Slashdot Mirror
Far Future Will See No Evidence of Universe's Origin
Dr. Eggman writes "According to an article on Ars Technica and its accompanying General Relativity and Gravitation journal article 'The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology', in the far future of the universe all evidence of the origin of the universe will be gone. Intelligences alive 100-billion-years from now will observe a universe that appears much the way our early 1900s view of the universe was: Static, had always been there, and consisted of little more than our own galaxy and a islands of matter. 'The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise--the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin. Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe.'"
I really wonder what we've missed simply because the evidence is long gone.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Nah, the bigger problem would seem to be that as far as we know we are the only sentients capable of taking advantage of the information currently available... which places a huge responsiblity on our shoulders.
If the far future will see an absence of this information then we have a responsibility to persist the data beyond the demise of our culture, whether or not another civilization will arise that can interpret the data. The information we can gather now would appear to be a limited resource given our current understanding of cosmology, and we who have access should derive what we can and pass the value on as others will not be able to do so.
Can you imagine the ID vs Evolution argument in an apparently static universe? Oh wait.. just pick up a history book and check out the executions, exiles, pariahs, and all the other fun stuff that happened to/became of our scientific forefathers back when the Earth was considered the center of a static universe.
Regards.
- The current model of the universe's origin is essentially correct. What if we're the ones living in a "post-cosmology universe," and the evidence for what really happened has faded so much that we can't detect it?
- Currently observable stars, background radiation, etc., are all we or anyone else will ever be able to observe. Almost surely, we'll come up with better technology to observe the stuff we already know to look for; quite possibly, we'll discover entirely new things (different forms of radiation, etc.) to use in forming a more complete picture. The same goes for our hypothetical observers in the far future.
- Human perception is as good as it gets. Anything living 100 billon years from now will be so different from us that it may perceive the world around it in completely different ways, and will accordingly have different technology for astronomy and everything else.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
But here's an interesting question--if documents were discovered from some ancient civilization that had a completely different cosmology, describing that cosmology, would you take those documents at face value? Suppose they contained measurements and recorded observations, as well as a prediction that future observations would differ in a certain way. I'm not sure the far future would believe us, so we would have some convincing to do.
The upside is, the people of the future can believe in a static universe, and insofar as their universe is compatible with that hypothesis, they're no worse off for not knowing the truth. If it turns out that the universe's origin does make a difference to them, there will no doubt be some observations that don't correspond with their static universe hypothesis, forcing them to adopt a hypothesis similar to ours. So by preserving our data and our theory we are indeed providing a possible solution to a future scientific problem.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
What is interesting to me about this scenario is that a currently scientific idea will become unscientific over time. What is now a scientific theory, testable and supported by empirical data, will become nothing more than the ancestors *claims* of empirical data.
Can the claims of the ancestors be trusted, when they suggest such preposterous experiential data as a "sky full of galaxies" and "background radiation"?
If they can, then science is not the only valid way to learn about the universe. We can also learn from the experiences of those who came before us, even if we cannot experience the same thing they did.
Science is a useful way to pursue truth, but it is not the only way. I think people need to see that, and this is a good example of how that is true.