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A Snapshot of the Universe 3 Trillion Years From Now
ultracool wrote with a link to a Science Daily article that requires that you think long term. Really long term. Case Western Reserve University physicists are theorizing that trillions of years from now the universe will become 'static'. Essentially, the information that we use to gauge our Galaxy's position in the universe will have moved beyond the 'visible horizon. "What remains will be 'an island universe' made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void ... The researchers followed up that discussion with one tracking early elements like helium and deuterium produced in the Big Bang. They predict systems that allow us to detect primordial deuterium will be dispersed throughout the universe to become undetectable, while helium in concentrations of approximately 25 percent at the Big Bang will become indiscernible as stars will produce far more helium in the course of their lives to cloud the origins of the early universe."
Sounds a little like armageddon.
Actually no, it doesn't. Not in the least.
if we can't even correctly predict the weather 5 days from now
how can we expect to predict the universe 3 trillion years from now?
For a better look at points along the future timeline of the universe, see here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/universe.html
Science/philosophy went through stages of flat Earth, Earth at the center of the universe, everything made up of four elements... Granted, we progressed a bit in what we can measure and observe these days, but current structure and workings of the whole universe now, much less a trillion years later is not one of those things. We are most probably spinning fairy tales on what happens inside black holes, on other planets, in the center of our own planet or even with temperature changes on the surface. It might be amusing to plug big numbers into equations and end up with a wild picture of the world, but it's just an exercise in math and science fiction. Why don't we focus on getting more facts first? Better exploration of nearby planets and deep layers of the earth should be within our reach now.
Not content with the fact we will die in less than ten billionths of the time interval discussed in this story, some of us still obsess with thinking we know the answers to the universe.
How will this affect your behaviour today? Will you re-think going to that club? Will you pick up an extra piece of litter? Will you go and buy up all the compressed helium you can find?
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
I'll believe it when I see it, just like any other theory that will only be demonstrated in several trillion years time.
Doesn't this mean that the universe may be much older than we can currently detect in that there may be a lot more of it out there beyond our current event horizon which drops off at about 13.7 billion years? Maybe it is 20 or 30 billion years old but we can only detect it to the 13.7 billion year line.
First idiot to mention a certain game with a protracted development schedule gets shot.
Jackson: Of course our sun will expire long before then, in about 3 billion years.
Mavis: [jumping from chair in panic] What's that you say?
Jackson: [repeats]
Mavis: [gradually relaxing] Oh, I thought you said 3 MILLION years, whew!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Will Duke Nukem Forever be released until then?
The debate over what the universe will be like in 3 trillion years is over, please censor the scientific method, because this is a moral issue now, and I will lead you to the promised land. Sincerly, your Father-Figure-Prophet-Messiah
I'd be much more interesting if someone had a theory about what the universe looked like before the Big Bang, assuming that isn't a bunch of bullshit too.
Right now, Hindu creation mythology is looking less silly than theoretical astrophysics. I'll be waiting for Kalki to come destroy the universe and start a new cycle before I'll believe any speculation about what will happen in the way, way future, 150X as long away as the speculated age of our universe. That's like making predictions about the 3000th birthday of a 20 year old person.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
All this stuff about microwaves and dark matter is cool but what I want to know is, will Linux have taken over the desktop?
I believe the summary is misleading. The researchers are not saying it will be a static universe, but that it will appear to be static.
The universe will keep expanding, but we will not be able to tell.
So, from what I can gather, any speculation beyond 20 billion years is a waste of time.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What remains will be 'an island universe' made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void...
yes, because crossing intergalactic space is so easy nowadays...
Kharma is like a boomerang. Mine is broken.
I repeat in greater detail...
As far as I know, the universe is expanding and the rate of expansion is increasing. IIRC, this will result in a situation with a shrinking event horizon, where the universe basically ceases to exist as space-time tears itself apart, and once the event horzon is less than the Planck Length, the universe itself ceases to exist. According to one study which, IIRC, has not been refuted, this will happen in some 20 billion years time. It's called the Big Rip.
So, from what I can gather, any speculation beyond 20 billion years is a waste of time.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
So, in this expanding universe, 3.000.000.000.000 years from now, we will seem to be in a dark void. Sorry, that's no suprise to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_s pace
As long as there's some big computer around by then that has figured out how to reverse entropy... let there be light...
and do some actual research.
Just some point's I've thought of
Can we actually change something in the universe's future? I mean, if we were on earth or not, would it have any impact on the universe's future? or we're just an ant in at a very big forest?
If we can change something in the Macro level of the universe's acts, can we change the universe so it will fit our needs for a long term (billions of years)?
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
This is a related video. From Google Video website
8 583592305
... all incompatible--reached its schizophrenic impasse: one theory, known as general relativity, is fantastically successful in describing big things like stars and galaxies, and another, called quantum mechanics, is equally successful in describing small things like atoms and subatomic particles. Albert Einstein, the inventor of general relativity, dreamed of finding a single theory that would embrace all of nature's laws. But in this quest for the so-called unified theory, Einstein came up empty-handed, and the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics has stymied all who've followed. That is, until the discovery of string theory."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=425804139
"Einstein's Dream," introduces string theory and shows how modern physics--being composed of two theories that are ferociously
The best art videos collection from YouTube
Unselfish actions pay back better
Luckily there is a magnitude of difference between a US Trillion (10e12) and a European one (10e18)...
:)
This being a mainly US site I assume the prediction is based on the easy one
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Hooray perspective! Now let's go out there and have some fun!
...Just enough time for another bath then...
At what point do we stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies?
At Slashdot, individuals that probably are new to having their own pubes are seen agonizing about whether the human existence will be around in 500 years. These usually are the types who demand this sort of thing:
1) stop global climate change right fucking now, or else (no matter what it takes) before we all die
2) let's get off this crappy rock and populate new planets before we all die
Both are absurd notions, but apparently crying wolf again and again works when manipulating hungry-for-hype mass media.
It *is* important to be forward-looking and responsible about the future but those who make environmentalism into a sort of religious crusade are not doing themselves nor their descendants (assuming they ever bother to have any, given the catastrophe now! mentality) any favours.
The universe: a device for turning hydrogen into helium
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
I thought this site was about "stuff that matters."
Galaxy Song
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
There's no way for them to know what will be "undiscernable" to instruments and intelligence in 3 trillion years. Scientists a century and a half ago would have limited our universe to detection by optical telescopes. In just a decade from now, "dark matter detectors" (for example) could push that "horizon" beyond today's wildest imaginings. "Only" a trillion years from now, if we could possibly keep a consistent identity with whatever intelligence descends from us to then, "we" will likely have intelligence of even subtler, more distant phenomena.
Or we'll have returned to optical telescopes, or much more likely, won't exist to know anything at all. At which point the "discernable" universe will be more or less infinitessimal, or zero.
--
make install -not war
still be a jobs program employing thousands of physicists.
The big bang, what a hoax! I can't believe there are those who actually see it as rational science! How can you just make things up!!
Three trillion years...I suppose that's when that Google-beating start-up will rise.
On the subject of misunderstandings about Hinduism, it bugs me that some people consider it to be a polytheistic philosophy. Not anymore so than most varieties of Christianity, with their Patris-Fílii-Spíritus Sancti trinity.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
A score -1 Ignorant would be entirely appropriate. All the parent post is saying is that oooh, nasty little scientists got it wrong 500 years ago, therefore they're equally full of crap about things I don't understand. We got a pretty fucking good idea about the inner workings of our planet. We got a damn good understanding of meteorology and climatology, and we're progressing nicely in cosmology despite ignorance peddlers like you. Your post isn't even logically consistent--poor dumbass scientists got it wrong with a flat earth, got it wrong with the four elements (it's called alchemy...what eventually turned into the science of chemistry once all the religious/mystical woo woo was ripped out), can't predict with 100% accuracy the weather, the fuckers can't grab their asses with both hands. But they can build a rocket...
<br>
So, since scientists are a bunch of idiots, how about you, and your expertise in, uh, something or other come up with a brand new rocket fuel. Might I suggest penguins? Worked fine on whaling ships near Antarctica. *Houston, we need more speed* *Roger that, Epimetheus. Toss another penguin in the burner*
Well, at last the Mouse will finally become public domain at about that time.
I'm looking forward to get my free copy of Steamboat Willie..........
X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
XX ITE AD X
every time i take a dump a new universe is born.
Isn't the origin of the universe a little cloudy at the moment? TA indicates that there will be no information about how the universe expanded a long time from now. We don't know exactly how the universe is expanding now. If we did, we would know exactly how it formed, right? If this is an attempt to enhance funding for the study of the physics of space, they had better round off a couple zeros.
Fukkit. I'D like to get a job sitting on my arse and spouting-out fairy stories about existence 2^40-odd years hence!
There's nothing BETTER they could be doing with their time and their grants? I SHOULD THINK SO!
Like, developing weapons and stuff?
3,000,000,002,007: the year of the linux desktop!
Florida housing market will be back at 2006 prices in three trillion years.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Just a little question i've been asking myself for ages: Why do current theories postulate the the universe will NOT contract back to a singularity after a (long) while? I thought i kind of understood the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory that used to popular, since gravity works at infinite distances, and should thus, ever so slowly, decelerate the expansion of the universe, or at least the fact that galaxies are traveling away from each other. AFAIU (understand), the constant acceleration of things in the universe (in part by the expansion of the universe) away from each other is powered by left-over energy from the Big Bang, which should be a finite amount of energy.
So why does the ever-so-soft tugging of inter-galaxy gravity, over an infinite amount of time, NOT lead to a Big Crunch? Any Astrophysicist car to enlighten me? I really want to understand this...
"Email me when this happens."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
does this we will no longer be considered urban,but perhaps suburban or rural?
Because the universe IS a singularity, and the so-called "expanding universe" is simply a differential crunch toward pointspace. The edge of the universe is our own outer limits -- and event horizon. Credit Carl Sagan for this one :)
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I posted earlier about the Big Rip. From what I have been able to gather, it has not been refuted, and the evidence is still the same. The conclusion is that the universal expansion rate will go vertical in about 20 billion years. At that point the light cone will be smaller than the Planck distance - the universe then simply disappears. It will hit the universe everywhere at the same time. No big crunch. No "coming back". No "eternal return". Just this, now. Forever.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Go read your bible some more. Actual science is probably a little too scary for you.
why does this stupid slashdot shit default to plain old text when I'm logged in? it'd be nice if what I wrote actually appeared as what I wrote for once, and what's hilarious is how it tries to prevent me from posting because of this idiotic "kharma" shit (I am the parent poster).
uh.. and why the fuck does the parent post (dated May 27 [or 27 May if you prefer]) appear BEFORE another post, dated May 26, in supposedly 'chronological' order on my posting history?
what a shitty website.
Because they're grouped by story, dipshit.
So back to my point--my personal incredulity has nothing illogical about it. Three trillion years from now is so far away that it is asinine to make predictions about what will happen then. But nature is full of waves and cycles, from the microscale to the macroscale. So it makes way more sense, from a scientific, rational, empirical viewpoint that the universe would behave in some cyclical fashion than an infinite expansion--an idea, as I cited, which is mirrored in Hindu mythology / philosophy / whatever.
I have a hunch you said I was making a logical fallacy because of your personal beliefs about religion (confirmed by reading some of your other comments). I am a very non-religious person myself, and I consider most religious beliefs to be fallacious. But for every question with a single correct answer there are an infinite number of incorrect answers. If I were to assume no correct answer existed simply because the vast preponderance of answers are incorrect, that would be a logical fallacy. In other words, if you assume an idea is wrong simply because it appears in a religious text, you're just as closed-minded as someone who believes an idea is right simply because it appears in that text. Scriptures are never going to take the place of science for providing definitive answers, but they might provide inspiration and insight for some good research.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Let the scientists play. They will bring us joys and worries.
Many very interesting and useful advancements have come from what at the time looked like idle thinking.
In our materialistic society nowadays many people forget that vacinnation, molecular biology and space travel started with people looking at bugs or at the stars for the sheer pleasure of doing so.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We probe these questions because it is interesting and because we can.
And very often knowledge for knowledge sake generates science that is useful in ways we did not imagine.
What you are advocating is oscurantism of the worst kind and I, for one, will not surrender to such facile and defeatist attitude.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It you are crap at being sarcastic don't blame others for not getting your brilliance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.