The “heat death” hypothesis might not hold
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
I comprehend an abstract scientific interest in it -- a positive emotion of wonder. But any negative emotional connection feels like projecting right-here-now depression. It would be healthier to deal with the actual issue rather than maundering about on something that is not the real driving cause.
We are the ones that create meaning in our actions. It's not given to us by the universe, it's up to us to decide with our consciousness. Meaning will always be on the scale of human lifetimes. The ultimate fate of the universe is irrelevant to that.
This is your opinion. Most people are religious and derive meaning from an outside source.
People who are religious believe their lives are meaningful even if the physical universe ends. In fact, for some mainstream religions they are counting on it eventually ending.
There is a nonzero possibility that "human lifetime" becomes unfathomably long eventually.
Update: That may be a bit harsh, so here's something to balance it: there's a sense in which what has been achieved is timeless, regardless of what the future brings.
How is that obvious for "entirety of all earth life"?
Writings and works, almost certainly lose their effect (but not a guarantee). But kids go on to have more kids until they don’t. That impact stretches out until it doesn’t, maybe not forever but also not necessarily a narrow window.
I am the consequence of thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of individual contributions (genetic and otherwise). Sure the sum ended up in me, but how changed would I be if one of those changed? Who can know. Yes, we are all the consequence of innumerable contributions and choices since the very beginning of time, but that means that as we stretch that time back each individual elements quickly loses meaning and becomes static.
But if you do believe that each contribution matters then great news - your little contribution to the universe's heat death will be there on display for all eternity and the fact that it can't actually be observed because of said heat death will also be due to your contribution, so no worries as you're still important at the end of the all things.
You might say ‘I would be here but with a different genetic makeup’ or some such. But that is basically nonsense. You are, at the very least, the sum of the PARTICULAR causal sequence that made you.
You claimed that essentially no individual contribution is there after 100 years. That isn’t true. I am not suggesting the contributions are clear, good, special, or even ‘matter’ in some grand sense. They don’t have to even be linked to the originator. But that doesn’t mean individual contributions aren’t there.
Scale matters. Plato contributed to humanity. Plato contributed to the heat death. One of those is infinitely more interesting than the other.
I didn't, I claimed they didn't matter, which you are agreeing with.
Sure, scale matters, and that's also my point. You aren't Plato, you probably aren't going to be the next Plato, and that's OK. Plato matters today, but he won't in a million years, and that's infinitesimally small compared to the time-span to heat death.
And again, if your individual contribution matters, you don't have to worry about your contribution not mattering as the heat death of the universe will be your legacy.
I am saying things matter.
Individual contributions matter along the way and they easily and often last longer than many lifetimes. Not just like Plato. ‘Mundane’ reproduction of humans matters to all future individuals that result as a consequence.
This is true even if we all end up dead and the universe ‘ends’ in a perpetual entropic fog.
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I like that one.
Liberating, isn't it?
I never discovered the meaning of life, but have definitely changed my point of view. I now think the belief that life is meaningless is a consequence of epistemic arrogance, not a rational conclusion. How can we say existence has no meaning when we don't really understand existence in the first place? There's way too much we don't understand about the universe, the laws which govern it, and even ourselves to draw any firm conclusions.
I do know that hundreds of great thinkers have spent many collective man-centuries considering and writing about this question, and come up with far more interesting output than if they'd just punted on the question. I think if we punt it says more about us than about the question itself.
I'm partial to what is arguably Nietzsche's main idea, or how I interpret it anyway: that as society's belief in religion wanes, we've barely even started to discover what we're really here for. The greatest challenge in our era of civilization is deciding whether or not we're ready to find out.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-life-a...
Do we need to understand something to assert if it has meaning or not?
Speak for yourself!
me, i worry about what life has in store for next wednesday.
Might also suggest that the problem of black hole entropy is not actually settled, and that black holes could in fact simply reduce entropy instead of emitting Hawking radiation.
Also, it's interesting to note that expansion of the universe actually "breaks" the first law of thermodynamics: energy is not actually being conserved, new energy is being created. This can happen because the first law of thermodynamics only applies in a fixed size space, while in the expansion model we believe that space itself (the coordinate system, as it were) is expanding.
And realizing this makes theoretical physics much more interesting as there are so many more possibilities to how reality works than what's proscribed.
I also wonder how much of our dogmatic adherence to these laws are preventing us from progressing.
But if you stay with the understood kinds (that are certainly energy), then no, they stopped increasing a long time ago and are decreasing now.
So all humanity has to do is move to another star, right?
Well, that's not a long-term solution. First, our sun is a main sequence star. It's very average, meaning most of the stars in our galaxy are just like it and they're the same age, i.e. they're going to "die" at roughly the same time. The inner, rocky planets we prefer will be uninhabitable. We might find a moon on an outer gas giant to our liking.
But all that supposes we could even get there - which isn't likely. Space is mind-boggling vast. The nearest star is 4 light years away. The average star you see in the night sky is 60 to 100 light years away. Even if we had the technology to travel at (near) the speed of light it would take six years to get to the nearest star. Why? It takes one year at 1G acceleration to reach the speed of light and one year of 1G deceleration to slow down to reach your destination. Of course you're going to need a shield to protect you from the gamma rays you just transformed all the light you're approaching into and since you need more shielding to protect from the gamma rays you need more energy to maintain the acceleration - you quickly realize you can't get enough energy to power even a modest spacecraft.
Sadly then, it looks like going to the stars is out of the question.
Our sun is it, and in 100 million years or so it will make our home planet uninhabitable (though we're trying our best to make it uninhabitable long before that!)
You have to realize humanity is going to go extinct. There's a maximum timeline for our existence. That's why I say AI and robots will be our progeny. They're the ones that will have to contend with the heat death of the universe.
It certainly seems to be that way in code, anyway.
However, the article is stating that this is not an accurate view of the mathematics - and that a more accurate view merely requires more disorganized distribution of energy, while matter may be arbitrarily better organized and still have its entropy increase. For example, crystalization of a material does not necessarily decrease its entropy, as long as the crystal formation dissipates heat.
It's tempting to simplify the universe like any other system: one for which microstate descriptions will have a fixed number of microstates across which the available energy will eventually be distributed more or less evenly. But perhaps that's a bad simplification. The article says as much, but in the middle of a bunch of claims about order and disorder.
So what's confusing about the article is it's attempt to describe the... confusion, that the new interpretation leads us away from.
If you throw a bunch of carbon, oxygen, and other organic compounds into a vat, you're vastly less likely to get a fully formed human being than, well, a disorganized pile of matter. Usually you wouldn't consider the random clump of molecules more complex -- there are practically an infinite number ways to rearrange a pile into a pile. In contrast, there are many orders of magnitude fewer ways for a human being to emerge.
That said, there is a sense in which the random pile of molecules is more complex. If I want to predict the motion of every (or at least, most) of the molecules in that vat, it's easier to predict the bulk motion of a human than each molecule moving per the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution.
Similarly, it's easier to compress a static black image than continuous random noise. Notice that a static black image is more organized, more easily compressed, and less likely to occur by random chance (assuming noise is the default). Therefore, a static black image has less entropy. Whether you want to call this state more or less complex is a matter of definition.
> There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Even taking this scenario for granted, the universe certainly will still very exist. Finally, no war anywhere anymore. Peace and stillness forever is the ultimate fate of the grand scheme of things, who could sanely complain? :D