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There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe

Posted by timothy on from the never-outlives-the-ballot-box dept.

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.

19 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. What joy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Happy Sunday, everyone!

  2. Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". by Crashmarik · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". by execthis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Quothe the raven, "Forevermore". by onepoint · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I try every few years to "Feel" things differently :

      Last year was Ultra-Violet light, it was amazing that with a UV-flashlight a neighbors garden was weird and wonderful

      a few year back I hooked up headphones and tried listening to 30HZ sounds and below, could feel them but not hear them
      and it seemed to make me feel sick.

      I walk around with a blindfold a lot, makes me listen better

      I try writing with my left hand and use tools ... their is almost no tools make for left handed people

      this years test, I read somewhere that learning to discriminate time accurately is very hard to do.
      So I bought an egg timer, and I am going to learn what 5 minutes really is. kinda like that ST-TNG where data try's to boil water.

      --
      if you see me, smile and say hello.
  3. Medium.com by narcc · · Score: 4, Informative

    Again. It's like a plague.

    --
    Required reading for internet skeptics
    1. Re:Medium.com by gargleblast · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually, the mere existence of medium.com is evidence that the limit in question has already been reached.

    2. Re:Medium.com by TWX · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's what happens when you try to surf the web on a Motorola StarTAC...

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  4. The last question by Mats+Svensson · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?"

    1. Re:The last question by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sounds like Siri's been drinking.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    2. Re:The last question by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

  5. In our universe yes, but.. by LongearedBat · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...with the help of MultiVAX intelligence will... (Won't spoil it for those who haven't read it yet.)

    1. Re:In our universe yes, but.. by shess · · Score: 4, Informative

      Story in comic form:
            http://bato.to/read/_/188371/t...

  6. Why not Just Link Textbook Chapters? by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  7. Mod parent down by Prune · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

    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 /., by a wide margin.

    --
    "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
  8. nihilist arbys by bitrex · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  9. Is there any way to reverse entropy? by lunchlady55 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Insufficient data for meaningful answer.

    http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

  10. Re:Well that's depressing. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Black holes dissipate over time.

    Yes, but very slowly. A black hole of one solar mass would take about 2e67 years to evaporate through Hawking radiation. The time to evaporate goes up as the cube of the mass, and some black holes are 10 billion solar masses, so they would take more than 1e97 years to evaporate.

    Any current black hole with a mass larger than earth's moon would actually be growing, since the cosmic microwave background being absorbed is more than the Hawking radiation being emitted. They will not start to shrink until the universe cools off and the CMB dissipates, far in the future.

  11. Re:Well that's depressing. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So then we have a long lasting energy source!

    Yes, very long. But a solar mass black hole would have a temperature of 60 nano-Kelvins, and would emit 1e-30 watts. If you used all the emitted energy from the black hole to charge a AA battery, many of the protons in the battery might decay before it is fully charged (assuming protons have a half-life of ~1e33 years, which has not been experimentally verified).