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So while these time spans are minuscule on an astronomical scale, they are enormous on a human scale.
While the topic is on. I am trying to find a short story I read some years ago (4-5) about the evolution of life on our planet in the far future. Warning, massive spoilers: There are like 5 or 6 mass extinction events followed by a new civilization each time built by a different specie. At some points a raven civilization goes on the moon (they always had an innate tendency to go higher) and find an old rover, then i…
> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second. Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 5…
I always thought that the universe will just reach zero Kelvin and the party is over. That it will just continue to do improbable stuff was beyond my imagination. I don't really understand how it should be possible that effects like the emergence of virtual particles still work if all the energy is now in a form which can't be used for energy transformations anymore (entropy) - I know that annihilation of anti-particles of virtual particles (which causes them to exist - that was the amazing finding of Hawking with the Hawking radiation where the anti-particles of virtual particles get annihilated at the event horizon and his counterpart is happily living on because he got lucky that he wasn't too close) is a way to form new particles "out of nothing" (using quantum effects), but I still can't believe that this still works when nothing's moving because we're at absolute zero.
Could someone explain why those quantum effects still continue to work (and sometimes even spawn particles and even brains if we get lucky) even if the universe is at absolute zero?
Fascinating: "10^(10^50) years: Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain > [...] a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. [...]
The further I read, the smaller I feel.
The further I read, the smaller some of the issues we face today seem. I could spend my life fighting to prevent global warming or fix the world, but this list just makes me want to enjoy the time I have here with my loved ones... I don't know how I feel about these feelings.
Fascinating: "10^(10^50) years: Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain > [...] a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. [...]
Now calculate the probability of the current Universe arising spontaneously from vacuum.
Fascinating: "10^(10^50) years: Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain > [...] a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. [...]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The further I read, the smaller some of the issues we face today seem. I could spend my life fighting to prevent global warming or fix the world, but this list just makes me want to enjoy the time I have here with my loved ones... I don't know how I feel about these feelings.
> According to Berger and Loutre, the current interglacial period ends[14] sending the Earth back into a glacial period of the current ice age, regardless of the effects of anthropogenic global warming. According to that guy, there will be a new ice age in 50k years regardless of the current global warming being stopped or not.