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."

Comments

Re:Oops, we did it again

[FalconZero]

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

Don't mean to crash the party but...

[Spy der Mann]

Didn't Stephen Hawking say recently that there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes?

Quote:

Hawking presented his solution to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin. ...
Hawking also dismisses his previous suggestion that the information might have leaked into a different "Baby" universe. "The information remains firmly in our universe," he told the conference. "I am sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognisable state.

(Emphasis mine)

Re:Don't mean to crash the party but...

[TexVex]

String theory indicates that black holes are not singularities, and their event horizons are fuzzy. They are not holes, but balls of strings compressed to the maximum possible density the universe will allow. In other words, every quantum state inside a black hole is filled. Black holes aren't composed of anything resembling matter or energy we recognize. However, information about what the matter was before becoming part of the black hole remains encoded in the (extradimensional) vibrations of the strings. Slowly, over time, the black hole gives up its strings (and the information they contained) from the fuzzy event horizon, until it evaporates.

So, one way to look at it is, if you jump into a black hole you'll be transformed into the tiny vibrating strings that make up subatomic particles according to String Theory, then those strings will be flung off in randomly over time in the form of Hawking radiation.

That would be a cool thing to do with your corpse, much like having your body cremated and your ashes scattered.

Re:How to do it:

[roseblood]

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 :)