Don't you watch the discovery channel? They're all around us....
The universe will completely die in..
- Thread starter Merlin5
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Don't you watch the discovery channel? They're all around us....
Maybe they are out there, just they don't bother to interfere with us because we're meaningless in their business. There are galaxies that have recently been discovered that are at least 11 billion years old, plenty of time for the random order of the Universe to do what it did to our solar system. The Universe is huge after all. Our technology may not be capable of even detecting signs of them if they just so happened to pass by our neighbourhood as well.
When you walk past a worm do you stand there looking at it, probing it, thinking wtf it is doing?
This borders more on the philosophical as well, for a civilisation to be ftl requires every nation to work together. Such a feat would make almost everything we work for today redundant. It would break apart our current way of life. If the Industrial revolution kick started the modern age then ftl would be leagues and leagues greater.
Think about it, in that scenario, the moment the world goes ftl, everything changes. Humans then (if they still exist!) will be far different to what we call humans today.
Ftl also comes with its own issues. time dillation is the ultimate Achilles heel.
The problem with galaxies that old is that the heavy elements weren't in abundance when they first formed. Without the heavy elements past Iron (which form when a star goes supernova and required for any advanced civilisations) you don't have much. Iirc, the Sun is a generation 3 star or something like that, and that generation is generally the first in which heavy elements are in enough abundance - I don't think advanced life is that much older than us if at all.
Another thing is that an advanced civilisation would require a lot, and a lot of resources. Earth would be ripe for that, especially in certain heavy elements. If life out there is as common as we think it is these days, we're probably not important enough to 'conserve'. I doubt we would in their position.
The biggest issue with FTL is if it is even possible (most of the 'cool' sci fi things we've been able to accomplish like Star Trek tractor beams have only ever been at the atomic level, scaling it up might prove insanely difficult or impossible!) and from there, how do we communicate across the galaxy?
Another thing is that an advanced civilisation would require a lot, and a lot of resources. Earth would be ripe for that, especially in certain heavy elements. If life out there is as common as we think it is these days, we're probably not important enough to 'conserve'. I doubt we would in their position.
The biggest issue with FTL is if it is even possible (most of the 'cool' sci fi things we've been able to accomplish like Star Trek tractor beams have only ever been at the atomic level, scaling it up might prove insanely difficult or impossible!) and from there, how do we communicate across the galaxy?
I see that it's from 2012. Seven Ages of Starlight.
The story of the stars, from red giants and supernovae to black holes, and how discovering their tale has transformed our own understanding of the universe.
Never saw it before and only caught the last half hour. I got the trillion years wrong btw, as he says right at the end, 100 trillion years. So I was only 99 trillion years out
There's this most amazing fact in the programme where they say "80 years ago, Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky was sure that when a supernova exploded, it left behind a kernel so dense, that a cupful would be as heavy as a mountain. He called it... a neutron star. "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00yb434/seven-ages-of-starlight
Energy never disappears...
I don't believe the universe will just whimper out. I think theres much more to the cosmos than the observable universe. I heard people describe the amount of energy that is stored inside the event horizon (I think not far from the singularity) of a black hole and the big bang could have been the release of said energy in a perhaps merging of two humongous black holes. That's the theory that entices me the most anyway.
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Supposedly all mass changes back into energy (photons?)
this then sits around for a bit until something happens to change energy back into mass and the universe starts again. Simplified...
Only having one universe seems a bit small (relatively), there should be lots of them. But it is nice to know that we can never ruin it, because we just get recycled into another brand new universe in a few trillion years.
I guess aliens are bored with us, personally I haven't been to the monkey zoo for years so I don't see why they would be any different. We are probably just on the end of a satellite webcam or something so they can watch us breed and argue over a European standard for a cucumber shape.
There isn't a government on Earth that you could trust with advanced technology anyway, and we still have billions of people following the big book of pixie stories.
If we weren't so stupid we could have made contact and be flying around on hover boards by now - instead we have all the deluded pixie people wasting money and making us look like stupid apes with guns, and the slightly more rational national governments unable to run countries without getting into debt. We suck.
Somewhere in the universe there is an Alien reality show with the human race as the unknowing contestants.
Soldato
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The passage of time is only really relevant to us as humans, for all we know the universe could have been through this whole cycle billions of times already.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only converted to another form.
And this isn't happening in a trillion years, but a lot longer than even that. (If my memory serves)
Nothing happens to it - it just gets spread out evenly. If there aren't any concentrations of mass/energy then nothing happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
Most mass/energy will probably fall in to black holes which will then evaporate due to Hawking radiation.
Soldato
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It's accelerating faster than thought, apparently. It's effect will be felt on the microscopic level, not just macroscopic.
I dunno, maths, physical models... One way or another, the party is gonna end.
No chance will we have moved away within a couple of hundred years, it's not even remotely realistic at the current rate of technology or economic progression. As for mutual nuclear destruction, also pretty unlikely to happen the more developed we get as no country wants to risk it's own destruction now. The most likely nuclear attack if it comes will be form of terrorists with nothing to lose. Ok, or maybe Iran, which is somewhere in the middle.
Exactly, so it has periods of being active and inactive. Which you could interpret as the world ending and then being born again
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Soldato
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Will likely be quiet for the same amount of time it's 'alive' then another big bang.
Given this theory is based on an expanding Universe - the hydrogen in the Universe will diminish (as it will be used in star formation and converted to other elements in nuclear fusion). The remaining hydrogen will be so spread out that the gravitational forces that would normally attract hydrogen to form clouds and then stars will not be able in time to do this. Therefore no more stars will be born and the Universe will fizzle out quietly