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'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

nytimes.com

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Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#31

Post by beeforpork »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #10
timewizard wrote: post #6

> If dark energy really is Einstein’s constant, the standard model portends a bleak future: The universe will keep speeding up, forever, becoming darker and lonelier. Distant galaxies will eventually be too far away to see. All energy, life and thought will be sucked from the cosmos. The laws of thermodynamics pretty much guarantees this anyways does it not?

Still, we’ve got a little while to go before star formation can no longer occur. Some estimates put the star formation period from 1 to 100 trillion years. I’d be more concerned about our collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy in four to five billion years.

Why would you be concerned? Earth and everything living on it will be long dead by then, and probably gone and swallowed by the sun. And maybe the Sun dies before that, too. So what would be particularly concerning about merging of our galaxy with another one?

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#32

Post by stodor89 »

petargyurov wrote: post #29
thom wrote: post #27

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…

[BUG #3451249] Unlimited resource drain caused by conscious blobs of particles (a.k.a humans) invoking recursive thought patterns over their own existence. Workaround: ponder function can return a feeling of existential dread accompanied by increased weights for headache "sensation", causing blob to terminate process. Estimate: M Label: Backend

I reckon we're just a bug and Colin doesn't even know about our existence.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#34

Post by indigoabstract »

thom wrote: post #27

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…

Call it professional bias, but I like to think about it as a big VM. If for some reason, things go awry, the (said) programmer will hit the pause button, then diligently go to the last valid snapshot, fix the bug and then get things going again. If this isn't desired, fixing the current mess is also an option.

The time required for fixing bugs isn't really an issue in this case, he can take as long as he likes.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#35

Post by wantoncl »

timewizard wrote: post #6

> If dark energy really is Einstein’s constant, the standard model portends a bleak future: The universe will keep speeding up, forever, becoming darker and lonelier. Distant galaxies will eventually be too far away to see. All energy, life and thought will be sucked from the cosmos. The laws of thermodynamics pretty much guarantees this anyways does it not?

> The laws of thermodynamics pretty much guarantees this anyways does it not?

Yes, but:

http://www.thelastquestion.net/

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#36

Post by jcarrano »

thom wrote: post #27

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…

They say the deadline was quite literally 6 days. Some of the employees rage-quit and started their own business (they are doing fantastic but work conditions are reportedly hellish). As far as we know, they were still tweaking the physical constants until not long ago.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#37

Post by mr_mitm »

brador wrote: post #33

Every detection capability humans have uses EM. From eyeballs to x rays to red shift. Step 1 is making a new detector, then we talk about unknown unknowns.

We measure neutrinos and gravitational waves as well. It's much more difficult though.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#38

Post by DebtDeflation »

thom wrote: post #27

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…

I once saw the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle described as the result of the simulation creators using an 8 bit variable to store position and momentum combinations which were each themselves 8 bit values.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#39

Post by Timwi »

beeforpork wrote: post #31
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, we’ve got a little while to go before star formation can no longer occur. Some estimates put the star formation period from 1 to 100 trillion years. I’d be more concerned about our collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy in four to five billion years.

Why would you be concerned? Earth and everything living on it will be long dead by then, and probably gone and swallowed by the sun. And maybe the Sun dies before that, too. So what would be particularly concerning about merging of our galaxy with another one?

> Earth and everything living on it will be long dead by then

How do you know? It's not far fetched to think that, if humans don't go extinct in the meantime, they will continue to find ways to shape the world according to their needs. By the time the Sun goes red giant, we may well have found a way to alter the orbit of Earth. By the time the Sun goes supernova, we may be able to move to another star. Who knows.

But let's not get distracted. We need to tackle climate change first. That's our first self-made extinction challenge.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#40

Post by Sharlin »

mr_mitm wrote: post #37
brador wrote: post #33

Every detection capability humans have uses EM. From eyeballs to x rays to red shift. Step 1 is making a new detector, then we talk about unknown unknowns.

We measure neutrinos and gravitational waves as well. It's much more difficult though.

In the end, to be fair, we measure both of them with photons (quite literally – GWs with laser interferometry and neutrinos by looking for Cherenkov flashes).
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