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Escape from the Universe
rleyton writes "Prospect Magazine is carrying an excellent article "Escape from the Universe": The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it."
Haven't even loaded TFA yet, but the idea sounds VERY similar to the premise of Stephen Baxter's book "Ring"......
an excellent read if you get the chance.
Now tht could solve the Social Security problem.
Article Text from :
http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php? id=6701
Lifted at :
22:00 20/01/05
The universe is out of control, in a runaway acceleration. Eventually all intelligent life will face the final doom--the big freeze. An advanced civilisation must embark on the ultimate journey: fleeing to a parallel universe.
In Norse mythology, Ragnarok--the fate of the gods--begins when the earth is caught in the vice-like grip of a bone-chilling freeze. The heavens themselves freeze over, as the gods perish in great battles with evil serpents and murderous wolves. Eternal darkness settles over the bleak, frozen land as the sun and moon are both devoured. Odin, the father of all gods, finally falls to his death, and time itself comes to a halt.
Does this ancient tale foretell our future? Ever since the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, scientists have known that the universe is expanding, but most have believed that the expansion was slowing as the universe aged. In 1998, astronomers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Australian National University calculated the expansion rate by studying dozens of powerful supernova explosions within distant galaxies, which can light up the entire universe. They could not believe their own data. Some unknown force was pushing the galaxies apart, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Brian Schmidt, one of the group leaders, said, "I was still shaking my head, but we had checked everything... I was very reluctant to tell people, because I truly thought that we were going to get massacred."
Physicists went scrambling back to their blackboards and realised that some "dark energy" of unknown origin, akin to Einstein's "cosmological constant," was acting as an anti-gravity force. Apparently, empty space itself contains enough repulsive dark energy to blow the universe apart. The more the universe expands, the more dark energy there is to make it expand even faster, leading to an exponential runaway mode.
In 2003, this astonishing result was confirmed by the WMAP (Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe) satellite. Orbiting at a million miles from earth, this satellite contains two telescopes capable of detecting the faint microwave radiation which bathes the universe. It is so sensitive that it is able to photograph in exquisite detail the afterglow of the microwave radiation left over from the big bang, which is still circulating the universe. The WMAP satellite, in effect, gave us "baby pictures" of the universe when it was a mere 380,000 years old.
The WMAP satellite settled the long-standing question of the age of the universe: it is officially 13.7bn years old (to within 1 per cent accuracy). But more remarkably, the data showed that dark energy is not a fluke, but makes up 73 per cent of the matter and energy of the entire universe. To deepen the mystery, the data showed that 23 per cent of the universe consists of "dark matter," a bizarre form of matter which is invisible but still has weight. Hydrogen and helium make up 4 per cent, while the higher elements, you and I included, make up just 0.03 per cent. Dark energy and most of dark matter do not consist of atoms, which means that, contrary to what the ancient Greeks believed and what is taught in every chemistry course, most of the universe is not made of atoms at all.
As the universe expands, its energy content is diluted and temperatures eventually plunge to near absolute zero, where even atoms stop moving. One of the iron laws of physics is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in the end everything runs down, that the total "entropy" (disorder or chaos) in the universe always increases. This means that iron rusts, our bodies age and crumble, empires fall, stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, and the universe itself will run down, as temperatures drop uniformly to near zero.
Charles Darwin was referring to this law when he wrote: "Beli
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
The Author, Michio Kaku, also had essentially the exact same article in the December issue of Discover. The article is right here. Very interesting read, but the engineer in me makes me laugh at the sheer impracticality if the possible methods.
www.owlsden.com/moroha
Quote:
(Emphasis mine)
As you can see, it's not easy to come to agreement about what the term "our universe" actually means. A term this broad invites all manner of semantic arguments
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of short stories about a race called the Xeelee, and how humanity discovers them, moves to the stars and is nearly destroyed. The stories have an epic scope - several million years - but are quite entertaining. One of the most enjoyable reads I've ever had.
I'd describe what a 'great attractor' or 'neutrino birds' are, but that would give a way a lot of the story.
what the hell are you talking about? a belief in jesus or HIS teachings != creationist theory.. that's Adam and Eve..
Though the wormhole route is explored most engagingly in Greg Egan's Diaspora, I prefer the Total Perspective Vortex in H2G2.
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make install -not war
An interesting observation..
l Argument.html
Keep in mind that there are there are different "sizes" of infinity ("proof" below). If you accept this, you can accept that having an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of universe bridging wormholes, does not imply an infinite number of wormholes in each universe.
Notes
1) Using a digitalization argument you can show that the number of whole numbers is "countably infinite" while the number of real numbers (fractional numbers) is "uncountably infinite". And thus the infinite set of real numbers is larger than the infinite set of whole numbers.
2) Note 1/2 of infinity (e.g. even numbers) is still equal in size to infinity (e.g. all whole numbers). We're talking cardinality here.
3) See http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/CantorsDiagona
When you say "no end," do you mean that in terms of distance, or in terms of its ultimate disposition?
Just a refresher on how we came up with the "big bang" notion: the things in the universe are spreading apart from one another in a very, very observable way. In fact, they're doing it faster and faster as time goes by. There is a lot of empty space, but it's sprinkled with lots of nice glowing objects that we can see and measure. You don't have to do much math to "rewind" the observed movement of those objects to see when everything that we can see would have been unimaginably close together and dense, and hence the age of the universe in which all of those things sit. As things get any closer or denser than that, there's really no point talking about time or distance, as you've reached an infinitely irreducable point, and the math shows that to have been roughly 13 billion years ago.
Doesn't matter what happened, if anything, before then. "Before" isn't even a workable concept under those circumstances... all dimensions, including time, are compressed beyond recognition or measurement. The point is, it's just a bigger one of those word problems from school math... "A train from New York is in Baltimore going 50 miles per hour at 2:00, and has been accelerating steadily since it started in New York at X miles per hour per minute... what time did it leave New York?" If elementary students can mentally picture the problem and solve it, then given the (much more complex) observations of the actual universe around us, the math describing when our Universal Train left The Big Bang is pretty hard to miss.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, he's referring to RING, also by Stephen Baxter, and part of the Xeelee sequence. Vacumm Diagrams is just a collection of short stories rounded up into one volume. Still an entertaining read :)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I get asked this over and over.
It's IA-32 assembler (machine code for 32bit x86 PC's).
90 - Machine code for 'do nothing'
CD 19 - Machine code for 'call interrupt 19' which is roughtly 'reboot'
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
If Jesus existed in 0AD then he's definitely in a wormhole of some sort, considering that isn't a valid year. The calendar goes from 1BC straight to 1AD. There is no Year Zero.