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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing always fascinates me. This is all true and it absolutely does not matter.

The thought of the universe sitting essentially idle for 10^86 years seems like it should feel wasteful. But why? Wasting what? Does our consciousness imbue the universe with any special quality?

It's all so weird. Even some of our most fantastical science fiction only projects out a few millennia.

Star Trek gets to the 31st century (or 3000s). Foundation is at least 12,000 years in the future. Dune takes place from about 23,000 to about 28,000. Warhammer 40k gets its name from the fact it takes place in the 40,000s. The Time Machine reaches to the 800,000s for the majority of its action. Red Dwarf is set the furthest at 3,000,000-ish.

All of which fall way short of even 1 billion years. The Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies aren't scheduled to meet up for another 5 billion.

We aren't even a blip.

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Small correction to your maths but not your sentiment.

10^100 years - 10^14 years = approx. 10^100 years

In the same way that:

10^6 - 10^3 = 1,000,000 - 1000 = 999,000 which is more or less approx. 10^6

Edit: Although this is one of those relatively uncommon situations where it doesn't really matter if you're off by 100 trillion years.

True enough. I honestly did not care enough to do anything but the most cursory attempt at math due to the scale involved. 10^14 years and 10^100 are effectively equal compared to even our entire species current lifespan.

Yeah, it can be boiled down to "there will be stars for longer than you can fathom, then there won't be stars for longer than you can fathom". It's hard to really feel much about different timespans that are all "forever" relative to the entirety of human existence.

Not to give any special credence to Scott Adam's theory that we are actually a simulation and co-incidences are examples of the simulation re-using code, just today youtube fed me a video of @misterwootube discussing 0 ^ 0 in which he incidentally discusses division and multiplication of x^y numbers; for division you subtract and multiplication you add the ^y parts, so the math error was treating the subtraction of the x^y as if it was a division. Mister Woo looks fantastic - I'd never heard of him before; worth a look, youtube.com/@misterwootube

> The thought of the universe sitting essentially idle for 10^86 years

10^100 years minus 10^14 years is not 10^86 years. It is roughly 10^100 years.

Since you mentioned some works of science fiction, this is one thing that is pretty awesome about Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem and how the series encompasses the present and all the way past the end of our universe. It is a really jarring perspective change for us as mortal humans that I think is something that only well thought out science fiction can accomplish.

Check out Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime for a murder mystery and love story that transpires over millions of years.

A great AR art project for the coming years would be to speed up the collision with Andromeda by a factor of a zillion, so that it takes place over a few years.

https://twitter.com/fasc1nate/status/1619408572084850690

I was thinking more like: Check out the night sky, how is Andromeda doing ?

Ah I see. Viewed from earth. Yeah that would be interesting. The distances between stars are so vast, it might be barely noticeable, the way we can barely see the milky way now.

They’re all dead, everybody’s dead, Dave.

What about Peterson?

Everybody is dead, Dave.

What? Todhunter?

This is one reason why true immortality would be a bad idea.

Try telling that to yeast

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