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Universe Closer To Heat Death Than Once Thought
TapeCutter writes "In a paper soon to be published (PDF) in the Astrophysical Journal, Australian researchers have estimated the entropy of the universe is about 30 times higher than previous estimates. According to their research, super-massive black holes 'are the largest contributor to the entropy of the observable universe, contributing at least an order of magnitude more entropy than previously estimated.' For those of us who like their science in the form of a car analogy, Dr. Lineweaver compared their results to a car's gas tank. He states, 'It's a bit like looking at your gas gauge and saying "I thought I had half a gas tank, but I only have a quarter of a tank."'"
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
So as well as peak oil now we have to worry about peak universe?
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So how much entropy does the fact that this story is a duplicate add to the universe?
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So is this 30x higher than the 100x higher that was reported here on Slashdot a few months ago? http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1641232/Universe-Has-100x-More-Entropy-Than-We-Thought
> Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
And where is it that we're going?
Does it bother anyone else that a guy named "Lineweaver" is making a car analogy that doesn't involve alcohol?
John
Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
Yes, fortunately for us, maybe... but what about our children's children's children's ... (* 10^80) children? Won't someone please think of them?!?!
You mean we may never make it to:
- seeing a computer which can run Crysis?
- Duke Nukem: Forever release date?
- Hurd 1.0?
- kdawson leaving a story alone and publishing something accurate?
:-O
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Just because the laws of physics IN THIS UNIVERSE prevent that doesn't mean it can't happen since by definition the low entropy state the universe started in was created (in some form) by alternative laws of physics possibly outside this universe since the laws we know didn't exist at that point.
There's no reason why these alternative physical laws couldn't suddenly kick back in when the universe reaches a certain entropy state and start to reverse the whole process back to zero. Some people would say time would then be going in reverse but this doesn't need to be the case.
Considering that red dwarfs are expected to last trillions of years (no red dwarf has ever died. The universe is too young), we just need to move to a planet around one of them, assuming they have habitable planets.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Star formation is believed to end about 10^14 years from now, the total entropy of universe only affects events after that. Not a worry. If protons decay with 10^32 year half-life, then practically all nucleons decay after 10^40 years, which leaves all black holes to evaporate after about 10^99 years.
If protons don't decay as we suspect, then universe slowly tunnels to iron-56, (light nuclei via fusion and heavier via fission) in about 10^1500 years, which coalesce into black holes or neutron stars in about 10^10^76 years (yup, double exponent).
So quite frankly, this bit about more entropy means little for life as we know it, though if life can arise by some heat-engine powered means (due to temperature differences only). still the time scales are staggering.
but all mute if Big Rip is possible, we might only have 22 billion years left!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
I've for one have never forgiven them for Hitler.
So on the previous iteration, a man named, coincidentally "Douglas Adams", in a language totally unrelated to but oddly identical to English, wrote a series of books where he concluded that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 41?
emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong. consider events around the end of the 19th century. thermodynamics was around. the equations were established. in fact, there was, based on a flakey idea that physics was finite, the thought that we knew everything. There were a few unimportant oddities. One of them was radioactivity. so the thermo equations on the blackboard got rewritten. right at that point, thermodynamics did not hold. so what does this say about the fundamental nature of the universe?
The only thing that thermodynamics can't explain is why aren't we already at maximum entropy? Everything else that we know of (such as radioactivity) is fully consistent with thermodynamics.
Black holes can contain lots of usable energy, for those that might be in the black holes.
No, there's a large amount of energy inside, but it's all in the form of a high temperature, and there's no colder heat reservoir available to anyone down there that would try to extract useful work from it. (Since nothing outside the singularity is reachable once you're there.) Useful work could be extracted from outside the hole by letting stuff fall in, like the way a hydroelectric generator works, but not if there's nothing outside left to fall in.
There's an asymptotic limit to the universe's entropy that is approached but not necessarily reached, where everything would have fallen into one massive hole, free to explore an immensely large number of quantum states available to it at its high temperature. When you fall in your mass contributes to the number of states (and the temperature). The entropy rises with the logarithm of the number of states. A black hole singularity is postulated as being some single particle with a complicated wave function composed of a large number of available component states.