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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."
With my luck, the parallel universe that I escaped into would be even closer to ending than this one...
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.
Couldn't we wait a few billions of years before we start consider this question seriously?
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
This was one of my biggest concerns! I mean, the universe could end tomorrow, and we'd be completely unprepared! I am so incredibly important that I must escape via a wormhole before the universe ends, so I may help... other such people... uh... get back to me.
The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe?
No. Anything that is reacheable from our universe is, by definition, part of the universe. The concept of "escape" has no meaning in this context.
2: Suck up thousands of galaxies into a toroidal naked singularity
3: Avoid any pesky humans throwing relativistic neutron stars around the universe
4: Hold off neutrino birds at all costs
5: Escape universe
Potential hazards: physical constants of new universe may not be what you expected. Beware of ultra-high gravity.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"Escape from the Universe" commented on by people who haven't figured out how to escape their parent's basements.
The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it.
The short answer: Find worm hole. Jump into said wormhole. Escape universe. I mean, this is pretty basic stuff here.
---gralem
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
If there are an infintie number of parallel universes, why aren't there an infinite number of wormholes opening all over the place in our universe?
The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it."
I'll wait until "Escaping your Universe for Dummies" comes out... that's always easy to read.
what if the parallel universe you pop out through the wormhole into is made completely of antimatter.
No problem, it will just be an escape towards a really bright future.
Dont touch ANYTHING!
When the universe explodes for my pleasure, I want to be downing Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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
Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe?
...
Now why would I want to do that? With my luck, I'd wind up in a universe where we had President George W. Bush, instead of Al Gore beginning his second term.
Yeesh. What a terrifying concept
Theory - The universe has existed for 13.7 billion years. It's a guess.
Fact - The existence of Jesus Christ is generally accepted by all scholars.
Please note, I'm an athiest but let's not go around making wild claims unless we want to turn science into a faith-based belief system.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
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.
The idea behind paralell universes are that they are smilar to our own, but slightly diffrent, say, way back when Pangea was the place to be a meteor landed and cracked the mega continent, and in certain paralell universe the metor hit, but didn't crack the continent due to some serious english being placed on the rock when it fell (or whatever bullshit thing you can think of.) Fastforward 100million years and the dinosar killing rock hits ocean instead of land, so the big die-off isn't so big. Fastforward another 200 million, and dinosaurs still rule the earth and men still look like squirles. Small changes far back can mean a big thing today. Think using 2 bytes to store the value of a year vs 4. That's a y2k problem, or no y2k problem. It all would depend on when the parallel universes diverged, and the degree of divengence. A big diffrence only a few years old and you might not notice a diffrence in the overall universe, but a small diffrence that occured way back in the begining (like..oh..say... durring the big bang there was a discarded mayonase sanwich laying about.)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
...and then there are some who believe this has already happened....
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Points well taken.
There are a great many number of interpretations of Biblical writings depending on if you are Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, etc. Some believe in completely literal translation of the Bible. This, I believe, is something in which you find great fault (correct me if I am wrong). I'm not out to change your views, but for what it's worth, there are plenty that don't think that way.
For example, I'm a member of a church in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA). Our particular interpretations are far more lenient, and do not at all suppose that concepts of evolution and science are mutually exclusive from Biblical teachings or faith. On the contrary, we believe God does indeed want us to use our intellect to understand these things.
Of course, the ELCA is considered far more "liberal" than just about any other Christian faith you may find in the US. We have no problems ordaining homosexuals for leadership positions in the church (given a vow of celibacy*), as well as women for the same. Can't say that for the Catholics or Baptists, to be sure.
This isn't meant to be a pro- or anti- religious post regarding any "Christian faith" in the US. I'm not out to change anybody's beliefs. Keep up the critical thinking! This was just meant to be somewhat informative. Hopefully you know something more than before you read my post.
Cheers,
--Kozz
* My politics are more liberal than this, also. I'm not homophobic by any stretch. This is a statement about the ELCA policies, not my own personal beliefs.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Many geeks are aware of the fact that their parent's basements will not last forever. While many say this is both far off and inevitable and thus not worth worrying about, a growing number of geek researchers are treating the issue seriously, and turning to advanced physics for a solution.
Under some theories, there is not just one parent's basement, but in fact many basements. In this "multi-basement" view, it would even be possible to travel from one basement to another.
The theory states that up the stairs and through the kitchen there are portals that lead to a realm given the mysterious sounding name of "Outside". And indeed, it is mysterious.
"We know virtually nothing about 'Outside'," said a prominent geek theorist whose name I'm too lazy to make up. "The theory states that one could travel through 'Outside' to any other place in the known basements, but we aren't sure how that is possible. Certainly it would be a place of astounding energy. While still purely theory, one of my colleagues sent me an IM claiming that he actually saw this energy shining through the windows of the kitchen when he went upstairs to get lunch."
While agreeing with the general theory, several researchers say that Outside provides no hope to the geek facing the destruction of his basement. The incredible energy of Outside, they say, would fry a geek in an instant. One said clearly fabricated claims that some geeks had already travelled Outside and returned was proof that the theory was the realm of crackpots.
"There are certainly difficulties involved in traveling Outside," said that same geek from before, "but we've found nothing insurmountable as of yet. I've calculated that the energy of Outside waxes and wanes in approximately twelve hour cycles and travel would be possible during the low portion of the cycle. Frankly, I think these theoretical problems will be overcome. I'd be much more concerned about the practical implications of traveling to other basements, such as: if there are no parents in these new basements, who will pay rent and fill the fridge? What if there is no Chinese or pizza delivery? These are the issues engineers will have to face as they travel to new worlds beyond the kitchen."
While all geeks we spoke with admitted that it is far too early to draw any conclusions, many said that this new field of research should give geeks everywhere hope.
The enemies of Democracy are
Oh, and they produce a wildly disproportionate number of the world's death metal bands.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"