Posted by rbanffy 7 days ago
Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
Spotted the republican
If you ask /dev/random "What is 2+2?", that question makes no sense as /dev/random does not listen to you and just spits out random binary output.
Go and disagree with /dev/random.
Pretty similar to a republican's mindset: I don't have to fix it, let the next generation deal with the problems that I caused.
While dumping matter into a black hole destroys the matter, it doesn’t destroy the mass. It just confines all of the mass in one place. Powering your Birch World is just a matter of using the Penrose process to extract energy from the black hole for the next few million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (about 3×10¹⁰⁴ years give or take a few). The stars will only last for about a million trillion years (10²⁰ years plus or minus a bit), so this plan extends your your lifetime by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.
Maximal extension perhaps, but not quite forever. Forever takes a lot more work.
I liked the DS9 episode where the mutants realized that the universe was collapsing into the Big Crunch, so they demanded “antigravity generators, lots of them!” Their cosmology was wrong, but only because the show had the misfortune to be written in the past. Their enthusiasm was great :)
Living forever is such a strange desire, considering that complex life has existed on earth for just a fraction of the time it has existed, and humanity even less than that. I recommend watching the Kurtzgesagt video called All of History in one hour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo&t=3670s). It displays all of earths history in one hour, and humanity is merely a few seconds of it.
Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, that's 4500000000 years, and in 1300000000 years it will be uninhabitable by humans, and in another 4.5 billion years (roughly 3.2 billion years after becoming uninhabitable) it will be engulfed by the sun.
Assuming humanity manages interstellar space flight you could possibly escape earth and live somewhere else until that also dies, but in case it is not practical or possible, you get to enjoy 3.2 billion years of literally choking and being burned alive on earth.
Assuming you did escape earth (or you're immortal so escaping doesn't matter) In 1000000000000 years the last star will be born, and in 100000000000000 years the last star will die out.
You now have an extremely long time to enjoy suffocating in hard vacuum with your body being boiled by the low pressure, and all in complete darkness until the heat death of the universe occurs in roughly 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years
Please read this article first before damning yourself to an unimaginable hell.
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)
For a single bacteria cell, our timeframes must seem immense too.
I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but it’s a trap to think that just because you can’t fathom the scales that makes it impossible. The universe is huge and very very old. It can afford to wait what is a long time to us for something to happen.
I do think you’re likely right in practice though, and that it is too long for the universe to be an organism. But who knows. We already know that mathematically speaking the heat death of the universe looks identical to a very zoomed in big bang, maybe we just need to zoom out a few billion orders of magnitude to see the big picture, where the vast distances and time scales we see appear as little more than micrometers and microseconds apart…
The scales involved are vastly different than the minor difference in scales between bacteria and us - we don't have to worry about the speed of light for anything that we currently consider alive.
Unless there's something big we're missing. Maybe the cores of stars contain the final ingredient required for DNA formation or something.
As a non-astronomer, that number still always boggles my mind.
> Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.
Also boggles my mind. Also makes me think of doctor who when the stars start disappearing. I need to rewatch that...
Much worse than that, the universe is enormous and it is expanding faster than the maximum possible velocity, as a result such a clock could never complete a single tick.
> THIRTY SUPERNOVAE PER SECOND, over the entire observable Universe.
> So you should view this fleeting world—
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
1) When was the last supernova observed in our own galaxy?
2) How close would one have to be to be observed with the naked eye?
> Can you spot Supernova 2021 axdf?
Are you supposed to be able to spot the supernova?
All I've noticed is a couple of small stars that disappear in the latter photo, but this mostly seems to be because it's more blurry.
Tens of thousands a year is one an hour!
There are so many supernovae you really could bounce too close to one and that would end your trip real quick
2^64 planck times is 9.9e-25 seconds. Planck times are really tiny.
2^64 nanoseconds is 584 years.