanding? (Score:2)
he says waving his arms... (Score:2)
The remark demonstrates our ignornace (Score:2)
Makes me wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
The Long Now History (Score:2)
Another way to pop this conundrum is to ask whether anyone has proven that we will not be able to record our current
Scientific idea becomes non-scientific (Score:3, Insightful)
Can the claims of the ancestors be trusted, when they suggest such preposterous experiential data as a "sky full of galaxies" and "background radiation"?
If they can, then science is not the only valid way to learn about the universe. We can also learn from the experiences of those who came before us, even if we cannot experience the same thing they did.
Science is a useful way to pursue truth, but it is not the only way. I think people need to see that, and this is a good example of how that is true.
I thought information could not be destroyed (Score:2)
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Re:Assuming of course... (Score:5, Funny)
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but really how can we mark your words if we don't know who you are?
The amount of armchair science that gets flung around
Provide links to back up crack-potiness. Otherwise why bother with speculation...
And no... IANNAH (I Am Not New Around Here)
Re:I'm sure (Score:5, Funny)
"that this article will be relevant in 100 billion years."
Nah, it'll have experienced the "dupe death" as its reposted countless times, each time increasing its entrophy, losing a few letters here, having a few more arranged there ..
Today:
Today + n dupes:Today + n * x dupes:
Time zero
Time zero +1
Time zero + z
Because we all know, what goes around, comes around.
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For once Slashdot has a story that isn't weeks out of date, and you still complain. There's no pleasing some people...
Re:How much has already been lost? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:News flash: Ars Technica will also be gone by 1 (Score:2)
Perhaps and perhaps not.
The current living "record holder" is 114. The Oldest Human Beings [recordholders.org]
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Yep, any day now... Like right
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Wi-i-i-i-ilbur, is that you?
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One problem with obtaining absolute proof of the big bang is that, according to the most recent widely-agreed with model, light didn't exist in a way we should be able to detect until hundreds of thousands of years after the initial 'bang'.
Starting with the evidence Hubble collected, and most recently with the Nobel prize given to Smoot and Mather for their work on cosmi