Future civilisations won't know how the universe formed Scientists have estimated that a whopping 92 per cent of "Earth-like" planets have yet to be born, and inhabitants of such worlds in the far-distant future will be "largely clueless as to how or if the universe began and evolved". Those are the conclusions of a study of Hubble Space Telescope and Kepler space observatory data …
This post has been deleted by its author
Post-collapse and descendants of invading people, if there are any, won't be able to make sense of the palaeontological record, fossil record, or anything much.
What do you think, say, extreme-nutter types would do with Lascaux? They showed their spirit at Palmyra.
Archaeologists and palaeontologists have excavated and moved so much around, not to mention pilfering by private collectors, post-collapse people trying to return to a decent level of learning and behaviour will have a very hard time working any of the connections out.
Zork,
If you haven't, you may enjoy reading the Illiminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, apparently a former Playboy editor.
It is old-fashioned, but where it is mixing the (very good) parody of Ayn Rand with many conspiracy theories, hippy craziness, Jules Verne (Anna Rosenbaum a.k.a. Ayn Rand copied her submarine captain from Verne, but was too busy with other things to write a line on life on the submarine, Wilson has it at the centre), it is wonderful.
Would commend the Illuminatus! trilogy to all reading and free-thinking Regtards. It is an old series of novels, I do not like everything in them, but they do make one think.
The take on the JFK assassination scene, in particular, is a masterpiece, conflates all of the conspiracy theories, masterful comedy.
Made me laugh out loud on first reading.
Would commend the Illuminatus! trilogy to all reading and free-thinking Regtards.
Good god. I went to the Reg today but somehow ended up on Usenet circa 1991.
(Ah, to be, well, anywhere, now that September is here! Always, always here.)
Bleu spoke truly. The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and the ever-wacky Robert Anton Wilson is great fun. And it has lots of sex and violence, too (especially sex)!
And it integrates every conspiracy theory that has ever been devised by Man. No better or fitter reading when you're hiding from the black helicopters in your Montana bunker!
I've got that book too but I can't find anything that gives a date. I can't even find agreement on how long a day is. In fact, it seems to say that time as we understand it is not important to the creator.
I would infer therefore that the universe formed somewhere between 0.01 seconds ago and 4.4E17 seconds ago. God is above all this time nonsense anyway...
> "I have a book here that says so..."
What book is that? The Bible? You do realize that the Old Testament doesn't actually specify any dates? Okay, some priest once counted the generations mentioned and came up with a figure, and that figure was 6000 years.
If you're going to be so deliciously sarcastic about a religion, you really should get the details right, otherwise you look like a fool. ;-)
The scientologists have many books, their founder was, for a time, a talented writer of some very *good* pulp SF short stories.
The app to trust blindly is not computerised, but a simple electronic device called the 'e-meter'.
I found one of their brainwashing manuals second-hand, a friend, whom I still consider a friend, acolyte of a later brainwashing cult was fascinated, so I just gave it to him. I found it boring.
If you are truly interested, the biography 'Bare-faced Messiah' is available for free on the WWW. I bought my copy, but legal action by the 'church' of Scientology means the writer cannot sell it now.
It is a very good biography of the founder, Hubbard, does not go much into the 'church' after his death.
Great book.
Strongly recommended.
> "Big J, Why so butthurt?"
Um, MFB? Why do you assume I take a religious stance here? I could easily be like you, a smug, holier-than-thou individual (pardon the expression), who is certain he knows what reality really is, and trolls the believers every chance he gets.
Or not, as the case may be. I ain't sayin'.
There is a theory which states that future beings will speculate blindly about their origins for roughly another 99 trillion years, until the last star finally flickers out.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
I like that idea. We only imagine we are alive, people are already gone.
However, going out into the streets tomorrow, some will be newly tarred, the railways (much better than the UK) will still be running, it is difficult to imagine that the world has ended.
All that keeps the illusiom going is a collective delusion.
>this evidence will have disappeared "due to the runaway expansion of space".
Doesn't that just mean they'll need more sensitive instruments? The evidence surely doesn't disappear, it dissipates - so collectors will need to be that much larger. What could one see with a radio telescope the size of a planetary system?
Or they could invent time travel :)
Unless the geometry of spacetime changes beyond our visible horizon.
If not, the evidence will be as most evidence that we have detected and be in the form of vector fields. Fields which will be diluted the intensity weakening in accordance with the divergence of a vector field at a rate inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the source.
A scalar field like the Higgs field has been a constant throughout spacetime since a few nanoseconds after the theorised big bang. (Theorised based on best current knowledge. I go with this). So any future elsewhere boffins could play with that, amongst other things. Less evidence also means more philosophy...... And god forbid more religion too!
He's talking about cosmic inflation, where things are moving away from us at faster than the speed of light due to the expansion of space itself. The light horizon shrinks over time, faster than one light year per year. Assuming that's what is really happening, and it continues happening, in the far future you won't even be able to see other galaxies at all. Those future people will see only the stars in their own galaxy, and have no way to infer anything about how that galaxy was created.
Of course, we're probably jumping the gun a bit to simply assume we know exactly what happened. Maybe if Earth was around earlier we could have seen something that is now beyond our light horizon that would change our theories on how the universe started.
As for me, I keep thinking about how everything in quantum mechanics such as the uncertainty principle, Planck length / Planck time, etc. are exactly the sort of choices you'd make in a computer simulation. If we're all bits and bytes in some unimaginably vast computer, it doesn't matter if we can or can't see how the programmers want us to believe our universe started!
"As for me, I keep thinking about how everything in quantum mechanics such as the uncertainty principle, Planck length / Planck time, etc. are exactly the sort of choices you'd make in a computer simulation."
OTOH it could be observational bias.
Interesting perception that the 'Goldilocks Zone' is in (observed) time as well as everything else. Now, is that an anthropocentric 'here is where we are' claim, or do we have an objectively special seating plan precisely between the Restauants at the Beginning, and at the End, of the universe? Or is it simply what you must see when you 'are'.
Just because we use a given method to get information, does not mean it is the only way. What if future 'humanoids' have better, different senses like animals enjoy? Wouldn't their devices be based on those or something useless to us with our limited senses. Why do we always assume that every civilization or alien life will mirror us? I'm sure the aliens are laughing at our ingrained stupidity and hubris.
Whatever senses they have, they will still not be able to detect electromagnetic energy that is not reaching them.
That is why these scientists are having a heartache about the poor, poor civilizations that will attain sentience after the expansion rate of the Universe exceeds the speed at which information reaches them.
It seems statistically unlikely that we should somehow be in the first 8% of all possible Earthlike planets.
So you'll be completely freaked out by the argument that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
If we're all in a simulation, then precisely what is the original whatever that's being simulated? Is that a sim too? Is it sims all the way down?
See Simulacron-3.
That's what blows my mind... the Jesus/Allah/etc freaks think God made the Universe, but then who made God?? But equally badly, if the big bang came from nothing, how does that work? How can something exist out of nothing? And if we're computer simulations, how the hell did our Gods/simulators/developers become created themselves??
I find it funny/mind-blowing that both the God-theory and the Big-Bang-Theory require some faith on part of the believer... so whether an atheist or a deist, you must believe in something that is to our monkey brains rather unfeasible/un-intuitive.
The episode a week or two ago was prefaced by the Doctor explaining a scenario where a time traveler goes to meet Beethoven, and finds he does not exist. However, he has all of Beethoven's music with him, and proceeds to "feed" it to Beethoven's contemporaries, playing Beethoven. So who ultimately wrote the music in this case?
Same thing with the universe...
That episode idea seems to have been borrowed from Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man.
That episode idea seems to have been borrowed from Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man.
It's a pretty common time-travel trope - a variant of what's sometimes known as an ontological paradox (because some event becomes its own cause). I don't offhand know of an earlier example than Moorcock's story (first published in '66), but I'd be very surprised if there aren't a number of them.
Personally, I like the treatment of it in Charles Yu's novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe; Yu does a nice job of capturing a feeling of dreary inevitability that someone aware they're caught in a causal loop might feel, without the book itself becoming dreary (or, curiously, inevitable).
But probably the work of fiction to beat this subject about the head and shoulders most extensively is Andrew Hussie's controversial (and enormously popular) online graphic novel / web comic Homestuck, which is also the longest hypermedia novel ever published, and generally quite extraordinary - though certainly not everyone's cup of tea. Hussie's work has dozens of time-traveling characters creating alternate timelines and temporal paradoxes left and right, with causal loops that span multiple incarnations of universes. Even keeping track of the bits that the narrative explicitly documents is tough without frequent recourse to the fan wiki. There's none of this namby-pamby "oh dear I've changed the future" hand-wringing.
This post has been deleted by its author
My theory (oh yes, sit down, get a nice cup of tea) - lots of stars formed early on because the Universe was nowhere near absolute zero. Now our planets global warming (and other planets, it's not just us) means we are sucking the warm from the Universe (it 's a physics thing, warmth has to come from somewhere). So, the Universe is cooling down, less stars are being formed because all that gas is getting sluggish. Simples.
Where do I go to get the Nobel prize for stating the bleedin' obvious?
inhabitants of such worlds in the far-distant future will be "largely clueless as to how or if the universe began and evolved".
Totally unlike Earth then.
Here a small number of very intelligent people have come up with a few different ways that they think might more or less explain most of their observations about the universe. Probably. Failing that they should at least keep the research grants trickling in.
A slightly larger group of people have heard the explanations and adopted various opinions ranging from 'Strings and brains? You whut?' to the more succinct 'Whut?' Somehow despite that they are still fairly happy to have research grants paid.
An even larger group of people prefer to stick to whatever arcane and bizarre primitive belief system they inherited from their parents on the grounds that it's easier than thinking. They don't pay research grants but they sometimes chuck a few coins in the collection box.
Then again in a hundred years 'strings and brains' will probably be considered arcane and bizarre so..meh. If it helps you sleep at night believe what you want - just don't force your beliefs on me :)
"We know all this because our own ball of rock formed early enough in universal history for us to gather "observational evidence for the big bang and cosmic evolution, encoded in light and other electromagnetic radiation".
Yes, our planet's inhabitants had to work it out from cosmic background radiation and doppler shifted spectra. But future life forms will simply tune into the TV signals we've been blasting out for decades and get all their info from the Open University broadcasts and suchlike. Bloody TV licence dodging alien bastards!
according to our theories about formation of the Universe, based on evidence that we collect from within our event horizon. So we are perhaps as clueless about real evolution and age of the Universe (relative to the older races) as inhabitants of these yet to be created planes are relative to us.
Obviously, we've got to build a monument explaining the cosmic background radiation, and we'll have to build it so that it will last a trillion years.
There will be a slight problem: in only a measly four billion years, our Sun will go off the Main Sequence. So we will have to send it out into interstellar space.
Oh, well, the next time we do something like the Voyager record, at least then we should be sure to include data on the cosmic background radiation and related matters for the use of the distant future.
I remember a similar comment from some scientist (sadly, I have no idea who at this point) about how there had to be at least one cycle of novas to create heavier elements before life could form, as so we may have got in on the game about as early as possible (give or take a few million years, of course) so contrary to the science fiction staple where we meet a vastly more advanced race of Old Ones, we may in fact be the Old Ones.
Now it seems, if we manage ti stick around, we'll also be in a position to enlighten younger civilizations about the origins of the universe. So... that's pretty cool, is all I'm saying.
That connection is one good reason to believe that, if we are not in fact among the First Ones, then we are at most only a few billion years behind them. Coupled with the present age of the universe, the minimum time necessary for the manufacture of heavier elements places an upper limit on the number of years by which any other race might have beaten us to the evolution of intelligence, space travel, etc.
Like Old Handle just above (to whom Trigonoceps occipitalis was responding), I have long thought that we Earthers/humans could just as easily turn out to be the invading aliens who develop the fancy tech first as the ones who get invaded by others who already have the tech. Put another way, maybe someday in the far-distant future we (or rather our descendants) may help the Vorlons to evolve and fulfill their destiny rather than the other way around!
And this article strongly supports this possibility. In fact, it suggests that from the perspective of the universe and its overall, eventual total history, we have arrived on the scene very near said scene's inception, and unfathomably many ages before its end. Which means we are not "just as likely" to be First Ones as we are to be later ones who look up to the First Ones (or to the Overlords, if you prefer the A.C. Clarke novel from which Joe Straczynski obviously drew two of the biggest ideas in his glorious creation, Babylon 5). We are far more likely to be First Ones than we are to be (very much) later ones! And even if we are not the very first ones, we are relatively close, and not very far behind them at all.
(On the other hand, if the pace of evolution accelerates after a certain point is reached, and especially after the ability to manipulate the genome itself is acquired, then perhaps even a few thousand years head start would be enough to put the truly first ones "as far above us on the evolutionary scale as we are above the amoeba", as Mr. Spock said of the Organians in "Errand of Mercy".)
And of course it was indeed the late Sir Fred Hoyle who first proposed, and principally worked out, stellar nucleosynthesis as the source of all the heavier elements (elements heavier than helium). Others contributed substantially as well, and somehow Willie Fowler but not Fred Hoyle even got a Nobel for the work,* but Hoyle was in fact the one who contributed the most to our understanding of these crucial processes. (Without which beings capable of figuring out and understanding these processes never could have come to exist!)
Which is an interesting and fitting coincidence, given the topic of the article we are all replying to, because Hoyle also was:
the man who coined the term "Big Bang", intended as a pejorative;
an opponent almost (?) until his death** of the Big Bang theory that is now universally (pun not intended) accepted, and that is implicitly the subject of the article;***
and
the principal formulator not only of the stellar nucleosynthesis theory concerning the manufacture of heavier elements, but (along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi) of the steady-state theory of the universe's formation!
At this point I was going to conjecture that at some point in the distant future, when people no longer are able to see the evidence of the Big Bang, they might instead accept rather than reject Hoyle's steady-state theory or something like it. And I was planning to make this comment about Hoyle even before I saw that someone else had mentioned his name.
But on further reflection, and remembering that the steady-state theory requires the slow but continuous creation of new matter, giving rise to new, additional galaxies, so that the universe will always look essentially the same in any and every direction when viewed from any point and at any time, I realize that that aspect of the steady-state theory is utterly at odds with the article's prediction of a future in which "the runaway expansion of space" itself (presumably due to the recently posited "dark energy", though such was not mentioned by name) has rendered it impossible to see even neighboring galaxies. (As DougS clarified above.)
P.S. I debated which icon to use, and considered several possibilities before deciding to go with the pint. Because a picture of a Ritalin tablet wasn't available.
.
* I for one am deeply puzzled and offended that Hoyle was slighted by the Royal Swedish Academy and the Nobel Committee for Physics.
But not as offended as I am by the fact that the 1978 Prize went in part to Penzias and Wilson — who stumbled onto the microwave background entirely by accident, and at first thought they were simply hearing pigeon shit! — instead of to the man who first predicted the microwave background, George Gamow. (Had a Nobel Prize been awarded for General Relativity (none ever was), should it have gone to Eddington instead of Einstein?) Granted, Gamow was dead by the time that Prize was awarded, and the Prize rules prohibit the awarding of any of the Prizes posthumously (unless someone passes after his Prize is announced but before it is formally conferred a few months later), but that just begs the question: Why wasn't the prize for that remarkable insight awarded to Gamow while he was still alive? At the very least he should have shared the Prize with Penzias and Wilson, who really barely deserved it at all.
(A case can be made that Bob Dicke of Princeton ought to have been in on it too, but Gamow predicted the cosmic microwave background (CMB) slightly before Dickie independently re-predicted it (both in 1946), and Penzias and Wilson finished building their Dicke radiometer before Dicke himself (and his colleagues Wilkinson and Roll) could finish building the one that he was planning to use to measure the CMB.
I'd also be more than happy with Ralph Alpher (Gamow's graduate student) and Robert Herman sharing in Gamow's prize. They extended and refined his prediction, and made a more accurate estimate of the background's temperature. But — contrary to what Wikipedia's entry on the CMB says — they did not predict it first. Gamow did, two years earlier (as the timeline in Wikipedia's article on the discovery of the CMB acknowledges).)
.
** I vaguely recall reading or hearing that he finally threw in the towel and conceded that the Big Bang is a better fit to the data shortly before his death, based on the slight variations in the CMB discovered by the COBE satellite in the 1990s. However, Hoyle's Wikipedia entry reports that he "died in 2001 never accepting the Big Bang theory". If that is right and what I thought I read or heard is wrong, then change "opponent almost . . . until his death" to "life-long opponent".
.
*** It also is interesting and worthy of comment that he opposed the Big Bang theory for religious reasons, and that he made no bones about this fact. In his view, the Big Bang theory smacked far too much and too obviously of a Creator, and he would have none of this!
Which makes it all the more ironic and amusing that so many Christians fail to see the Big Bang's obvious religious potential, and identify it — rather than Hoyle's steady-state alternative — with the atheism that Hoyle himself firmly subscribed to. You'd think they would point to Bible passages that talk about God stretching out or spreading forth the heavens (e.g., Zechariah 12:1; Job 9:8; Isaiah 40:22 and 42:5) and say "See, we told you!", but instead they largely disavow the Big Bang and crap all over it, simply because they don't like its time scale, which they find far too large. Never mind its implication that not only all the matter and energy (including light) that exist but space and time themselves may have come into being at a definite point in the finite past, all at the same single instant.
(Mind you, I am not saying that the Big Bang theory is inherently religious or Creator-bound. At best it is merely suggestive; the suggestion may easily be disregarded, and the theory certainly tells us nothing about who or what might have instigated the Big Bang. And I am well aware that there are many theories nowadays according to which there might have been a "before" the Big Bang after all. I take no position myself in regard to any of these controversies. I wish only to point out Hoyle's great candor, and the irony of some people essentially refusing to take Yes for an answer.)
so contrary to the science fiction staple where we meet a vastly more advanced race of Old Ones, we may in fact be the Old Ones.
Something I have also considered as a likely explanation of the Fermi paradox, with the proviso that this applies to our galaxy only (other galaxies may be older), and out galaxy might contain also other civilizations born within a 100 000 year or so time window, and far enough that we have not detected them yet (they are across the galaxy, maybe).
Sets up an epic battle a few million years from now, when our networks of colonies finally encounter each other...
It isn't difficult to imagine that a civilization might have evolved, without the usual megalomaniacs along the way, into a highly sophisticated and advanced culture, many thousands of years our technological and sociological superiors, because they didn't exhaust most of their effort on either killing each other, or massaging one's status up some preposterous ladder.
Or, if the hawks truly are our saviours, another civilization might just as easily have been at each other from day one and never stopped to take a breath. These creatures by the theory of "war fuels progress" would again be superior to us and thus appear to be an older race, when actually they just ran a little faster with the ball than we did.
and called it "Babylon 5"
Then Channel 4 bought the rights and proceeded to broadcast it at various different times of the day and different days of the week. And so it came to pass that only the truly devout managed to actually watch all the episodes first time around.
Presumably, however, at such a distant future epoch those sentient beings will look out at what they can observe at that time and make some interpretations of it. As there will be no way to perform experiments on a cosmic scale those interpretations will be untestable. Those observations will miss out some of what we can see today so their interpretations will be wrong according to our interpretations based on our observations but they'll not be in a position to know that. AIUI that's what's being said in this article.
Now, about our observations and our interpretations of them....
"...since every piece of matter in the Universe is in someway affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Universe
Frankly, we don't even know how the universe was created. We have lot's of tidbits, but no one one really knows what made the hypothesized expansion of the hypothesized singularity begin. It's the best theory we have, so we use it. But to suggest that we "know it" and that others won't "know it" is ignorant beyond belief!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
