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 …
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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.
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