I don't get why people worry about "heat death" in 10^30 years. You're going to undergo "plain old death" in 10^1 years, times a constant that is almost certainly not much larger than 10.
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.
Microsoft-Google-Walmart-America will put off updating the DateTime type in .NET 583271 until December, 9998 and expect developers to migrate all of their existing codebases in just over a year. If you're wondering why the version number for .NET is so high, they had to skip ~500,000 version numbers to avoid some weird issue that would break backward compatibility.
> I don't get why people worry about "heat death" in 10^30 years. You're going to undergo "plain old death" in 10^1 years, time a constant that is almost certainly not much larger than 10.
people worry about the sun swelling to a red giant and consuming the earth (far before heat death), ignoring that by then humans will have evolved into very non-humans, or gone extinct, or most likely both, ages before.
me, i worry about what life has in store for next wednesday.
I used to say this sort of thing a lot. It's a variation of the main idea behind existential nihilism: that life has no intrinsic meaning or value, and any meaning you assign to it is arbitrary. As far as I could tell it was correct but it bothered me enough that I started reading philosophy and looking for counter-arguments.
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.
I can guarantee you your individual contribution would stop mattering far earlier than that. Not saying that as a slight, but for realities sake. If what we do matters in 100 years after we die we're doing better than most of entire human history. It's the height of hubris to think that it's going to be heat death that finishes our accomplishments off. Better to realign expectations to something less grand than "have an effect that last forever".
Fair enough, but the reply you got is just as obvious.
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.
By "fair enough", I was mostly thinking of edgyquant's second sentence. With regard to "entirety of all earth life", I think the point here is that these are all subjective opinions - The universe either will or will not undergo heat death regardless of what any of us think about it. Obviousness is an opinion, and in my opinion, SketchySeaBeast's attitude to the possibility of heat death is just as obvious as edgyquant's, and there is no objective reason to adopt one over the other.
YOU are the consequence of individual contributions 10s or 100s of thousands of years ago.
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.
> YOU are the consequence of individual contributions 10s or 100s of thousands of years ago.
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.
Without the contribution of every unique individual in your lineage it is safe to say YOU wouldn’t be here. Differences between identical twins should be enough to tell you that.
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.
> You claimed that essentially no individual contributions is there after 100 years.
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.
You want to say ‘nothing matters’ because there is some high entropy state of the universe way in the future. I don’t think that is reasonable.
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.
Why on earth would the heat death of the universe on such a time scale mean everything is pointless.
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.
Probably not. Even if we succeed in stopping senescence completely, most people would still die of accidents in a scale of hundreds to thousands of years, eventually.
> 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.
Living up to your name there, nothing was for anything anyway. Meaning is entirely self constructed whether or not the heat death, the big crunch, or the big rip are going concerns. If you think the meaning of life is "being excellent to each other" that's totally achievable, and from a pragmatic perspective, likely to make things go pretty smoothly while we run out the clock.
I've always tried to reconcile this idea with the hope that some future advanced civilization (maybe even evolved from humans) might figure out a way to "escape" the Universe, by manipulating spacetime itself, "accessing" other dimensions, &c.
This is so much time that humanity (if still alive) could advance technology so much that we would be able to workaround heat death too. This is borderline sci-fi, but I believe we could bend almost any known laws of Physics with enough advancement.
It's interesting to note that applying the second law of thermodynamics to the whole universe, even if we didn't know about expansion, yields one of the biggest disconnects between prediction and observation since the ultraviolet catastrophe. If the second law applied to the whole universe, we should expect the Big Bang to have been quickly followed by a heat death. Having the entire universe we see today become so extraordinarily well organized from an initial glob of hot uniform plasma would have an inexpressably small probability. It seems far more likely to say that, for as yet un-determined reasons, the second law can't apply to the universe as a whole, only to certain subsets of it.
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.
I love this perspective. Not all physical laws have been proven in the grand scale of the universe, yet we narrow mindedly assume every one of these laws always hold -- I mean they're laws right!? -- and then we base all theories on what could be misconceptions.
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.
Is new energy really being crated by the expansion of space though? I know the vacuum energy increases, but would the increased negative gravitational potential energy cancel it out?
Humanity is going to have problems far sooner than the heat death of the universe - the increasing heat of the sun. As our sun enters the last half of its life it's going to start burning hotter (and no, this is not the cause of today's global climate change). In 100 million years or so earth will be uninhabitable by most mammals, certainly humans. In 1 billion years the oceans will have boiled away.
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.
Either I'm confused or the article is. Article seems to keep relating higher complexity to higher organization. But higher complexity is tied to higher entropy and disorganization, not higher organization. Generally, more complexity equals more entropy and less organization. Outside of certain possible exceptions like life (which still obeys it through waste product), is this not true?
It certainly seems to be that way in code, anyway.
Interpret entropy as "how unlikely is this state to occur by random chance?", with lower entropy corresponding to less likelihood.
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.
No, the article is very explicit. In the traditional statements of the second law, higher entropy is indeed seen as lower organization.
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.
I find this unconvincing. If the energy in your organized matter is not itself organized, the matter is not going to be moving in an organized way, which means it's dead.
The second law only applies to thermodynamic entropy, which has to do with the variety of ways that energy can be distributed among microstates (like maybe this electron is excited to 2 eV and that one is excited 3 eV) for a given microstate description (like "the sample is in the liquid phase").
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.
> There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
> There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The probability of a bubble nucleation from false vacuum decay[1] is astronomically low, but the probability that it has already happened is still non-zero. If it did happen we would never know, but if it reached us then we would all be destroyed in an instant.
>This bleak idea is known as the “heat death hypothesis,” and the prophecy foretells a future where all pattern and organization has ceased to be. In this cosmological model, everything must come to an end. There is simply no possibility for continual existence.
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
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.