How Will the Universe End? | Hacker News Reader

How Will the Universe End?

quantamagazine.org

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Maybe the premise of the proposition is faulty from the start. It will not end as it never started. It was always here and it always be as the Universe of his own name. What would be then after it's death?

And when after it's death, there is nothing, quantum fluctuations will bring something from nothing. We will be all back here...Furiously replying on parent comments on HN stories with a 14 Billion years delay...

"How could our universe suddenly appear out of nothingness?" - https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/16376/how-cou...

"Did the Big Bang happen at a point?" - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/136860/did-the-b...

my theory is that a "deja vu" occurs when you encounter an uncannily close return to something that happened innumerous times in the past

My infinite lives must be on average rather boring then lol. I usually get deja vu in the most mundane situations like going down a path of thinking while driving or telling (retelling?) a story when I’m out with friends.

on average; the heads and tails of the bell curve most likely approach infinite levels of adventure :)

I'd recommend reading the short story All the Myriad Ways by Niven ( https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v27n03_1968-10/page/n31/m... ) and Anathem by Neal Stephenson (which is much longer than a short story).

Also on the subject, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

Obligatory mention of Asimov's "Last Question"

https://astronomy.org/moravian/C00-Last%20Question.pdf

If you want a great narration of this by Leonard Nimoy: https://youtu.be/8XOtx4sa9k4

Also, "Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter, 2008 Hugo Nominee for best short story (around 4k words):

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...

Are quantum fluctuations "nothing"? Can "nothing" fluctuate? What is fluctuating?

"A Mathematical Proof That The Universe Could Have Formed Spontaneously From Nothing" - https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/a-mathematical-pro....

"In each of these cases, they find a solution in which the bubble can expand exponentially and thereby reach a size in which a universe can form—a Big Bang."

So, it's contingent upon a "bubble" forming, which is not nothing but rather something. They have not claimed to prove how the universe formed spontaneously from a bubble, not nothing.

It's the discussion between physicists and philosophers from my second link. For philosophers the nothing can exist, but for physicists the whole quantum thing, makes the nothing of the philosophers a non reality...

I think the idea is that ‘something’ must exist by necessity. Sort of like how logical truths are eternal and have no beginning: the laws which make up matter appear to follow mathematical (logical) rules, so maybe matter in some sense is eternal as well.

Seems to me this would be the reality. Always been here, always will be here. Eventually the stars use all their fuel and the universe goes dark. Don't fret! The recycling bins of the universe are there. A giant black hole becomes large enough to keep growing and boom! Another big bang to reignite energy.

The ancients were right all along.

Power, here, failed the deep imagining: but already my desire and will were rolled, like a wheel that is turned, equally, by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

- Paradiso, Canto XXXIII

If the universe is infinitely large everything that can happen will happen, an infinite number of times.

One of my favorite YouTube videos does a great job with visuals and voiceovers about what will happen over the next trillions x trillions of years:

https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA

No idea how accurate it is against anything that might be more theoretically accurate but it’s still a great watch.

This is a superb video. When I saw the post, I was going to recommend it also.

When I read about the death of the universe I always ask myself, why any of the things we do on this little planet would matter, not that I'm not enjoying it here sometimes. But if you think about it we are already pretty insignificant compared to the 'size' of the universe, but if you start thinking about 'time' that's really crazy. I mean no matter what you accomplish down here, nobody will remember it in a few million years, and in a few billion years, everything will be gone. So anything ever accomplished will be lost for all eternity. But on the other hand if you die one day it propably doesn't matter for you anymore if one day goes by, or a billion years. So somehow your universe already dies when you die. :)

This philosophy (and some existentialism) helps me deal with meaningless of it all. [1]. Find personal meaning in spite of things, let that be enough.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

Yes, that and still be curious about the things happening around you. I mean, if nothing really matters it can also take the pressure off.

How can we know what is going to happen to something we don't know about? I mean, 99% of what we "know" about the universe is pure theory or speculation. Or what am I missing here?

Well I was talking from what science currently says will happen to the universe, if there maybe is anything else beyond that I cannot say. But I'm more than happy to find out if my day has come, until then I try to make the best out of things.

Meaning is never external. We project meaning as an outside entity through the looking glass of ego: desire for recognition, power, love, and so forth. Meaning has always been internal: "Whoever will be free must make [themselves] free. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self" [1], to have the will to give yourself a meaning.

[1] Max Stirner, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Stirner#:~:text=Unsourced%...

So what if determinism is true? Does responsibility even make sense in an ultimate sense? And any meaning you give yourself is dependent upon past environmental history.

There are layers and language is very impractical in these matters (not to say utterly useless considering the 10+ gigabytes of textual philosophical speculation from the past 2,400+ years). One way to think about it is akin to a stack trace: there is the quantum indeterminacy of the electron -> there is the deterministic CPU building on top of electrons (`mov eax, 0` achieves the same state on any x86) -> there are indeterministic effects facilitated by CPUs (the network effects of users interacting using CPUs).

In a similar fashion, yes, each of us is composed from cells with proteins coded in DNA strings, however those cells are able to reach a collective intelligence which is able to run a simulation/model of the world coupled with a simulation/model of the high-level internal state and we call this coupling, in the usual parlance, a "self". This self then goes to decide, based on the past experiences, present goals, and future predictions and hopes, but a decision nonetheless, what determines it-self. As said, these words, i.e. decide, determines, are very loaded and begging the (multiple series of) questions, going through various viewpoints from Sartre and Simone Weil, to Kierkegaard, back to Plotinus [1].

In other words, from a strong Robert Sapolsky-based position: surely determinism is true, we operate on the realm of the regulation of the side-effects of bio-electro-chemical reactions, not on the realm of quarks, however, responsibility in the ultimate sense makes just as much sense as calling someone an "adult" once they are 18 years and 0.1 seconds old: it's an arbitrary determination which allows further operation (breaks the epoché [2], the withholding of assent or the phenomenological bracketing, if you will).

The meanings one gives for themselves are indeed dependent upon past environmental history, yet the point is what you make from what the world makes of you: it's a tertiary and beyond type of operation, across the multiple societal-physical abstraction layers, not direct control.

[1] "the One above intellect, the first principle of all", https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/#:~:text=the%20O...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch%C3%A9

My favorite end of the universe is heat death when entropy reaches the maximum and it can no longer increase. From this moment on (pun intended) time has no longer a meaning and it will be impossible to tell the passage of time. Time will cease to exist.

Always love an opportunity to link to my favorite Wikipedia article:

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

There is also the page for Sphaleron [1] (only 60,200 Google Search results); good name for a start-up: sphaleron.io — hypothetical technologies made real.

The sphaleron is probably tied to proton decay [2], which is probably the saddest and most sobering possible fact in the entire universe: all this is fundamentally temporary, it will all go away, even the protons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphaleron

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay

lots of iron in store for the future, apparently

The universe ends when entropy reaches maximum and all information takes the form of popular science articles.

It ends when we run out of observers (readers)

So ... not with a bang but a whimper?

As a solipsist, the universe will end when I die

as another solipsist: not if i can help it :P

My favorite site re: end of the world/universe is the old timer http://exitmundi.nl

In this ever expanding universe in which we live in, it seems there is stuff at the distance edge of our light cone, red-shifting past our causality horizon as it slips away from us at greater than the speed of light. For them our reality has already ended, and for us, theirs. The same for those who fall past a black hole horizon. We see their experience of our time as slowing and ending. As they see us.

Isaac Arthur has an entertaining "Civilizations at the End of Time" series https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LvHsTP5fm8oxB1q...

I love Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" on this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_and_Ice_%28poem%29

Maybe it’ll be like this:

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/reset/

So in other words, no one knows, but with some bias in favor of heat death. I remember reading a book 2 decades ago that offered a similar set of outcomes.

It's an interesting idea to ponder a question about an event that no species from this planet will ever experience.

Possibly excepting Keith Richards.

'I’ll write all your epitaphs!'

    - Keith Richards

Maybe whatever comes after will preserve a few of us in like a reserve. You know out of nostalgia.

What I find mind blowing is that a bunch of hydrogen atoms in a corner of the universe have somehow gained awareness as to figure out how the universe will come to an end.

After getting fused inside a star which later exploded. We 've been through some shit.

Cold death!

One trillion years from now, matter and potential shall be so far dispersed, composite mass floats as dry cinder upon momentum of expansive cosmic debris.

Use the time you have!

I hope soon.

Which universe?

With a whisper

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