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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.
Again. It's like a plague.
Required reading for internet skeptics
...with the help of MultiVAX intelligence will... (Won't spoil it for those who haven't read it yet.)
Evidence please.
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."
I prefer the last answer
"He threw the switch connecting all the galaxies computing power, and asked the question: " Is there a god""
From the speaker he heard the reply "Now there is"
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956 http://www.multivax.com/last_q...