Think of it this way. You're a bright guy. You probably won't think up a side-step to the heat death problem by age 85. But, what if cellular aging and biochemical atrophy can slow down until you croak at age 150? Your prospects for research success now have extra time. Shouldn't aging to 150 years be the primary goal? It lengthens the time horizons that are needed to crack difficult problems.
I potentially _already_ know how to _effectively_ escape the heat death of the universe, at least theoretically, even without evoking the aid of FTL, wormholes, etc. It requires a lot of technology we don't yet have but doesn't make make _too_ many assumptions about future physics. So granted the optimism required to presume we make it this far, it's actually still a somewhat pessimistic set of tools to achieve this with.
Imagine the universe has aged quite a bit and we're entering the black hole era, desperate for energy. Black holes currently don't lose mass even when there's little significant matter to absorb because of the presence of CMB radiation. As faint as it currently is, it all the same currently overwhelms the Hawking radiation emissions of even the most powerful black holes and said black holes continue to gain mass.
As the CMB radiation thins as per the expansion of the universe, however, eventually black holes will emit more radiation than they absorb and they will begin to shrink. Additionally, black holes emit Hawking radiation ever faster and ever more powerfully as they shed mass. Eventually any black hole will have reduced in size to something emitting enough power to meaningfully harness energy from. Hawking radiation from a natural black hole couldn't even perpetually power a light bulb, not for lack of energy, but because the emissions are so slow. This whereas harnessing energy from a black hole via systematically depositing matter into it is rather easy.
Again, black holes generate far more energy as they evaporate and shrink in mass. A black hole that contains roughly 20 billion tons of mass would be giving off around a megawatt of power and would continue to offer power for a couple billion years, gradually increasing the amount of available power as it did so. During this window a civilization could carefully add set amounts of matter to other black holes, harnessing power as they deposited mass, but cutting off the flow when they reached a specific mass for each, and measure a plethora of them to slightly different masses, manipulating their lifetimes so as that they are giving off useful amounts of energy one after another in a series.
A post-biological civilization living as uploaded minds would require far less energy to run a mind on a computer than biology requires, potentially billions of times less energy, and thusly might be able to run a massive civilization on something like a single-megawatt black hole power plant. The universe continues to cool and the theoretical minimum amount of energy required to flip a bit on a computer, or many so as to produce a digital mind's thought, is proportional to the switch's temperature. This references the Landauer Limit, and a cooling universe is suddenly advantageous for a great while; one can do ten times the calculations with the same amount of energy at a tenth of the temperature. This, of course, merely postpones things for a civilization, but either by continuing to manipulate black hole masses while possible _or_ potentially getting even more effective at colder computations (preferably both if possible but not required), one can continue this game for trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of years. So long as proton decay doesn't occur before this, and we don't believe it will, one might be able to survive though the entire black hole era in this manner. That's more than enough time to perform the next required steps if they're indeed possible at all.
It may be that in the extremely distant future our universe will contain only radiation, c-speed (or light-speed) particles. Time and space are as one. What then if the universe contained no clocks? That's the case in a universe containing only light. For the photon, or any c-speed particle, the beginning and end of any journey are the same.
Spacetime loses meaning regarding the photon. In order for time and hence space to be meaningful, a universe must be able to build a clock. A clock must perceive a spacetime grid and it must travel at sub-c so as to do so, and to do that the clock must possess mass. So if you have so much as one electron in a universe you can build a clock and can thusly determine the difference between a one light-second and one billion light-year-sized universe. But with only light and other c-speed radiation there's nothing internal to those universes that can differentiate between them. They're indentical as per the conformal transformation of rescaling.
As per inflation, matter may eventually decay into its lightest possible components, although in the case of the proton we're still somewhat unsure so that's the biggest assumption I have to make and it may actually not even be required to make as per something I'll touch on in a bit.
We may be left with only photons, electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and gravitons. Photons and gravitons, as the respective force carrier particles of electromagnetism and gravity, are inherently massless, but electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, are clocks, possess mass, and this seemingly allows the universe a method by which to determine that it's massive.
Roger Penrose speculates that mass itself may not be such a fundamental property in the end and that we may eventually be left with massless electrons (and of course positrons but it's redundant to continue mentioning both). The standard model of particle physics predicts eternal electrons, but not necessarily those with mass. Indeed, the masses of elementary particles are _not_ fundamental properties of the particles themselves but rather arise from interactions with quantum fields, the Higgs field in the case of the electron. A massless universe effectively has no sense of a spacetime grid and is thusly both timeless and spaceless, sizeless (important).
The particles of the early universe were effectively massless as well. Perhaps you can see where this is going. A particle's energy is a combination of its kinetic energy and rest mass energy. Kinetic energy was so high during the Big Bang that rest mass energy was rendered negligible. All particles behaved like inherently c-speed particles. This is simply how quarks and electrons which gain their masses from interactions with the Higgs field behave at a sufficient temperature. At the temperature of the Big Bang, the Higgs field was unable to grant mass. Therefore if the Higgs field decays to a lower energy these particles will once again be stripped of the property of mass. Zero clocks.
The concept of size and time may become as meaningless in the late universe as it was in the early universe. Infinite space and time may thereafter effectively be compressed or conformally rescaled into a finite space, in fact, the infinitesimal, zero-sized point of the Big Bang. One can stitch these conformal hypersurfaces together so as to see an endless chain of universes.
Each universe is this chain is referred to as an "aeon". Interestingly, so as for this to be possible the universe requires a positive universal constant and it has it: Dark energy. To be clear, this is not a steady-state theory, nor is it a typical cyclic model but rather something of a category of its own. It all depends on whether or not clocks plan on sticking around.
Only light and other massless particles cross this conformal boundary, but they do. The most incredible takeaway from all of this is that a sufficiently advanced civilization may be able to orchestrate the interactions of black holes toward the end of the black hole era of one aeon so as to actually encode information in the CMB of the next aeon with gravitational waves, potentially even offering the instructions regarding how to recreate the previous digital civilization for an advanced but much less advanced civilization to follow, thereby escaping the heat death of the universe. None of this even takes into account the absolutely unfathomable increase in our understanding of physics that would occur during the black hole era, which makes not just human civilization but the current age of the universe a metaphoric blink of an eye.
All of this said, I won't be seeing any of this without some radical improvements to lifespan. Sometimes I indeed consider suddenly dedicating my entire life to it. Even taking a less optimistic approach than people like Aubrey de Grey, there's no denying that increasing one's lifespan increases one's odds of living until the next increase, and he's not the only one who believes the first person to reach the age of 1,000 has already been born today. As with things like worm holes, it's one of those things that's very difficult to see but also difficult to rule out in a world where our technology is exponentially increasing in power and we constantly discover things that were completely alien only some years ago.
Another worthy cause is working toward the development of a general AI and subsequently a superhuman intelligence because at the point that it finally happens our current understanding of all other fields will probably be left in the dust anyway.
Do you think immortality can ever be achieved?
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Think of it this way. You're a bright guy. You probably won't think up a side-step to the heat death problem by age 85. But, what if cellular aging and biochemical atrophy can slow down until you croak at age 150? Your prospects for research success now have extra time. Shouldn't aging to 150 years be the primary goal? It lengthens the time horizons that are needed to crack difficult problems.
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I potentially _already_ know how to _effectively_ escape the heat death of the universe, at least theoretically, even without evoking the aid of FTL, wormholes, etc. It requires a lot of technology we don't yet have but doesn't make make _too_ many assumptions about future physics. So granted the optimism required to presume we make it this far, it's actually still a somewhat pessimistic set of tools to achieve this with.
Imagine the universe has aged quite a bit and we're entering the black hole era, desperate for energy. Black holes currently don't lose mass even when there's little significant matter to absorb because of the presence of CMB radiation. As faint as it currently is, it all the same currently overwhelms the Hawking radiation emissions of even the most powerful black holes and said black holes continue to gain mass.
As the CMB radiation thins as per the expansion of the universe, however, eventually black holes will emit more radiation than they absorb and they will begin to shrink. Additionally, black holes emit Hawking radiation ever faster and ever more powerfully as they shed mass. Eventually any black hole will have reduced in size to something emitting enough power to meaningfully harness energy from. Hawking radiation from a natural black hole couldn't even perpetually power a light bulb, not for lack of energy, but because the emissions are so slow. This whereas harnessing energy from a black hole via systematically depositing matter into it is rather easy.
Again, black holes generate far more energy as they evaporate and shrink in mass. A black hole that contains roughly 20 billion tons of mass would be giving off around a megawatt of power and would continue to offer power for a couple billion years, gradually increasing the amount of available power as it did so. During this window a civilization could carefully add set amounts of matter to other black holes, harnessing power as they deposited mass, but cutting off the flow when they reached a specific mass for each, and measure a plethora of them to slightly different masses, manipulating their lifetimes so as that they are giving off useful amounts of energy one after another in a series.
A post-biological civilization living as uploaded minds would require far less energy to run a mind on a computer than biology requires, potentially billions of times less energy, and thusly might be able to run a massive civilization on something like a single-megawatt black hole power plant. The universe continues to cool and the theoretical minimum amount of energy required to flip a bit on a computer, or many so as to produce a digital mind's thought, is proportional to the switch's temperature. This references the Landauer Limit, and a cooling universe is suddenly advantageous for a great while; one can do ten times the calculations with the same amount of energy at a tenth of the temperature. This, of course, merely postpones things for a civilization, but either by continuing to manipulate black hole masses while possible _or_ potentially getting even more effective at colder computations (preferably both if possible but not required), one can continue this game for trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of years. So long as proton decay doesn't occur before this, and we don't believe it will, one might be able to survive though the entire black hole era in this manner. That's more than enough time to perform the next required steps if they're indeed possible at all.
It may be that in the extremely distant future our universe will contain only radiation, c-speed (or light-speed) particles. Time and space are as one. What then if the universe contained no clocks? That's the case in a universe containing only light. For the photon, or any c-speed particle, the beginning and end of any journey are the same.
Spacetime loses meaning regarding the photon. In order for time and hence space to be meaningful, a universe must be able to build a clock. A clock must perceive a spacetime grid and it must travel at sub-c so as to do so, and to do that the clock must possess mass. So if you have so much as one electron in a universe you can build a clock and can thusly determine the difference between a one light-second and one billion light-year-sized universe. But with only light and other c-speed radiation there's nothing internal to those universes that can differentiate between them. They're indentical as per the conformal transformation of rescaling.
As per inflation, matter may eventually decay into its lightest possible components, although in the case of the proton we're still somewhat unsure so that's the biggest assumption I have to make and it may actually not even be required to make as per something I'll touch on in a bit.
We may be left with only photons, electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and gravitons. Photons and gravitons, as the respective force carrier particles of electromagnetism and gravity, are inherently massless, but electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, are clocks, possess mass, and this seemingly allows the universe a method by which to determine that it's massive.
Roger Penrose speculates that mass itself may not be such a fundamental property in the end and that we may eventually be left with massless electrons (and of course positrons but it's redundant to continue mentioning both). The standard model of particle physics predicts eternal electrons, but not necessarily those with mass. Indeed, the masses of elementary particles are _not_ fundamental properties of the particles themselves but rather arise from interactions with quantum fields, the Higgs field in the case of the electron. A massless universe effectively has no sense of a spacetime grid and is thusly both timeless and spaceless, sizeless (important).
The particles of the early universe were effectively massless as well. Perhaps you can see where this is going. A particle's energy is a combination of its kinetic energy and rest mass energy. Kinetic energy was so high during the Big Bang that rest mass energy was rendered negligible. All particles behaved like inherently c-speed particles. This is simply how quarks and electrons which gain their masses from interactions with the Higgs field behave at a sufficient temperature. At the temperature of the Big Bang, the Higgs field was unable to grant mass. Therefore if the Higgs field decays to a lower energy these particles will once again be stripped of the property of mass. Zero clocks.
The concept of size and time may become as meaningless in the late universe as it was in the early universe. Infinite space and time may thereafter effectively be compressed or conformally rescaled into a finite space, in fact, the infinitesimal, zero-sized point of the Big Bang. One can stitch these conformal hypersurfaces together so as to see an endless chain of universes.
Each universe is this chain is referred to as an "aeon". Interestingly, so as for this to be possible the universe requires a positive universal constant and it has it: Dark energy. To be clear, this is not a steady-state theory, nor is it a typical cyclic model but rather something of a category of its own. It all depends on whether or not clocks plan on sticking around.
Only light and other massless particles cross this conformal boundary, but they do. The most incredible takeaway from all of this is that a sufficiently advanced civilization may be able to orchestrate the interactions of black holes toward the end of the black hole era of one aeon so as to actually encode information in the CMB of the next aeon with gravitational waves, potentially even offering the instructions regarding how to recreate the previous digital civilization for an advanced but much less advanced civilization to follow, thereby escaping the heat death of the universe. None of this even takes into account the absolutely unfathomable increase in our understanding of physics that would occur during the black hole era, which makes not just human civilization but the current age of the universe a metaphoric blink of an eye.
All of this said, I won't be seeing any of this without some radical improvements to lifespan. Sometimes I indeed consider suddenly dedicating my entire life to it. Even taking a less optimistic approach than people like Aubrey de Grey, there's no denying that increasing one's lifespan increases one's odds of living until the next increase, and he's not the only one who believes the first person to reach the age of 1,000 has already been born today. As with things like worm holes, it's one of those things that's very difficult to see but also difficult to rule out in a world where our technology is exponentially increasing in power and we constantly discover things that were completely alien only some years ago.
Another worthy cause is working toward the development of a general AI and subsequently a superhuman intelligence because at the point that it finally happens our current understanding of all other fields will probably be left in the dust anyway.