Comments on: What Lies Past Eternity, for the Universe?

What Lies Past Eternity, for the Universe?

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:38:46 -0800

Exit Mundi's thoughts on the latest anticipated apocalypse: the coming apocalypse in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 A.D.. (No kidding.)

(Previously and previously.) (head asplode) The subpage lists as sources Evolving Cosmos and Stephen Battersby's February '05 article in New Scientist, "The Final Unravelling of the Universe." Although the site at large is familiar to many Mefites, this particular subpage seems to have been added rather recently and I thought contained ideas that are unusual and interesting enough to be worthy of highlighting ...

By: gomichild

gomichild — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:40:48 -0800

Way to break the front page WCityMike!

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:43:05 -0800

Doesn't look broken to me, and the post is showing. What, it's not wrapping?

By: hackwolf

hackwolf — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:43:54 -0800

Post Apocalypse. Nope, it's not wrapping.

By: gomichild

gomichild — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:44:47 -0800

Not wrapping mate. Sorry.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:45:14 -0800

Well, crapadoodle. I know there's a mod on a different timezone, sort of the "overnight mod." Anyone remember offhand who that is? I'll try to find it on Meta and let him know. grumble grumble let's get some 21st century wrapping code installed shall we?

By: qvantamon

qvantamon — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:46:17 -0800

I can't wait to hole myself up with a few virgins to prepare for this inevitable oncoming apocalypse.

By: taz

taz — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:47:49 -0800

that would be vacapinta, WCityMike.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:49:17 -0800

Thanks, I found it in the FAQ -- although the contact form entry in the FAQ doesn't have any IM information for him, so I just shot him an e-mail. Sorry, guys, I honestly thought it'd wrap on a comma, and I thought the number was sort of a fun thing about the incomprehensible vastness the link is talking about.

By: faster than a speeding bulette

faster than a speeding bulette — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:50:06 -0800

This is why neither historians nor prophets will never be considered scientists: They don't know when to use scientific notation.

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:51:09 -0800

Scientific notation, anyone?

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:52:09 -0800

It's a new year and Metafilter is already broken.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:52:31 -0800

Anyway, though, I posted this partially because I know we have scientifically-minded Mefites on the site, and I was interested in hearing the commentary or discussion that might arise on those very strange cosmological concepts described on the page — the Eiffel Tower randomly popping up in a incomprehensibly distant future where all the black holes the universe collapsed into have dissipated ... :-) Please don't let the wrapping-accident derail things, hopefully it'll be fixed real soon ...

By: cashman

cashman — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:52:41 -0800

You got your apocalypse in my mefi!

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:53:49 -0800

faster than a speeding bullet beat me to the comment about scientific notation. Parse for string lengths that are too big and insert a line break, please.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:55:55 -0800

In the year 10¹⁰⁰, after all the universe has collapsed and quantum vacuums have caused us to reappear, a future WCityMike will make the exact same mistake. Unless he reads this comment first! Survive, little electrons, survive!

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:57:29 -0800

1 x 10^134 by my count.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:00:00 -0800

Maybe by the time 10^100¹⁰⁰ A.D. arrives, the repeated iterations of future WCityMikes posting this thread will have resulted in the mistake not occuring the next time 'round ... okay i've milked that joke as far as i can

By: qvantamon

qvantamon — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:02:41 -0800

*makes it the sacred mission of his lineage to kill WCityMikes before they post to Metafilter, until the end of times*

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:02:47 -0800

Please people, don't blame big numbers! Small numbers will also hurt. Witness: 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.... No, I didn't have the heart.

By: empath

empath — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:02:54 -0800

If I wasn't posting from an iPhone I'd paste a link to boltzman brains here.

By: stavrogin

stavrogin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:04:41 -0800

"Do no evil", huh? Yeah, right.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:09:03 -0800

Here you go, empath.

By: Clave

Clave — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:09:11 -0800

Lotta words to say "heat death".

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:09:18 -0800

[i have broken the zeroes that were on the front page and which you were probably not intending to bork things forgive me they weren't wrapping so contiguous and so wide]

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:11:47 -0800

Cortex got it, so we should be okay now, hopefully.

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:11:57 -0800

cortex broke a zero.

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:20:59 -0800

I'm going to mention now, for the benefit of anybody who joins the thread later, that what was happening was that this post read "Exit Mundi's thoughts on the latest anticipated apocalypse: the coming apocalypse in... and then there was an enormous gap until the rest of the post. Pretty funny, really, given the context. Things are back to normal now.

By: 517

517 — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:24:20 -0800

One 'googol' years, is the official word for that number. It's the current age of the Universe... No it isn't. According to its driver's license it's 13,800,000,000ish but if asked, it says it's 29.

By: Bora Horza Gobuchul

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:27:48 -0800

Don't feel bad about it, WCityMike... it was refreshingly strange to see the line the coming apocalypse in... with empty blue following it. Being a deeply pessimistic MeFite, my second reaction was one of anxiety: "The apocalypse? When? When, you bastard?" My third reaction (still without reading the article) was an association (and potentially a spolier): the end of a Stephen Baxter novel, in which the entire universe has almost been completely extinguished by swarming, semi-intelligent aliens that consume baryonic matter. The final scene, in which the last remaining uncorperal human beds himself down in the embers of a dying star as the universe cools to dark energy and matter, is the saddest I recall in SF outside of Childhood's End.

By: longsleeves

longsleeves — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:31:15 -0800

We, the Transhumans, will not let this fate befall our universe, as long as our naked asses are drifting in the intergalactic vastness.

By: JimmyJames

JimmyJames — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:31:39 -0800

Should we start planning a meet up at a certain restaurant to watch the whole thing? The first round of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters is on me.

By: Dipsomaniac

Dipsomaniac — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:39:02 -0800

Shit. I had plans that day. Changing that around is gonna throw off my whole week.

By: edd

edd — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:44:04 -0800

517: the second half of the sentence you didn't quote changes the meaning dramatically from the bit you did quote. They never said a googol was the age of the universe.

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:44:33 -0800

oh man this is going to be so awesome

By: Foosnark

Foosnark — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:44:50 -0800

I'll be sure to mark it on my google calendar.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:45:21 -0800

So the front page was broke. Anyone can do that! Me, I broke wind! I find the Big Freeze to be repugnant. I propose to fashion a slingshot from some elastic strings, and shoot off to another brane. Or, perhaps, become totally irrelevant to this universe, and thus reveal The Way to the next. The universe may die, but the metaverse is eternal.

By: sexyrobot

sexyrobot — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:45:36 -0800

ok, buckle yr seatbelt... no matter how large the universe is at that point, when the last particle evaporates, there will no longer be any reference points to define the volume of the universe. not after 10^1056 years (or whatever), but immediately, that 'volume' becomes indistinguishable from a singularity containing all the energy that that empty volume of space represents...an object identical to that which started the universe. the likeliest scenario at that point is another big bang. see, even if the universe is 'open'...it's still 'closed'. so says me enjoy! :)

By: lalochezia

lalochezia — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:49:06 -0800

Metafilter: Incoherent lumps of random garbage, most of the time.

By: Tube

Tube — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:55:22 -0800

Supernaught.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:58:11 -0800

I'm probably with ROU_Xenophile.

By: ubernostrum

ubernostrum — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:11:39 -0800

Fun (and accessible) further reading: Paul Davies' "The Last Three Minutes", which explores all sorts of "incomprehensibly far in the future" scenarios.

By: Pseudology

Pseudology — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:15:12 -0800

Wow, there really are 1056 zeros in the big bang calculation. 20x3 zeros in the top row 41x3 zeros in the next 5 rows 49x3 zeros in the following two and finally 29x3 zeros in the bottom row so it's (49x3)2(41x3)5(20x3)(29x3) ... I'm so bored...

By: b1tr0t

b1tr0t — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:20:34 -0800

while true puts "Aleph-nought bottles of beer on the wall," puts "Aleph-nought bottles of beer," puts "You take one down, and pass it around," puts "Aleph-nought bottles of beer on the wall" end

By: athenian

athenian — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:47:52 -0800

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:05:16 -0800

Everything has happened. We just don't perceive it. You pick your reality or just leave it. Heat death will come... or we'll just be one. Repeat the cycle indefinitely... You and I make three, WTF that be? Stick to arts, it's farts. Leave science to the people... who failed art.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:24:27 -0800

Omega Point Theory is much more fun, heaven has already been won. Bicameral will give you another one. Snow Crash also gives cash, Infinity and the Mind might take it away, GEB brings it back almost any day.

By: Xere

Xere — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:32:11 -0800

10 gaziggyrillionwhatever years? Fine by me, because I won't be around anyway!

By: raygirvan

raygirvan — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:56:31 -0800

anything can happen including the Eiffel Tower or a physicist popping back into reality. Reminds me of The Hole in the Zero:

"Planets made of rust. Thousands of two-headed lions. Carnivorous stones, Izaak Newton in a paper coffin. Radioactive lead. Suns that absorbed heat. A little man ten milimetres tall made of collapsium. In the end, they just set up warning beacons and left it." "How utterly baroque," she said with a shiver.

By: Pseudology

Pseudology — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:57:05 -0800

So, in infinite time, anything can happen including the Eiffel Tower or a physicist popping back into reality. Does that not mean that an infinite number of things can happen? So I might pop back into existence married to my existing wife and then (at some other time) pop back into existence having my liver eaten by wolves? If it's not "anything can happen" but "anything will happen" then that's rather ... confusing. Given an infinite amount of time, anything that can happen will happen. But the event in question still has to be physically possible. What this article seems to be arguing is that given enough time the universe can basically conjure up anything it wants. So an entire crispy cremes outlet could just appear sometime in the distant future after all the photons have died but, say, the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster couldn't phase into existence at any point because its existence could not be not supported by our reality.

By: mono blanco

mono blanco — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:18:24 -0800

Not everything can happen even given an infinite amount of time. Look at Aleph Null (integers 1, 2, 3. up to infinity) versus Aleph 1 (the infinity of real numbers of which an infinite amount exist just between 1 and 2). No matter how long you wait you'll never get a 1.5 in Aleph Null. Or take the "Where are they?" argument: If life on other planets exists then, given an infinite or even very large universe, they should've visited us by now. But they haven't. If, given infinite time, anything can and will happen, then everything should happen all the time, simultaneously. A blizzard of white noise. But it doesn't. Infinity does not mean that no possibility is precluded.

By: Fruny

Fruny — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:04:44 -0800

People should use more zero-width spaces.

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:58:18 -0800

Seeing a post with a 1 followed by so many zeros reminds me that the total number of favorited comments I've acquired right now is only two away from 1,000. I think about this. How important is a power of ten? Does it make me a better person if I have 1000 favorites instead of 998? Would 999 be better than 998? This seems absurd. Beyond that, why should I care how many Favorites I have. Am I that shallow? Probably I am that shallow. Certainly, faced with the long term Heat Death of the Universe, I tend to dwell excessively on simple measures of my own performance. "How did I do during this Life/Universe cycle?" "Did I get enough points at Metafilter?" "Does she like me, and will she come with me to the Prom?" But how does this translate numerically into measurements of success? I know my IQ is 100 plus or minus 100. I know that my income is 100,000 within a factor of ten. I can count on the fingers of two hands how many fingers I have, which means I have a lot of fingers... and what more could a person want? I reject the acquisition of further Favorites. For a moment, I resist the tyranny of powers of ten. This is actually one of those rare posts where if you Favorite it you will screw up the post.

By: sfts2

sfts2 — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:11:33 -0800

Page tried to run getlog.aspx - fuck this! Run away...WCMike to the penalty box...

By: Hobgoblin

Hobgoblin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:20:52 -0800

As mono blanco (3 above as I type, slowly) seems to be saying,where is it written that given infinite time, everything that could possibly happen will happen? Or anything like that? Sez who?

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:49:08 -0800

Damn you mmoncur.

By: St. Alia of the Bunnies

St. Alia of the Bunnies — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:32:10 -0800

So how do you know WE are not already a time burp? Hm?

By: leotrotsky

leotrotsky — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:39:24 -0800

twoleft: enjoy the POWER OF TEN!

By: leotrotsky

leotrotsky — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:46:59 -0800

I swear I was just reading an long article about a noncrackpot theory that eliminated the problem of the Big Bang singularity, and predicted a big crunch preceding the current universe, with an eye towards a big crunch at the end of ours, possibly by dark energy changing from a repellent to attractive force. Anyone? Bueller?

By: cthuljew

cthuljew — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:48:39 -0800

Somewhere in a parallel universe, WCityMike is breaking MetaFilter... [pdf]

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:03:30 -0800

A pickaxe to the head for you leotrotsky. You've forced me into the next order of magnitude.

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:05:12 -0800

What this article seems to be arguing is that given enough time the universe can basically conjure up anything it wants. The universe fucking hates it when people go around anthropomorphizing it.

By: edd

edd — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:31:20 -0800

These arguments are often considered problematic. The term for your googling is Boltzmann Brain.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:56:53 -0800

In 2003, Max Tegmark wrote an article for Scientific American called "Parallel Universes". It was mind blowing and won an entry in that years edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing. Unfortunately it is behind a pay-wall, but luckily someone transcribed it into a message post on MSN Groups. It's long, poorly formatted, and one of the most mind blowing articles I've ever read. In a post above cthuljew may have been linking to the same article, but the URL is fubar and when trying to open the PDF is says it is corrupt.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:01:06 -0800

FWIW, an infinite amount of time is not needed to have crazy things happen. An infinite amount of space works as well. From the "Parallel Universes" article:

The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.

By: leotrotsky

leotrotsky — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:08:02 -0800

Stbalbach: So that doppelganger would be outside of our light cone, but certainly the gravitational effects of something that massive would be felt, right? Or is it just so distant that it doesn't matter?

By: kid ichorous

kid ichorous — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:18:16 -0800

Anything can happen including the Eiffel Tower or a physicist popping back into reality. Or a teapot. YOU HEAR ME, BERTRAND RUSSELL?

By: edd

edd — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:04:57 -0800

Leotrotsky: the speed of gravity is fairly well constrained to be close to that of light.

By: The Great Big Mulp

The Great Big Mulp — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:08:52 -0800

b1tr0t, that's hilarious.

By: semblance

semblance — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:57:15 -0800

In the next universe, Nietzsche already posted this on metafilter over a hundred years ago. Except in his version, given infinite time, the same things must happen over and over again, forever:

If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centres of force - and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless - it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have taken place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum. (from The Will To Power)

and

The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (from The Gay Science)

By: Dormant Gorilla

Dormant Gorilla — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:40:59 -0800

So an entire crispy cremes outlet could just appear sometime in the distant future after all the photons have died... Yeah, right. The universe can't even manage to conjure me a krispy kreme in lower manhattan. Stupid universe. Heat death's too good for it.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:42:21 -0800

Remember, kids, before you make some crazy webpage: 10^100¹⁰⁰ is still ∞ less than ∞. That's the math take on this. For the physics take on this, well: in a dead universe, time also dies.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:04:30 -0800

This post led me to re-read wikipedia's page about googolplexes, which eventually led me back to Scott Aaronson's classic Who Can Name the Bigger Number? Only extremely tangentially related (is there even such a thing as an extreme tangent? In our next series, we ask some extreme geometers, while skydiving into pools of Mountain Dew), but a fun read. I'd forgotten about the Ackerman function(s).

By: buzzv

buzzv — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:33:48 -0800

Does anybody know if they say it will happen on a Tuesday or a Wednesday? If its Tuesday, I won't bother to Tivo House that day. Come to think of it, I probably already know what it will be about anyway: The disembodied heads of Wilson and House sealed in the same glass jar alternate between spitting at each other and tongue kissing, while Cutty presses her disembodied, jar-enclosed décolletage against the glass, insisting they do more clinic hours as punishment for their misbehavior. Also: Did my 10^1023m-distant duplicate misspell décolletage? Did he use m-w.com or tfd.com to look it up? Does he use coasters? What's in his Netflix queue? Damn. Now I'll be up all night.

By: jamstigator

jamstigator — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:22:42 -0800

I wanted to see if I had anything scheduled to record on the Dish DVR the night the universe dies, but it wouldn't scroll forward in time far enough. Hopefully their next model will handle this problem!

By: Devils Rancher

Devils Rancher — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:25:10 -0800

athenian: So, in infinite time, anything can happen including the Eiffel Tower or a physicist popping back into reality. Does that not mean that an infinite number of things can happen? So I might pop back into existence married to my existing wife and then (at some other time) pop back into existence having my liver eaten by wolves? If it's not "anything can happen" but "anything will happen" then that's rather ... confusing. Yes, I am an arts major. Well, then. Your school assignment is to paint this in a fashion whereby I can wander into a gallery at random and deduce this meaning from your representation of it on canvas. You have one class period.

By: treepour

treepour — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:23:41 -0800

Does anybody get this (from the Parallel Universes article)?

The algorithmic information content in a number is, roughly speaking, the length of the shortest computer program that will produce that number as output. For example, consider the set of all integers. Which is simpler, the whole set or just one number? Naively, you might think that a single number is simpler, but the entire set can be generated by quite a trivial computer program, whereas a single number can be hugely long.

Why would it be simpler to generate the entire set of integers? Is it because all you have to do for the entire set is keep adding 1 to whatever number you have, whereas to reach a specific number, you have to both increment and compare?

By: cthuljew

cthuljew — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:40:24 -0800

treepour: Pretty much yes.

By: monospace

monospace — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:49:13 -0800

In the future, we'll all be dead.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:03:13 -0800

treepour, the quote is badly worded. But his question is: Which is simpler, the whole set or just one number? The answer is, it depends on the number. Most numbers are insanely huge with lots of decimal places. More keystrokes are made writing out a single large number than would be made writing a computer program to print the entire set of numbers.