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New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

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Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

Practically stars are mostly burned out in another 50 billion years and radioisotopes that produce a heat gradient will also be mostly decayed by then. Eventually good tidal energy situations like

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

will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase for a long time -- for instance, black holes will be slowly inspiralling and crashing into each other resulting in huge entropy increases on paper.

Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#22

Post by jzl »

hungmung wrote: post #8

Slightly tangential, but does anyone know of a good layman's book on thermodynamics? I'm interested in the science and the history of it, but I'm not really trying to do a deep dive into the math -- I wasn't bad in stats or calc but that was decades ago now and I haven't really used them since...

“From Eternity To Here” by Sean Carroll has some nice discussions of it. He can be a bit much at times and could stand to have better editing (the book is 25% too long), but he does have some of the most approachable modern writing on physics out there. Lots of videos on YouTube as well.

Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#23

Post by crazygringo »

jzl wrote: post #20
crazygringo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this is the type of stuff ChatGPT is really good at. Explaining overviews of a field, avoiding math if you want, focusing on concepts and explaining different schools of thought. As long as you're sticking to the well-established stuff, it tends to be quite factually accurate. I think it's really underrated as a resource for good high-level overviews of fields where those overviews otherwise don't exist at…

Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, LLMs can generate some really nice introductory summaries of topics. But, so far at least, they can’t even hold a candle to brilliantly written books and long form articles. Consider the classic book Cosmos. There is more insight into the universe in any few pages of that book than could be gathered by reading even a thousand ChatGPT results.

You and I are talking about totally different things.

I'm talking about general overviews of topics, where a good book form at the level you're looking for often doesn't even exist.

You're talking about a classic book that is recognized as a great work.

Nobody's claiming that what ChatGPT outputs is Cosmos. And most books written by people aren't Cosmos either.

And most of the time when you want a basic factual introduction to a field that is at your level, neither too popular nor too technical, ChatGPT is really good at providing that.

Not everything has to be Cosmos.

Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#24

Post by getnormality »

delichon wrote: post #2

As such, the second law appears to hold a chilling prophecy for humanity in the very long term. The idea that our species is so uniquely capable of transcending extinction and surviving long enough for the fate of the universe to be relevant to it is optimistic to the point of absurdity. It fits the evidence better to suppose that we're particularly capable of self destruction.

Edit: nevermind, I agree I misunderstood the parent comment.

It's a common response to any interest in the destiny of humanity: "what's so special about humanity? What about bacteria, huh?"

I don't know, I'm human and humans tend to be social and interested in their own species? Is that weird? Does that not apply to you? Do you consider it petty and parochial to be more interested in one's own species? Are you "above" that?

If any bacteria or humans are interested in projecting the future of bacteria and their probability of surviving humanity, they should absolutely go for it.

Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#27

Post by thechao »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21

Practically stars are mostly burned out in another 50 billion years and radioisotopes that produce a heat gradient will also be mostly decayed by then. Eventually good tidal energy situations like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating_of_Io will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase fo…

I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks.

A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at that regime the characters can flit around the universe in the notional blink of an eye, even though their nanoships' velocity is only a few km/s. In my mind it'd be just a nuts-and-bolts 30's-style hard boiled detective story; but, set in the year 10^110.

Oh! Oh! And Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.

Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#28

Post by chamomeal »

getnormality wrote: post #24
delichon wrote: post #2

As such, the second law appears to hold a chilling prophecy for humanity in the very long term. The idea that our species is so uniquely capable of transcending extinction and surviving long enough for the fate of the universe to be relevant to it is optimistic to the point of absurdity. It fits the evidence better to suppose that we're particularly capable of self destruction.

Edit: nevermind, I agree I misunderstood the parent comment. It's a common response to any interest in the destiny of humanity: "what's so special about humanity? What about bacteria, huh?" I don't know, I'm human and humans tend to be social and interested in their own species? Is that weird? Does that not apply to you? Do you consider it petty and parochial to be more interested in one's own species? Are you "above…

I don’t think that’s that delichon is saying. It’s absurd to compare the lifetime of ANY species with the lifetime of the universe. The heat death of the universe is like 10^80 years away or something insane. Humans have been around for like… 10^5 years?

Even if something from earth lived that long, it wouldn’t be human. It probably wouldn’t be remotely recognizable!

Re: New interpretations suggest the "heat death" hypothesis might not hold (2023)

#29

Post by chamomeal »

grufkork wrote: post #6
qgin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still maintain that we're not just a simulation, we're a screensaver on the computer of some extradimensional office worker who has been out of office for their version of a weekend.

You might like this: https://qntm.org/responsibilit

That was freaking awesome
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