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The further I read, the smaller I feel.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there's a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%2...
> Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus, will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains. 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…
The quantum fields can't ever be zero, from my understanding. And thus stuff can still happen:
> According to Fowler & Guggenheim (1939/1965), the third law of thermodynamics may be precisely enunciated as follows: It is impossible by any procedure, no matter how idealized, to reduce any assembly to the absolute zero in a finite number of operations.
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…
How could the Earth be totally smooth?
> Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus, will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains. 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…
But order is probabilistic. It's not physically impossible for order to increase, it's just ridiculously unlikely. If you wait long enough (really long) it'll probably happen some time.
I don't think quantum effects are especially related, except to the extent they relate to everything.
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.
You mean, it doesnt make you want to get into an inconsequential political argument with someone on Twitter?
Amazing that the entirety of human civilization as we know it fits in a smaller time scale than the very first event on this timeline (10,000 years from now). So while these time spans are minuscule on an astronomical scale, they are enormous on a human scale.
> 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…