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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."
For a better look at points along the future timeline of the universe, see here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/universe.html
Contrary to the weather predictions, no one will complain about it.
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Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
Because no one ever prayed up a better microchip. Pointless meditations on the true nature of atoms and light however.... Well, not so empty a pursuit as religion in retrospect. Your brand of incredulity is the wellspring of poverty.
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...
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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
I don't know. It might be that the Hubble constant and short term climate processes have nothing to do with each other and that trying to make some inference between them is just asinine.
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.
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
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Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
Because all religions that wield power abuse it.
You sound like the people who say "why two desktop environments? we need to work together and focus on beating Microsoft". That doesn't make sense because the open source world is not a hive mind, and developers and projects are not interchangeable. People work on the projects that interest them, and they don't necessarily care about "beating Microsoft". If you try to force them to work on your thing, they'll get pissed off and work on nothing.
The same is true for the scientific world. If these Case Western Reserve University physicists were not writing this paper, do you really think they would be probing deep layers of the Earth? Do you really think there's value in everyone in the scientific world fixating on a single goal?
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)?
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This is a related video. From Google Video website
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... 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
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Unselfish actions pay back better
Religions that have power are no longer religions - they are political ideologies. And politics are inherently corrupt and corrupting. Are atheist ideologies with power any less corrupt? Secular ideologies?
Religion is not the problem though other ideologies would like for you to believe it is as they attempt to increase their own power. Politics and the "will to power" are the human problem whether at the level of individuals or nations.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
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.
Why can't I turn this around and say, "Some of us still obsess with thinking we know the meaning of life . . . Can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Sciences?" It's a different approach to trying to understand the universe. You're free to think that scientists are arrogant, but they're no less arrogant than you are in your comment.
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.
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I'm not sure what happens on planets and the deep layers of Earth matter for the expansion of the universe, or to generalize, what geology have to do with cosmology, so I'm not sure what a better understanding of those things would help the understanding of this. It would be far less than the scale of how a golf ball affect the rotation of Earth. And as for this research, they're simply extrapolating from what's been seen to happen in the past. And when you think about it, there's not many end stations for the universe. It's either a big crunch, static universe, or a big rip. If there's enough black matter, perhaps we have yet to see the force of the big bang being overtaken by the gravity of all the mass though.
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True. But we can predict that light bulb driven by a fixed battery will go dark within a predictable number of hours.
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I think that's a great idea. I think that my religion, which says that you're all going to hell is right. Why? Because god privately revealed it to me, that's why? Proof? What more proof do you need? It's about FAITH. If you don't believe then it's not my problem, cause you're the one who's going to hell.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, this has got to be one of the most asinine statements I've ever read on Slashdot. We don't leave Big Answers to the religions because THEY CAN JUST MAKE STUFF UP. Who's to say who is right or wrong in an arena where it's all about how somebody feels about things and you simply have to take things on faith? I trust math and science to come up with the correct answers, not someone who could very well be having psychotic delusions.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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...
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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..........
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XX ITE AD X
The term you're looking for is red giant. Red dwarfs are just regular stars even smaller than our own, and the name comes from their reddish spectra.
Except that there is a big difference between political ideologies based on religious belief ans secular ideologies: in the first case, the political power is based on a religious belief in the second case it is based usually on economical theories *not* on atheism!
As a trivial example, I've never heard someone say, there is no god so you should eat such or such food for example.
So those two types of ideologies are really different.
Yet somehow all that mucking about with four elements, geocentric models and alchemy led to what we now regard as science. Humans are constantly trying to expand their horizons, and it is a given that they will makes some mistakes along the way. You call this "an exercise in math and science fiction", but I think it is a necessary exercise. It's not like there is some magic point when we will have gathered "enough" information to make proper judgements, and if we don't try to apply our knowledge every step of the way, then how do we know if we are really getting anywhere? The trail of mistakes our scientists leave behind is just as important as the trail of their triumphs - they are signposts telling us what fallacies not to fall for.
I agree.
Another theory is that the particles will decay.
What happens then?
Something cool. New universe?
Us Yanks are particularly susceptible to religious trolling because we are CONSTANTLY surrounded by people who actually think that way. No amount of sarcasm could possibly match up to the religious fanaticism that actually exists here.