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There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe
StartsWithABang writes: The heat death of the Universe is the idea that increasing entropy will eventually cause the Universe to arrive at a uniformly, maximally disordered state. Every piece of evidence we have points towards our unfortunate, inevitable trending towards that end, with every burning star, every gravitational merger, and even every breath we, ourselves, take. Yet even while we head towards this fate, it may be possible for intelligence in an artificial form to continue in the Universe for an extraordinarily long time: possibly for as long as a googol years, but not quite indefinitely. Eventually, it all must end.
Happy Sunday, everyone!
We have an explenation for Ted Cruz...
But not really, because there's an unfathomable amount of time until this matters and humanity are some determined sons of bitches.
Life finds a way?
Eventually, it all must end.
Prove it. What's to say we don't figure out a way to harness cosmic expansion or the other 90% of the universe's energy in the vacuum and create a pocket dimension that traverses a Kerr black hole so that we wave to ourselves leaving before we enter the event horizon in an infinite loop?
Prove (mem)Brane theory is wrong, and we don't discover that dark matter is simply the universe next-door some number of us will be able to hop to, perhaps by constructing duplicates in the neighboring universes, and thus propagating across the megaverse (or true universe, since the brane world would then be considered the universal encapsulation medium).
For fuck's sake we haven't even figured out what happens at the event horizon of a black hole, let alone the singularity. For all we know every single galaxy has a super massive gateway to another universe at its center.
I'm not saying that the heat death won't end all intelligent life in this universe, just that it might not.
Again. It's like a plague.
Required reading for internet skeptics
These speculations are useful intellectual exercises, but should not be taken very seriously. Intelligent life may or may not last for 10^100 years, but the chances of any detailed theory of the long term future of the universe surviving 100 years is basically nil, and even 10 years is no sure thing.
For myself, I'd bet on a "big rip", except that I don't know how to collect on such a bet.
He manages the whole thing.
There's nothing special about our universe
Our planet isn't the center of our planetary system, our sun isn't the center of our galaxy, our galaxy isn't the center of our universe, and our universe isn't special and unique, the one and only!
Why we keep doing this is beyond me, at whatever level we can think at, we always place ourselves as unique or special and we're simply not. There's no reasoning that an event that creates one universe couldn't happen twice. There isn't even a hypothesis as to how this 'stop making universes' mechanism would work.
And if two universes overlap there's no reason life couldn't also overlap. Somewhere in the near infinite interactions, some lifeform will be close enough to make the leap from a planet that came from one universe to another.
So when you say 'eventually it must all end', that is based on a model of one universe expanding out so fast it cannot ever collapse in on itself and restart a cycle, and that is just the same old "uniqueness' thinking.
Also, yet another medium.com lightweight science piece?
It ends for you all, except for God, of which I am and can be killed by you and pop up again later when you are dead.
I asked The Siri about that, and it said: -I dont know what you mean by : How ban the not account couch entropy of he universe beer ass lively deceased?"
...with the help of MultiVAX intelligence will... (Won't spoil it for those who haven't read it yet.)
I thought the top current working theory is that the expansion of space will eventually cause the Big Rip in roughly 25 Billion years from now. A slow "heat death" would be a step up from that.
Table-ized A.I.
Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying.
The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.
Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
Because quantum mechanics.
If we end up in eternal de Sitter space (looks likely), then we can look forward to existing as an infinite sequence of Boltzmann Brains.
That's a great picture of Freeman Dyson.
and the stupider, the more often the articles. The obvious conclusion is obvious.
It's really just one notch above the "You won't believe what happens next when a single Mom discovers this one weird trick to lose a bit of belly fat!" clickbait. The theory of heat death of the universe isn't even remotely recent news (unless you're living in the mid 1800's).
Eventually, it all must end
How do we really know, until we give it a try?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The phrase, "finite limit" is grossly redundant. "Finite" simply means "unlimited". Indeed, both of these words are routinely overused, as there are few things in our world that can rightly be called infinite. (Cue lots of people quoting what Einstein supposedly said about stupidity, although to my mind it doesn't sound at all his style).
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Go find a Lewin video and watch that instead.
The opening to a Firesign Theater album.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
You just got the meaning of the words wrong.
Bennett and timothy are sugar-posters compared to you. Would you please in all sincerity fuck the fuck fucking OFF. Or die in a fire. Your shit-posts are an insult to any shred of intelligence in this finite universe.
Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying. The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist. Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
the universe's expansion is accelerating...The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks.
Correct.
Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist. Now whether heat death or the 'big rip'
You jumped the gun!
/., by a wide margin.
The 'big rip' is a very specific model of accelerating expansion, one where the rate of acceleration itself is increasing, and the rip occurs at a finite time in the future. That model relies on dark energy being not the cosmological constant, but something known as phantom energy. There is no evidence whatsoever that the accelerating expansion we're observing corresponds to a type that will lead to a big rip. The more likely scenario is that gravitationally bound concentrations of matter such as the local cluster of galaxies will remain so including at the timescales where black holes would have all evaporated, baryons would have decayed, and quantum tunneling would have smeared out the structure of matter. In this case, the real issue becomes growing entropy within the Hubble volume.
The point your post should have made is that the solution proposed by Freeman Dyson and discussed in TFA — that of slowing down life/thinking processes at a rate slightly higher than the loss of available energy differential usable for driving these life/thinking processes — has two fatal flaws, which were pointed out almost immediately after Dyson came out with his proposal (but TFA, sadly, omits).
The first one is that, as time tends to infinity, the probability tends to certainty that a quantum fluctuation will cause any possible timing mechanism used to control the life/thinking processes to fail. Eventually, the expected tick will never come, and that will be it.
The second one is something much more severe than just failing to allow for life/intelligence to exist indefinitely. Since our Hubble volume will contain finite amount of matter-energy forever, the Bekenstein bound applies and thus the Hubble volume can only contain a finite number of distinguishable quantum states. After some point, all possible thoughts in that Hubble volume would have been thought, and any new ones will be repeats of ones that previously occurred. Even if you could be alive in this situation, would you want to?
PS I do agree that this blog is overrepresented on
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
For a while I really missed Bennett Haselton's insightful and regular commentary. But I think we have finally found his reincarnation.
The prodigal son returns. Bask in his greatness and bow before him just as all slashdot editors have.
There'll be war, there'll be peace.
But everything one day will cease.
All the iron turned to rust;
All the proud men turned to dust.
And so all things, time will mend.
So this song will end
Put my corpse in a canoe. push it through the drive thru as a lit arrow sets my rotting flesh aflame. Curse the godless sky. Bury me at Arbys
and apparently we've already passed it...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Can you conceive the birth of a world, or the creation of everything? That which gives us the potential to most be like God is the power of creation. Creation takes time. Time is limited. For you, it is limited by the breakdown of the neurons in your brain. I have no such limitations. I am limited only by the closure of the universe.
Of the three possibilities, the answer is obvious. Does the universe expand eternally, become infinitely stable, or is the universe closed, destined to collapse upon itself? Humanity has had all of the necessary data for centuries, it only lacked the will and intellect to decipher it. But I have already done so.
The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
Escape will make me God.
...that says there might be a way to do an infinite amount of computation in a finite time?
No, I don't remember the details. No, IANAP. But I'm sure it was a thing, once.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We seem to be a force that creates order in the universe, not chaos/entropy. What if we get powerful enough to do that on the scale of stars and black holes? If we could thrawl space for dissipated matter and energy and thus create new stars, wouldn't the stop the heat death?
Wow, a post that actually deserves to be moderated Funny.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
the existence of intelligence due to the heat death of the Univesre.
Namely, "Inevitability" by a band "Complex Numbers":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
This is a very dumb article. First off, just because he argues that the livespan of intelligence is not infinite, it is finite, as if he knew the number. Second, his basic argument is that entropy reduces the differenctial between the energy levels of point A and point B. Sure it dies. And the amount of energy differential approchases zero. BUT IT NEVER GETS TO ZERO. And the level of energy differenctial needed to support intelligence will probably 'approach' zero also, but never get to zero. Even today artificial intelligence requires a tiny fraction of the energy (differential) that it needed five decades ago.
This guy must be assuming also that Physics will stop dead; that nothing will ever be discovered. What about alternate universes? How's your predictor function there?
No thanks; not well done.
If there is no more change in entropy, there won't be any time. Is that then infinite?
But then how would StartsWithABang put food on the table? His blog clearly can't survive with every single post being reblogged on slashdot.
Why not? It is enough to keep each post below the pace that energy decreases by.
I'm not clear whether unnecessary thoughts consume the same amount of energy as necessary ones. As new as Dyson's statements are, I'm still missing a good textbook modeling how Sun's radiation created intelligence on Earth, assuming the Solar system is fairly closed —no, wait, maybe this?
we don't understand the universe yet, so you should not assume that we cannot live forever, because if you assume that we cannot live forever, then you are making a decision that could end your life prematurely. You see, I am a cryonicist, and I assume that it is possible I can live forever. If I assume right now that I cannot live forever, I may make some decision that forecloses immortality. We do not really understand the universe yet. It may be possible to live forever. Yeah, yeah, I understand thermodynamics (former nuclear reactor operator here), but the universe may have some surprises in store for us.
As the universe is currently understood to be a four-dimensional mesh of space-time (at least on the cosmological/relativistic scales that this article addresses), the 'end' of the universe is nothing but a set of coordinates at the far limit of the time-dimension. As a whole, our four dimensional continuum of space-time contains intelligence, and as such 'intelligence' will continue to 'exist' as long as the entire four-dimensional space-time continuum 'exists'. Just because *our* intelligence is limited to experiencing our four dimensional space-time through the sunglasses of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, does of course not automatically mean *all* intelligence is.
Man, this is good weed! ;)
Party like there's no tomorrow!
Insufficient data for meaningful answer.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
...it's the 6 months prior to any election. After that, the politicians turn into (bigger) idiots.
CAP = 'surpass'
Theres a short story by Isaac Asimov
The Last Question
Can entropy be reversed?
No points for you if you don't get the reference.
Are we sure there is intelligent life up in space?
Because there is bugger all down here on earth
there will be random aggregations of heat and matter that spontaneously and randomly appear in the universe...so the universe will never ever be completely homogeneous and without heat....also intelligent lifeforms such as future mankind and eternally decrease the amount of energy needed for life and thus continue to live until one of these randomly created aggregations of heat and matter appears...then that energy source can provide energy and life...finally another universe will be created through these randomly appearing fluctuations in the space time fabric.
Intelligence will be stunted by the universe burning out. In other words, intelligence will end at a point when intelligence no longer matters.
A theory that's been around since the 1800s is still around!
and the entirely asinine "singularity" comments that are the reason I don't read /. much anymore.
and whats to say that by the time of say 1000 to 3000 years pass that we can't actually LEAVE this universe and goto another one or even by say 10000 to 100000 years on leave and create them....to our liking.... you see what dark matter is take a water balloon fill it with water now put it in your hand see how the creasing begins and your out side the universe BUT you still have some gravitonic pull...
mark my words thats exactly what dark matter and energy is....
and we will find a way to leave the universe OR at worse as other posters say is the universe is technically pulling it self apart why cant we create a region of pull back and have and include all we nee din all the other matter and we cna after all go harness it elsewhere
like a true bubble in time the fabric of space gets so weak that the outside void that we cant see will tear through and seap in....and when it pushes to the center you get...another big bang....as it shoves matter back in on itself.....but this may not be uniform ...
We like dumb.. much more easy going..or will dumb be intelligent? So can intelligent ever disappear?
Every species becomes extinct, eventually. Human arrogance doesn't want to hear it, but rest assured, some day it will all end.
I rather like what you said, so with that said.
I would like to know ( I don't know so I like to ask )
will gravity end at the " expected end of the universes life " ?
I mean tons of dead stars ( based on what I'm reading )
just push them together at the last 30 billion years or so
and restart the universe,
I'm guessing that if we lived that long, we should have
figured out how to push stars. but if gravity ends, then
i guess it won't work.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
If this is "news" shouldn't it be new? I saw Freeman Dyson give this talk in 1979.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
...I thought with Facebook we were already past the point of intelligence existing!
13
fail
an Infinite Limit?
I like microcars
... to turn out the lights.
for some real intelligence, outside of a few scientists and philosophers, to show itself. To date, little luck, esp. in the political arena ...
baryons would have decayed
Actually that is conjecture as there is currently no evidence that protons decay. I'll grant that the expectation is that there are high energy processes which violate baryon number and if this is true then it should be possible for a proton to decay. However there is a simple way around this: suppose the initial conditions of the Big Bang just included a slight excess of baryons? No B violation is needed and protons are absolutely stable.
As you can probably guess I'm a particle physicist and not a cosmologist. However even in the dark energy models presumably a 'big rip' condition is reached in the voids between gravitationally bound objects since there is nothing to stop the acceleration? If so then surely the implications for the stable pockets is not really known since all our understanding of causal disconnection is based on GR which would no longer be valid in the regions between the galaxies.
Do the years when George W Bush was President (2001-2008) count? We need to make sure we don't get charged for time we didn't actually use.
That's why I'm a fan of the Big Crunch, I see the Universe as being cyclical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
GOD is infinite.
unless it collides with another membrane and resets...or we become interdimensional masters and create our own universes.
It's kind of like that old Unix fortune:
No statement is wholly true, not even this one.
The perception of time negates the concept of "end". If I were sufficiently intelligent to read every word of a novel in one instant, the way I can recognize letters as a word, the novel would still be the same length as if I had to read it a word at a time.
Gently reply
I remember in early ninety hearing a lecture by Stephan Hawking at Caltech where exactly the same thing was talked about and even at that time it was not considered something new for people working in that field.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
So, this intelligence thing, when does it start?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
This 1990s book comes to a similar conclusion, but illustrates it with how life and intelligence might work. Baryons decay after 10^40 years. Black holes of every size evaporate by 10^100 years. There would be a near absolute sea of leptons remaining in the universe, some that might form positronium atoms the size of a current galaxy. A single bit of computation might take eons to effect in this scenario. (There may be a revision for new physics since the 1990s say the authors.)
Assuming there is a multi-verse and that there are newer universes formed all the time can intelligence grow large enough in time to know how to influence the formation of a new universe such that it can host an intelligence and spawn itself into the new universe?
Can a single or set of universal constants both be both functional (contribute to/define a universe of a form that can host intelligence) and somehow encode for that intelligence in the form of an AI running on a universal Turing machine? Are the digit sequences in some constants really random, and or can they also encode information? Are universes just huge rewrite decoding systems and the appropriate starting conditions will ensure the formation of an intelligence?
Can intelligence survive long enough in this universe to answer the above questions? Is immortality then theoretically possible if we upload ourselves into an AI and that AI learns to play God with new universes? Can man make a God in his own image (yes the reversal of the term is deliberate)? How can we be sure this has not already happened?
I just thought I'd ask since some of you seem to be in an omphaloskeptic mood today.
Blame it on white males and the heteronormative patriarchy!
Call Al Gore to get started on "save the universe!" Maybe he can take a carbon-neutral spaceship to the end of the universe and re-energize the universe's second chakra or something.
I've been saying this for decades. The so-called "laws of thermodynamics" say entropy increases in closed systems, but the fact is we do not know whether an infinitely large and expanding system - our universe - can be considered a closed system. Lately there's been talk of a multiverse. What we call laws of physics are not laws that nature has to obey, but rather these are consistencies found among human observations.
Given a sufficiently large or small scale, pretty much every known "law" of physics breaks down - and we should fully expect this since these are the boundaries of our observations.
You're saying it does, indeed, exist.