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Timeline of the far future

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Re: Timeline of the far future

#211

Post by Robotbeat »

duckerude wrote: post #24
mockingbirdy wrote: post #14

> 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…

My understanding of it is that it wouldn't reach zero Kelvin. The heat only becomes uniformly distributed. Everything becomes maximally disorderly. Things move, but all interesting information is gone. 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 a…

That’s the crazy thing about large numbers like these. Even Entropy’s Heat Death are swallowed up by them. Not only do such events become probable but they become inevitable an endless number of times over a long enough timescale. Infinity kills even Heat Death.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#212

Post by anvandare »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #18
netgusto wrote: post #2

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. [...]

Fun fact: most Boltzmann brains pass out in a matter of seconds, then die, and there's nothing they can do about that.

But given sufficiently enough time (i.e. infinity) the 'same' brain (spawned with a start-state which is an exact copy of the end-state of the last time) will keep re-appearing again and again, allowing for a continuous stream of thought. In fact, with infinity at our disposal, infinite repetitions of all states is guaranteed.

(+10^10^59 years) "Ah, good, awake again, shame the universe has gone dark, I wond-"

(+10^10^122 years) "er what the other copies are thinking. After all, there isn't really-"

(+10^10^185 years) "anyway to tell how much time is passing, I wish I still had stars and eyes to see them."

Re: Timeline of the far future

#213

Post by Robotbeat »

mrep wrote: post #169
sixdimensional wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that confuses me is, if the universe were to reach any type of steady state over infinite time, my question would be, what caused it to be in any other state than steady to begin with? Almost feel like this is a causality question.

Well, one of the last timeline events is "Around this vast timeframe, quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the vacuum could generate, via inflation, new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes.[108]" Thus, the cycle of new big bangs continue on forever. Granted, the timeline for that is 10^{10^{10^{56}}} which is beyond comprehension soooo.

But these numbers are still tiny compared to numbers mathematicians have created, like Graham’s Number. Which is crazy. These numbers are still finite, still nothing compared to infinity, but they’re plenty big enough to kill Heat Death an almost innumerable number of times.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#215

Post by 24gttghh »

mkempe wrote: post #187
wierd0 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists consulted when creating the tv show Blue Planet II seems to disagree. According to them we are in fact in the midst of an extinction.

There are wide varieties of corals and of their symbionts. To claim that they are all simultaneously going extinct in all seas and microclimates is absurd, and contradicts the evidence of their repeated adaptations to past climate variations over 500 million years as well as ignores the observation of their thriving across countless local seasonal and weather variations.

Please reconsider your thoughts on this subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching

Re: Timeline of the far future

#216

Post by KozmoNau7 »

zaarn wrote: post #195
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno man. I'm already quite aware of how insignificant I am on a cosmic scale. So it would be interesting to gain a proper sense of scale of the ridiculous vastness of space.

I recommend watching the Numberphile Video on Grahams Number. I think once you start to grasp how truly unimaginable large this number is, you get a comparable feeling to how the cosmic scale compares to us in an emotional way.

I've seen that one, it's really good :-)

Re: Timeline of the far future

#217

Post by hellofunk »

21 wrote: post #8

> 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…

That would be quite terrible, if in fact 50K years from now there was such a thing as computer code.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#218

Post by Razengan »

walrus01 wrote: post #144
cpeterso wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky novels, the characters in the far future track time using megaseconds (~11.6 Earth days) to sidestep the problem of days with different lengths. They still count from the 1970-01-01 Unix epoch, but the characters mistakenly think that date is when humans landed on the moon.

There's also such a thing as a Programmer-Archeologist, can you imagine dealing with 14,000 years of nested dependencies? One key plot point in one of the novels, a totalitarian group is running a omnipresent surveillance network but has no idea about the software running underneath it. They set it up using the GUI and are using it but never looked under the hood. The group attempting to get out from under the grasps…

The Matrix expanded-universe also has some surprisingly deep and complex lore regarding such interactions between the humans and machines and everything between and around them. Those movies and their spinoffs are worth revisiting now and then.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#219

Post by cpburns2009 »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #170
cpburns2009 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels anecdotal rather than an actual calculation.

I am hardly a mathematician, so I'm probably missing something, but I think it makes sense? I believe it's well-established that elementary particles can spontaneously generate through quantum fluctuation. Assuming that this process is uniformly distributed, the probability per unit time of any given structure self-generating is nonzero (if fantastically small). Over a long enough timescale, the probability of any po…

I meant it more tongue-in-cheek than as a real critique. That being said, such a strong statement should have some backing other than anecdotal evidence I agree with. I'm assuming @eanzenberg said the answer is "1" because our universe clearly exists (from my perspective at least). I'd expect the formula to be similar in nature to the Drake equation [1]. However, I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Re: Timeline of the far future

#220

Post by OscarCunningham »

mrkstu wrote: post #115

This reminded me of a question I've had knocking around in my head since I've heard of hawking radiation- the prediction is that the black holes slowly evaporate into subatomic particles. However, it seems to me at some point a critical juncture would be passed and the black hole would cease being bound gravitationally and the matter would be released similarly to a supernova or just spontaneously form a neutron star…

The temperature of a black hole decrease as it gets larger. A black hole colder than 2.7K will absorb energy from background radiation faster than it emits Hawking radiation. So it will get larger and cooler. Any black hole warmer than 2.7K will emit energy faster than it absorbs. This means it will get smaller and hotter, leading it to lose energy at an increasing rate until it has lost all its energy and evaporates.

The cutoff is at around 4.5×10^22 kg (about the mass of the moon). The event horizon at this mass is only 0.13 mm.

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