The Lemon Fool

Evening all.

I have just finished the book, 'How to Build a Universe' by Brian Cox - the ending was very to the point, but asked the question, "how does it make you feel?". If I may quote a paragraph or two from the book as an explanation (he has just explained about how all matter eventually breaks down to the smallest components or building blocks):

"Beyond 10^100 years, there will be nothing but darkness. The Universe will be an ever-diluting sea of the lightest subatomic particles, separated by such vast distances that they will never interact. There will be no temperature differences, no structures, and it will not be possible for a single bit of information to be stored. The bright young history of the Universe - the planets and moons and mountains and rivers and seas and stars, everything that ever was - will be forgotten; erased, as if it never existed. Time will have no meaning because nothing will happen. This is known as the heat death of the Universe, and it will be forever.

Our time is temporary. We know this as individuals. A century at most. We will leave a legacy if we're lucky. Children, works, memories. We all leave an imprint on the future in myriad tangled ways. But ultimately, nothing will survive. It will all be gone. How does that make you feel? This is not a trivial question; it goes to the heart of the human condition. The world's great religions, art, philosophy, literature, music are all responses to the finite nature of individual existence. Science tells us there is no immortality, the laws of nature forbid it. Meaning is temporary, because it is contingent on the existence of material structures and the flow of energy, and these resources are not eternal in our expanding Universe.

The Universe will spend an eternity in darkness after a brief period of light, and we are most fortunate to have had the opportunity to discover this deep truth. This is the meaning of life, or at least the only idea that we might call meaning."

These paragraphs really made an impact on me - I have no idea why they did, but they did. Maybe I do worry too much about the small 'stuff' and as an old boss of mine once said, 'very few things in life matter very much and most things don't matter at all.'

Have a great weekend everyone, cheers, OLTB.

Of the life of man the duration is but a point.
Marcus Aurelias

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking"

Steve McCroskey

OLTB wrote:
But ultimately, nothing will survive. It will all be gone.

How does that make you feel?

Probably the same as it feels when you go out for a nice meal, or anything else that we might 'do' that we enjoy 'doing'....

You walk out of your front door, go and have what will presumably be an enjoyable night, and then get home and close the front door again.

Do we stand there having shut the door again and think 'What was the point of that? We're right back to where we were before we went out...', or do we think of 'the in-between bit' as being something worthy of doing?

Life is the same - it's just 'an in-between bit' with slightly different doors....

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

i think i am lucky to just be able to raise the question.

The other truth is that energy cannot be destroyed, so even when the universe has broken into very small bits which have drifted apart, the tremendous energy is still there to start another universe.
Brian was talking about the material bits which only form a small percentage of the universe. Dark energy and dark matter may still exist.

There may be an infinite number of universes, being created ad infinitum. What conceit makes us think the one we are in is the only one?

"how does it make you feel?".

I know how you feel, I felt exactly the same when I read H G Wells Time Machine when I was a kid.
He just keeps going forwards and in the end is on a beach with just some crabs for company as the sun turns red and stops moving as the Earth gets tidally locked and stops spinning.

Depressing stuff, darned good book mind you, more political than scientific but very powerful stuff and nothing like the film which was fun.

I now feel more optimistic on the grounds that anyone can spout all of this end of the universe stuff secure in the knowledge that we can't even see all of it. Given a complete lack of understanding on how the whole thing actually works except on the smaller scale, anything that is said should be prefaced by 'I might be completely wrong but...'

Cox is saying there was absolutely nothing, followed by a big explosion that created everything which will exist for a finite amount of time before going all cold and dark and boring and will then hang about forever. That hanging around forever sounds a bit iffy to me, just gut feeling and a dislike of science which is only a few thousand years old telling us with certainty what is going to happen in many billions.

B.

OLTB wrote: But ultimately, nothing will survive. It will all be gone. How does that make you feel?

It makes me wonder what the point of lockdown is, if ultimately we will all be gone. Let the virus rip and do its best, and let us make the most of life in the meantime.

OLTB wrote: This is known as the heat death of the Universe, and it will be forever.

Cox has not been entirely straight with you there, that is one possible outcome. There are others, although nothing will indeed survive so the question stands. Unless multiverses do exist, in which case the question becomes a little muddied.

What really bakes my noodle isn't so much the end-to-end that's been discussed earlier in this thread, which I've got no real problem with as things stand, but the chance that a poorly-timed Gamma Ray Burst from a dying star light-years away could put the evolutionary lights out in the blink of an eye -

The intense radiation of most observed Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) is thought to be released during a supernova or superluminous supernova as a high-mass star implodes to form a neutron star or a black hole.

The sources of most GRBs are billions of light years away from Earth, implying that the explosions are both extremely energetic (a typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime) and extremely rare (a few per galaxy per million years). All observed GRBs have originated from outside the Milky Way galaxy, although a related class of phenomena, soft gamma repeater flares, are associated with magnetars within the Milky Way.

It has been hypothesized that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way, pointing directly towards the Earth, could cause a mass extinction event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst


Gamma Ray Bursts are one of the candidate-events put forward to perhaps explain the lack of wider evidence of life in the universe, a theory known as 'The Great Filter' -


The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents non-living matter from undergoing abiogenesis, in time, to expanding lasting life as measured by the Kardashev scale.

The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human).

This probability threshold, which could lie behind us (in our past) or in front of us (in our future), might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction. The main counter-intuitive conclusion of this observation is that the easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Still.......soon be Christmas!

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

I'm more worried about the world falling off the tortoise.

But surely when it's all over and we are gone and it's all black and that.......we will still owe HMRC. The end doesn't wipe out our tax liabilities like CGT or IHT etc.....the money will still be owed.

So if the question is, how does that make me feel ?......well, it makes me feel pretty damn good that they will be owed but they havent a chance in hell of getting any of it !

Stonge wrote:I'm more worried about the world falling off the tortoise.

I worry more about what on earth the tortoise is standing on...

Mike4 wrote:

Stonge wrote:I'm more worried about the world falling off the tortoise.

I worry more about what on earth the tortoise is standing on...

"all the way down" dude!

The meaning of life is obvious to most of us .......it's to pay taxes.
Just ask the IRS or HMRC.

All this other speculation is totally irrelevent.

richlist wrote:But surely when it's all over and we are gone and it's all black and that.......we will still owe HMRC. The end doesn't wipe out our tax liabilities like CGT or IHT etc.....the money will still be owed.

So if the question is, how does that make me feel ?......well, it makes me feel pretty damn good.

Like the man said, we are born with nothing. If we die with debts, we've made a profit on life.

BJ

Really enjoyed these replies - thanks everyone.

It's impossible to know what eventually will happen in a trillion, trillion years' time of course, and I have heard of the multiverse theory (don't understand it though!). I'm going to have a read through the Gamma ray burst and Great Filter though as they are new to me.

Cheers, OLTB.

But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply, the river of Time—
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream—
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast—
As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

'The Future' (part) - Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1883)

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Free Man's Worship (part) - Bertrand, Earl Russell (1872 – 1970)

I'll chuck in one more idea that I find even more intellectually disturbing. As most of those who read this sub-forum know, Einstein's General Relativity says we live in a four-dimensional world (three* spatial dimensions plus time). But it also implies that the time ahead of us 'already' exists. We are on a journey (a 'world line') though these four dimensions (imagine a wiggly line moving in a transparent cube) and cannot experience it but the entire future may already be there.
In the 1920s, JW Dunne (qv) wrote extensively about this under the general heading of 'serial time' and since he was also a top-class aeronautical engineer and a reasonable applied mathematician his views are worth reading, especially as neither the string theorists not the opposing loop quantum gravity theorists have yet produced anything more convincing.

* if you are a string theorist, you add six more dimensions that are all rolled up and don't count