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Comment by akka47 | Hacker News Reader

I always get a feeling of existential dread when I read these kind of news.

Don't worry too much about it. In the end, everything will be nearly 0k.

I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Only if we make the right decisions as a species and we don't get unlucky.

I'm quite apprehensive that the great filter lies ahead - that technology accelerates too rapidly compared to our wisdom and we end up nearly destroying ourselves. We're getting the ability to program life itself and to likely to democratize the ability to harness the forces inside the atom. Neither of which we're ready for as a species.

I think it was a joke about zero Kelvin.

I thought of it as being 0k as in empty of information. Kelvin is K but I like this interpretation more.

Same thing, really.

Zero entropy

I thought that entropy was increasing

Maximum entropy, I think?

I've wondered about this. How can something which is having a cold death (zero kelvin) also have maximum entropy? But I am not at all an expert.

Maximum entropy merely implies that the temperature everywhere is the same (any other situation would necessarily have a lower entropy). You could in theory have maximum entropy at 1000K. Our universe has a ton of empty space, and not all that much energy, so the temperature at which it equilibriates is very low. It's also expanding, so the hypothetical equilibrium temperature is decreasing all the time.

It's also worth noting that the entropy can be very large, even if the temperature is absolute zero. (You just need a system with a lot of different ground-states that all have the same energy.)

Thanks, this makes sense.

Oops. Brain fart :) Maximum entropy indeed

I believe the OP said 0K, not OK.

There may not be a universal law which says everything will be OK, but there is one which says everything will be 0K in the end.

Ah, I get it now. It's hard to see the difference!

nearly 0k

Not zero, just zero potential.

What does it mean to not pass the great filter? Humanity or their successor stop existing?

We won't be there ourselves anyways...

There are multiple explanations for why the sky isnt lit up with radio and laser signals from advanced civilisation. The great filter is one explanation, that there are existential crises or threats that wipe out most civilisations or cause them to collapse to subsistence level. Nuclear war, biological weapons, ecological collapse, paper clip maximising AI, etc.

I once ran a Traveller RPG exploration campaign where one of the systems they visited looked really odd on sensors. Just fuzzy clouds and clumps and ring formations of diffuse metallic debris. It turned out it was all paper clips.

I hope you snuffed them out before they took over the universe.

The surprisingly addictive game is below.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

I hate you

For context, the examples you mentioned are cases of the great filter lying ahead of us. The more optimistic hope is that the great filter is behind us - things like abiogenesis or multicellular life being extremely unlikely to happen. "Great filter" is just the name for "a barrier that stops life from becoming a spacefaring civilization".

This explanation is also the reason why finding basic life (say, bacteria) in the Solar System would be a cause for worry - if life evolved independently twice in the same star system, it would imply abiogenesis isn't that unlikely - thus strongly suggesting the great filter is still ahead of us.

Could the great filter be something like developing language? That's something that seems quite rare (only one species on Earth has it). If so, then discovering bacteria in the Solar System wouldn't be such a cause for worry.

> Could the great filter be something like developing language?

Perhaps it's a combination of factors? Dolphins are social animals that appear to be capable of complex communications among themselves, but don't have hands to manipulate their environment the way we can.

Apes have hands, but don't have complex language.

Another interesting one I've heard is getting into space, period. It's possible that there are other technological civilizations out there, but all stuck under a few hundred km of ice or on a 2-earth-mass monster where it's impractical to reach orbit.

Earth may only be special in being in a sweet spot between Mars (too small to hold an atmosphere or protect from cosmic radiation, hence no life) and Gliese 832c (with its low-orbit velocity of something like 15km/s, hence much less practical to put stuff in space).

> protect from cosmic radiation

That raises another issue of the planet having a magnetic core...

You can also get shielding with a thick enough atmosphere, or being under a solid ice/rock crust. But both of those also make it much harder to reach space.

Speak for yourself.

Humanity failing to become a technological civilization. Maybe continuing as a species, but Amish style.

> I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok.

Isn't there some QM law that says that with infinitesimal probability anything can materialize at any point in space? Meaning that after everything has collapsed, you can (will!) still re-materialize somewhere in space. An infinite number of times!

I kind of wonder, in a half-assed amateurish way, if the underlying reality of our universe isn't just an extremely rare random fluctuation in a fluid-like medium at thermodynamic equilibrium.

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

You can definitely find cosmologist who believe this kind of thing, though it's rarely formalized.

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

had to read that twice to get it :)

The worry is that not only will we be utterly destroyed, but that the destruction will be so thorough it will blow backward through time erasing all events that ever happened and making it so that we never even lived. That means everything we experience right now didn’t happen, we are just seeing a probability of what could happen but didn’t because it’s all destroyed. These lives mean nothing.

If there is no afterlife, then oblivion is our inevitable destiny.

No afterlife, no prelife, no life.

Reminds me of a Stephen Baxter story: http://www.sixwordstories.net/2009/08/big-bang-no-god-fadeou...

(the story is - for once, literally - in the URL)

That's a very specific worry.

I don't see how it's possible to un-make-something-happen. It already happened. It's gone. You can't kill what's already dead.

Imagine they told you that when you die, not only will you be gone, but then they will go back and undo everything you ever did and basically make it like you never existed at all. It didn’t happen, you never happened.

It happened, therefore it happened somehow, someplace. What’s the difference between something having happened and not having happened? It doesn’t intrinsically mean anything.

In addition, most humans learn to accept that there’s a good chance nothing they do will have an eternal effect on reality without needing any strange frameworks.

"Everything we experience right now, didn't happen, we are just seeing" - Who exactly is seeing?

It seems like in that case there isn't much to worry about then :)

Why is that a worry? I find it absolutely beautiful.

That is brilliant.

0K should be uppercase.

Level : Reddit

I don’t think this joke quite got the credit it deserves.

> The Big Freeze (or Big Chill) is a scenario under which continued expansion results in a universe that asymptotically approaches absolute zero temperature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_univers...

absolute zero == zero kelvin == 0K

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny

"The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" - Carl Sagan

And that pale blue dot means nothing in a cosmic scale. Stop worrying and enjoy the incredible fortune of being alive.

I must admit I feel that same dread. While I appreciate your intent, I'm not sure it helped.

Why? What exactly are you dreading? That our understanding of the universe and science involved might have some serious flaws? If so, won't we just adjust our understanding to something that matches the observations?

I get pretty severe existential dread whenever I read something about this, or universe-scale cosmology in general.

Don't worry it will be a problem for the future politicians and universe expand protections groups. "We have to stop the universe expansion, the universe is expanding faster than expected" they say.

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