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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.
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.
Sounds like Siri's been drinking.
#DeleteChrome
Slashdot really needs to tag all story links with the destination domain, just like they already do in the comments.
#DeleteChrome
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
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).
Seriously ? Once again we have an article that is pushing ignorance as wisdom. The truth is we can't say all that much with great certainty about the deep future or the deep past for that matter. We are still limited by our rather incomplete understanding. This situation is no different than Kelvin insisting the earth was between 20 and a 100 million years old based on his deep knowledge of thermodynamics but incomplete knowledge of physics.
I had this odd reflection recently: If you and your entire species never had eyesight, how would you know anything about light?
Think about this a minute. We know what light is so it seems extremely obvious. In fact, it almost *defines* what we mean by knowing in the first place: "To see the light"... "To illuminate" "Elucidate" Etc. Light is so synonymous with knowing, understanding, being aware of that we cannot just divorce our self from understanding it, or see from a perspective of there not being light (see? I can't even say a phrase like this without invoking light!).
But really think about it, and now think that there could be things in the Universe just like light which we simply do not have organs to perceive. How can we understand it? We have no conceptual framework for it perhaps. But it might be there. And it might be obvious - so obvious if we were beings who perceived it that it would be impossible to imagine existence being without it.
We are the primal tool. Just as Kant understood the limitations of knowing are intimately related with there already being the capacity to know inherent in the mind, so to the ultimate horizon of our understanding is primordially determined by our very being.
Insufficient data for meaningful answer.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html