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The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

nautil.us

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Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#111

Post by elevaet »

ansible wrote: post #78
stackbutterflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

Thinking about this stuff is what prompted my thinking about things like suicide. The Universe is so vast. So much space, most of it with only the barest wisp of gas. Most of the solar systems we see in the night sky may not have life (we don't know yet). And yet here we are, a rare event in a vast Universe. In the end it doesn't matter what you do. What you accomplish or did not accomplish. What awards were won or l…

Your words were stirring. Reminds me of the monologue scene in "Ghost Story" https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6bs2o5

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#112

Post by eludwig »

NateEag wrote: post #106
krylon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Albert Camus wrote a beautiful (IMHO, at least) book about it, The Myth of Sisyphus . His point, as I understand it, is that nothing matters in the sense that the universe is vast and empty does not care what happens to you or me. But that also means we get to choose what matters to us . Life has no meaning, but it has meaning to us , and we can, in a way, choose what we want it to mean. I agree, I find this perspect…

In this framework, Stalin and Kim Jong-Il created their own meaning and no one has a basis for saying what they chose is worse than anyone else's choice. To many of us, that is horribly demoralizing.

>>no one has a basis for saying what they chose is worse than anyone else's choice.

Of course they do! If your parents were killed by Stalin you probably have an opinion one way or the other. That is exactly what this thread is talking about.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#113

Post by Ar-Curunir »

NateEag wrote: post #106
krylon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Albert Camus wrote a beautiful (IMHO, at least) book about it, The Myth of Sisyphus . His point, as I understand it, is that nothing matters in the sense that the universe is vast and empty does not care what happens to you or me. But that also means we get to choose what matters to us . Life has no meaning, but it has meaning to us , and we can, in a way, choose what we want it to mean. I agree, I find this perspect…

In this framework, Stalin and Kim Jong-Il created their own meaning and no one has a basis for saying what they chose is worse than anyone else's choice. To many of us, that is horribly demoralizing.

You allocating a particular meaning to your life's actions does not mean that other's allocate that same meaning; you're making an unjustified logical leap.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#114

Post by vidarh »

eloff wrote: post #58
stackbutterflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

Even on shorter timescales we all die and cease to matter. That doesn't mean life is without meaning. Life is amazing, and terribly short. I wish I could live 1000 more lives, and live them all differently. There's so much I will never do.

> Even on shorter timescales we all die and cease to matter.

If you really want to drive this home, genealogy very quickly shows you how entire families ends up reduced to at most a few lines in archives. The proportion of people who ends up leaving anything of note beyond birth, marriage and death record is minuscule. Even an obituary in a paper is rare at scale.

Even most of those who left something behind are all mostly forgotten. E.g. most old novels are rarely if ever read (most new novels are rarely read). The proportion of even the people who are famous today who will be remembered 100 years from now is tiny - if you go back and read old newspapers, the number of people who were famous in their day you'd recognise the names of are a tiny little fraction.

One can choose to be depressed about that, are accept that measuring our lives based on whether we'll be remembered is pointless.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#115

Post by kibwen »

ansible wrote: post #78
stackbutterflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

Thinking about this stuff is what prompted my thinking about things like suicide. The Universe is so vast. So much space, most of it with only the barest wisp of gas. Most of the solar systems we see in the night sky may not have life (we don't know yet). And yet here we are, a rare event in a vast Universe. In the end it doesn't matter what you do. What you accomplish or did not accomplish. What awards were won or l…

Similar experience here. Learning about astronomy was a psychologically traumatizing experience. After a few years of ceaseless low-key existential crises I think I finally ended up better off, with a healthy perspective of my place in the universe and an appreciation for what a miracle it is that we have the chance to observe anything at all. The writings of Carl Sagan helped greatly. But I fear I could have just as easily slipped off the knife's edge into either nihilism on one side or hedonism on the other.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#116

Post by stan_rogers »

platz wrote: post #40
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Pretty much the same” is “has stars and planets like we do, ignoring the solar system which might be weird”. The “fairly good reasons” are that that assumption has allowed us to develop a very good understanding of physics – good even by standards that don't make that assumption. If an assumption is a good one, it's probably a true one… at least, the others have been, and I assume we can generalise from them.

Inflation is the leading cosmological theory. If that is true, all our observations are descended from a pinpoint region of space that contained everything we can observe now. We don't have any means to judge whether the parameters of space are the same or different in regions that have always been causally separated from us. Be more comfortable with saying "I (We) don't know".

For the things we can observe to be the way they are, the furthest things that can be observed by the furthest things we can observe must be more or less the same as well, and so on.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#117

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Do we really think that expansion is a constant thing in the far far future? We already have different expansion rates in the theory (Big Bang was explosively fast, and now there is a measured speed of expansion), but is that "constant"?

Does the redshift measurements assume a constant expansion, has someone looked at the redshifts data to show historical expansion rate differences somehow maybe with candles?

And... aren't most stars super-long-lived dwarfs anyway? The headline seems a bit misleading.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#118

Post by morpheos137 »

kubanczyk wrote: post #108
stackbutterflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

Chances are it is a simulated universe, so no need to be so grim. (No sarcasm.)

What would the universe be a simulation of? What is the practical difference between a simulation and the real world.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#119

Post by entropicdrifter »

ansible wrote: post #78
stackbutterflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

Thinking about this stuff is what prompted my thinking about things like suicide. The Universe is so vast. So much space, most of it with only the barest wisp of gas. Most of the solar systems we see in the night sky may not have life (we don't know yet). And yet here we are, a rare event in a vast Universe. In the end it doesn't matter what you do. What you accomplish or did not accomplish. What awards were won or l…

>In the end it doesn't matter what you do. What you accomplish or did not accomplish. What awards were won or lost, life goals achieved or not.

I tend to turn this type of thinking on its head. Nothing matters, so relax, it's a ride. Take a few gambles, risk whatever you're willing to lose and see what you can pull off! Life can be wild if you're not caught up in the stuffy pretense that we all have some grand purpose or destiny. Honestly, at this point I'm convinced that conventional thinking on this topic is more or less a trap to keep people from exploring and having adventures, so that they're better servants to the elites of our world.

Re: The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

#120

Post by ryandvm »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #36
misthop wrote: post #12

Wikipedia has a page on the Timeline of the far future[1]. It lists a ton of physical and cosmological things that are predicted to happen based on our current understanding of physics. A really fun read that always takes me down a rabbit's hole of phenomena wikipedia pages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

The Last Question (by Isaac Asimov) is my favorite take on this topic by far.

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf

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