7 ms·
I always get a feeling of existential dread when I read these kind of news.
by akka47 6y ago
I always get a feeling of existential dread when I read these kind of news.
- yokem55 6y agoDon't worry too much about it. In the end, everything will be nearly 0k.
- eloff 6y agoI appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Only if we make the right decisions as a species and we don't get unlucky. I'm quite apprehensive that the great filter lies ahead - that technology accelerates too rapidly compared to our wisdom and we end up nearly destroying ourselves. We're getting the ability to program life itself and to likely to democratize the ability to harness the forces inside the atom. Neither of which we're ready for as a species.
- woko 6y agoI think it was a joke about zero Kelvin.
- tartoran 6y agoI thought of it as being 0k as in empty of information. Kelvin is K but I like this interpretation more.
- brodie 6y agoSame thing, really.
- fouc 6y agoZero entropy
- combatentropy 6y agoI thought that entropy was increasing
- sn41 6y agoMaximum entropy, I think? I've wondered about this. How can something which is having a cold death (zero kelvin) also have maximum entropy? But I am not at all an expert.
- c1ccccc1 6y agoMaximum entropy merely implies that the temperature everywhere is the same (any other situation would necessarily have a lower entropy). You could in theory have maximum entropy at 1000K. Our universe has a ton of empty space, and not all that much energy, so the temperature at which it equilibriates is very low. It's also expanding, so the hypothetical equilibrium temperature is decreasing all the time. It's also worth noting that the entropy can be very large, even if the temperature is absolute zero. (You just need a system with a lot of different ground-states that all have the same energy.)
- sn41 6y agoThanks, this makes sense.
- fouc 6y agoOops. Brain fart :) Maximum entropy indeed
- grey-area 6y agoI believe the OP said 0K, not OK. There may not be a universal law which says everything will be OK, but there is one which says everything will be 0K in the end.
- eloff 6y agoAh, I get it now. It's hard to see the difference!
- ineedasername 6y agonearly 0k
- renewiltord 6y agoNot zero, just zero potential.
- kiba 6y agoWhat does it mean to not pass the great filter? Humanity or their successor stop existing?
- bartwe 6y agoWe won't be there ourselves anyways...
- simonh 6y agoThere are multiple explanations for why the sky isnt lit up with radio and laser signals from advanced civilisation. The great filter is one explanation, that there are existential crises or threats that wipe out most civilisations or cause them to collapse to subsistence level. Nuclear war, biological weapons, ecological collapse, paper clip maximising AI, etc. I once ran a Traveller RPG exploration campaign where one of the systems they visited looked really odd on sensors. Just fuzzy clouds and clumps and ring formations of diffuse metallic debris. It turned out it was all paper clips.
- mathattack 6y agoI hope you snuffed them out before they took over the universe. The surprisingly addictive game is below. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- diggernet 6y agoI hate you
- TeMPOraL 6y agoFor context, the examples you mentioned are cases of the great filter lying ahead of us. The more optimistic hope is that the great filter is behind us - things like abiogenesis or multicellular life being extremely unlikely to happen. "Great filter" is just the name for "a barrier that stops life from becoming a spacefaring civilization". This explanation is also the reason why finding basic life (say, bacteria) in the Solar System would be a cause for worry - if life evolved independently twice in the same star system, it would imply abiogenesis isn't that unlikely - thus strongly suggesting the great filter is still ahead of us.
- amelius 6y ago> I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Isn't there some QM law that says that with infinitesimal probability anything can materialize at any point in space? Meaning that after everything has collapsed, you can (will!) still re-materialize somewhere in space. An infinite number of times!
- mordechai9000 6y agoI kind of wonder, in a half-assed amateurish way, if the underlying reality of our universe isn't just an extremely rare random fluctuation in a fluid-like medium at thermodynamic equilibrium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- witherk 6y agoYou can definitely find cosmologist who believe this kind of thing, though it's rarely formalized.
- hnhnhnhnhn 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- unionpivo 6y agohad to read that twice to get it :)
- xwdv 6y agoThe worry is that not only will we be utterly destroyed, but that the destruction will be so thorough it will blow backward through time erasing all events that ever happened and making it so that we never even lived. That means everything we experience right now didn’t happen, we are just seeing a probability of what could happen but didn’t because it’s all destroyed. These lives mean nothing.
- ChrisLTD 6y agoIf there is no afterlife, then oblivion is our inevitable destiny.
- thatguy0900 6y agoThat's a very specific worry.
- rytill 6y agoI don't see how it's possible to un-make-something-happen. It already happened. It's gone. You can't kill what's already dead.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 6y agoImagine they told you that when you die, not only will you be gone, but then they will go back and undo everything you ever did and basically make it like you never existed at all. It didn’t happen, you never happened.
- ravenstine 6y agoThat is brilliant.
- p1mrx 6y ago0K should be uppercase.
- iamgopal 6y agoLevel : Reddit
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mithr 6y agoSee also https://pbfcomics.com/comics/youll-be-ok/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/youll-be-ok/
- dave_sid 6y agoI don’t think this joke quite got the credit it deserves.
- 867-5309 6y ago> The Big Freeze (or Big Chill) is a scenario under which continued expansion results in a universe that asymptotically approaches absolute zero temperature. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_univers... absolute zero == zero kelvin == 0K
- dotancohen 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny
- ASalazarMX 6y ago"The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" - Carl Sagan And that pale blue dot means nothing in a cosmic scale. Stop worrying and enjoy the incredible fortune of being alive.
- kenjackson 6y agoI must admit I feel that same dread. While I appreciate your intent, I'm not sure it helped.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoWhy? What exactly are you dreading? That our understanding of the universe and science involved might have some serious flaws? If so, won't we just adjust our understanding to something that matches the observations?
- ferbass 6y agoDon't worry it will be a problem for the future politicians and universe expand protections groups. "We have to stop the universe expansion, the universe is expanding faster than expected" they say.
- oarabbus_ 6y agoI get pretty severe existential dread whenever I read something about this, or universe-scale cosmology in general.