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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

"If your ship is sinking," he said to me, "why not get a lifeboat and
leave?" We earthlings can't do this just yet, Kaku observed. That is
because we are a mere Type 1 civilization, able to marshal the energy
only of a single planet. But eventually, assuming a reasonable rate
of economic growth and technological progress, we will graduate to
being a Type 2 civilization, commanding the energy of a star, and
thence to being a Type 3 civilization, able to summon the energy of
an entire galaxy. Then space-time itself will be our plaything. We'll
have the power to open up a "wormhole" through which we can slip into
a brand new universe. (see below)

===================

Sitaram comments:

Something which I read recently pointed out that everyone frets about
the thought that they will not live forever, yet no one seems to
mourn the obvious fact that there was an eternity in the past, prior
to our birth, in which we did not exist.

Here are some excerpts from what I have been reading this morning,
July 3, 2004.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096491/entry/2096506/

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096491/entry/2096507/

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096491/entry/0/

Until recently, the ultimate destiny of the universe looked a little
more hopeful-or remote. Back around the middle of the last century,
cosmologists figured out that there were two possible fates for the
universe. Either it would continue to expand forever, getting very
cold and very dark as the stars winked out one by one, the black
holes evaporated, and all material structures disintegrated into an
increasingly dilute sea of elementary particles: the Big Chill. Or it
would eventually stop expanding and collapse back upon itself in a
fiery, all-annihilating implosion: the Big Crunch.

Which of these two scenarios would come to pass depended on one
crucial thing: how much stuff there was in the universe. So, at
least, said Einstein's theory of general relativity. Stuff-matter and
energy-creates gravity. And, as every undergraduate physics major
will tell you, gravity sucks. It tends to draw things together. With
enough stuff, and hence enough gravity, the expansion of the universe
would eventually be arrested and reversed. With too little stuff, the
gravity would merely slow the expansion, which would go on forever.
So, to determine how the universe would ultimately expire,
cosmologists thought that all they had to do was to weigh it. And
preliminary estimates-taking account of the visible galaxies, the so-
called "dark matter," and even the possible mass of the little
neutrinos that swarm though it all-suggested that the universe had
only enough weight to slow the expansion, not to turn it around.

Now, as cosmic fates go, the Big Chill might not seem a whole lot
better than the Big Crunch. In the first, the temperature goes to
absolute zero; in the second, it goes to infinity. Extinction by fire
or by ice-what's to choose? Yet a few imaginative scientists came up
with formulations of how our distant descendants might manage to go
on enjoying life forever, despite these unpleasant conditions. In the
Big Chill scenario, they could have an infinity of slower and slower
experiences, with lots of sleep in between. In the Big Crunch
scenario, they could have an infinity of faster and faster
experiences in the run-up to the final implosion. Either way, the
progress of civilization would be unlimited. No cause for existential
gloom.

The dark energy theory spells inescapable doom for intelligent life
in the far, far future. No matter where you are located, the rest of
the universe would eventually be receding from you at the speed of
light, slipping forever beyond the horizon of knowability. Meanwhile,
the shrinking region of space still accessible to you will fill up
with a kind of insidious radiation that would eventually choke off
information processing-and with it, the very possibility of thought.
We seem to be headed not for a Big Crunch or a Big Chill but
something far nastier: a Big Crackup. "All our knowledge,
civilization and culture are destined to be forgotten," one prominent
cosmologist has declared to the press.

Cosmology is not really a science at all since you can't do
experiments with the universe. It's more like a detective story. Even
the term that is sometimes applied to theorizing about the end of the
universe, "eschatology" (from the Greek word for "furthest") is
borrowed from theology.

"The most plausible answer," Dyson said, "is that conscious life will
take the form of interstellar dust clouds." He was alluding to the
kind of inorganic life forms imagined by the late astronomer Sir Fred
Hoyle in his 1957 science fiction novel, The Black Cloud. "An ever-
expanding network of charged dust particles, communicating by
electromagnetic forces, has all the complexity necessary for thinking
an infinite number of novel thoughts."

.... interrupting this thread of excerpts to insert passages on Hoyle

===========================

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hoyle.htm

The Black Cloud dealt with one of Hoyle's favorite subjects -
intelligent life in the universe. The story starts in the year 1964.
At Mt. Palomar Knut Jensen finds that a giant cloud of interstellar
gas is approaching the solar system. Professor Chris Kingsley from
Cambridge calculates that the cloud will come between the Sun and
Earth, which will lead to a global catastrophe. Hoyle follows the
work of the scientist and reactions of politicians who first want to
keep the cosmic threat a secret. Hoyle's attitude to civilians is
ironic; only the scientist can coolly analyze the situation. The
effects of the cloud are disastrous when it arrives in the solar
system. But it turns out that the cloud is alive, and it starts to
communicate with the scientist - it has opinions about music, the
roles of men and women, evolution, and the origin of headaches. When
the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union try to
destroy it with missiles, it sends them back. The cloud leaves the
solar system, encouraging humankind to create more geniuses. - The
story also aroused the interest of Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Laureate
in Physics in 1945, who told once to Hoyle that he had studied it
together with Carl Jung, who wrote a critical essay on it. "I didn't
have the temerity to explain that I thought I was only writing a
story. But I had an intelligent life form in the story that didn't
think in words, a form that had to learn words before it could
communicate with man. Pauli knew all about Schrödinger's cat, about
arguments over the origins of mathematics, while Jung knew about
human emotions. So it was evidently the problem of what lies behind
words that had been occupying them." (from Home is Where the Wind
Blows by Fred Hoyle, 1997)

"The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that it was pointless
for the world to hold more people than one could get to know in a
single lifetime. Even if one were president of United Earth, that
would set the figure somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred
thousand; with a very generous allowance for duplication, wastage,
special talents, and so forth, there really seems no requirement for
what has been called the global village of the future to hold moire
than a million people scattered over the face of the planet." (Arthur
C. Clarke <aclarke.htm> in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds, 1999)

(Sitaram comments: The entire world population during the time of
Plato, circa 300 BCE, is estimated at 6 million).

Jung addendum
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cjung.htm

Jung wrote: "The artist is not a person endowed with free will who
seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes
through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and
personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he
is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic
life of mankind." (from 'Psychology and Literature', 1930)

The American writer F.Scott Fitzgerald mentions Jung several times in
Tender is the Night (1934). When his wife Zelda had a psychotic
episode in late 1930, Jung was Fitzgerald's alternative choice for
consultation.- Hermann Hesse's novel Demian was inspired by Jung's
theory of individuation. Among Jung's patients in the 1930s was James
Joyce's daughter Lucia, who suffered from schizophrenia. Jung had
earlier written a hostile analysis of Ulysses, and Joyce was left
bitter at Jung's analysis of his daughter. He paid back in Finnegans
Wake, joking with Jung's concepts of Animus and Anima. In his
essay 'Ulysses' (1934) Jung saw Joyce's famous novel as an
exploration of the spiritual condition of modern man, especially the
brutalization of his feelings.

.... end of Hoyle insert

==============

....continuation of original thread of excerpts

How, I objected, can we really imagine such a wispy thing, spread out
over billions of light-years of space, being conscious?

"Well," he said, "how do you imagine a couple of kilograms of
protoplasm in someone's skull being conscious? We have no idea how
that works either."

Practically next door to Dyson at the institute is the office of Ed
Witten, a gangly, 50-ish fellow who is widely regarded as the
smartest physicist of his generation, if not the living incarnation
of Einstein. Witten is one of the prime movers behind superstring
theory, which, if its hairy math is ever sorted out, may well furnish
the Theory of Everything that physicists have long been after. He has
an unnerving ability to shuffle complicated equations in his head
without ever writing anything down, and he speaks in a hushed, soft
voice. Earlier this year, Witten was quoted in the press calling the
discovery of the runaway expansion of the universe "an extremely
uncomfortable result." Why, I wondered, did he see it that way? Was
it simply inconvenient for theoretical reasons? Or did he worry about
its implications for the destiny of the cosmos? When I asked him, he
agonized for a moment before responding, "Both."

Would they come around to George Bernard Shaw's conclusion (reached
by him at the age of 92) that the prospect of personal immortality
was an "unimaginable horror"? Or would they feel that, subjectively
at least, time was passing quickly enough? After all, as Fran
Lebowitz pointed out, once you've reached the age of 50, Christmas
seems to come every three months.

There was a meeting held at the Vatican a few years back on the
future of the universe: "There were about 15 people, theologians, a
few cosmologists, some biologists. The idea was to find common
ground, but after three days it was clear that we had nothing to say
to one another. When theologians talk about the 'long term,' raising
questions about resurrection and such, they're really thinking about
the short term. We weren't even on the same plane. When you talk
about 10^50 (ten to the FIFTIETH POWER) years , the theologians' eyes
glaze over. I told them that it was important that they listen to
what I had to say-theology, if it's relevant, has to be consistent
with science. At the same time I was thinking, 'It doesn't matter
what you have to say, because whatever theology has to say is
irrelevant to science."

At least one cosmologist I knew of would be quite happy to absorb
theology into physics, especially when it came to talking about the
end of the universe. That's Frank Tipler, a professor at Tulane
University in New Orleans. In 1994 Tipler published a strangely
ingenious book called The Physics of Immortality, in which he argued
that the Big Crunch would be the happiest possible ending for the
cosmos. The final moments before universal annihilation would release
an infinite amount of energy, Tipler reasoned, and that could drive
an infinite amount of computation, which would produce an infinite
number of thoughts-a subjective eternity. Everyone who ever existed
would be "resurrected" in an orgy of virtual reality, which would
correspond pretty neatly to what religious believers have in mind
when they talk about heaven. Thus, while the physical cosmos would
come to an abrupt end in the Big Crunch, the mental cosmos would go
on forever.

Was Tipler's blissful eschatological scenario-which he called "the
Omega Point"-spoiled by the news that the cosmos seemed to be caught
up in a runaway expansion? He certainly didn't think so when I talked
to him. "The universe has no choice but to expand to a maximum size
and then contract to a final singularity," he exclaimed in his thick
Southern drawl. (He's a native of Alabama and a self-
described "redneck.") Any other cosmic finale, he said, would violate
a certain law of quantum mechanics called "unitarity." Moreover, "the
known laws of physics require that intelligent life persist until the
end of time and gain control of the universe." When I mentioned that
Freeman Dyson (among others) could not see why this should be so,
Tipler shouted in exasperation, "Ah went up to Princeton last
November and ah tode him the argument! Ah tode him!" Then he told me,
too. It was long and complicated, but the nub of it was that
intelligent beings must be present at the end to sort of massage the
Big Crunch in a certain way so that it would not violate another law
of quantum mechanics, the "Beckenstein bound." So, our eternal
survival is built into the very logic of the cosmos. "If the laws of
PHEE-ysics are with us," he roared, "who can be against us?"

Tipler's idea of an infinite frolic just before the Big Crunch was
seductive to me-more so, at least, than Dyson's vision of a community
of increasingly dilute Black Clouds staving off the cold in an
eternal Big Chill. But if the universe is in a runaway expansion,
both are pipe dreams. The only way to survive in the long run is to
get the hell out. Yet how do you escape a dying universe if The
universe is everything?

A man who claims to see an answer to this question is Michio Kaku. A
theoretical physicist at City College in New York, Kaku looks and
talks a bit like the character Sulu on Star Trek. (He can be seen in
the recent Michael Apted film about great scientists, Me and Isaac
Newton.) He is not the least bit worried about the fate of this
universe. "If your ship is sinking," he said to me, "why not get a
lifeboat and leave?" We earthlings can't do this just yet, Kaku
observed. That is because we are a mere Type 1 civilization, able to
marshal the energy only of a single planet. But eventually, assuming
a reasonable rate of economic growth and technological progress, we
will graduate to being a Type 2 civilization, commanding the energy
of a star, and thence to being a Type 3 civilization, able to summon
the energy of an entire galaxy. Then space-time itself will be our
plaything. We'll have the power to open up a "wormhole" through which
we can slip into a brand new universe.

"Of course," Kaku added, "it may take as long as 100,000 years for
such a Type 3 civilization to develop, but the universe won't start
getting really cold for trillions of years." There is one other thing
that the beings in such a civilization will need, Kaku stressed to
me: a unified theory of physics, one that would show them how to
stabilize the wormhole so it doesn't disappear before they can make
their escape. The closest thing we have to that now, superstring
theory, is so difficult that no one (with the possible exception of
Ed Witten) knows how to get it to work. Kaku wasn't the least bit
gloomy that the universe might be dying. "In fact," he said, "I'm in
a state of exhilaration, because this would force us, really force
us, to crack superstring theory. People say, 'What has superstring
theory done for me lately? Has it given me better cable TV
reception?' What I tell them is that superstring theory-or whatever
the final, unified theory of physics turns out to be-could be our one
and only hope for surviving the death of this universe."

Although other cosmologists were rudely dismissive of Kaku's lifeboat
scenario-"a good prop for a science fiction story," said
one; "somewhat more fantastical than most of Star Trek," remarked
another-it sounded good to me. But then I started thinking. To become
a Type 3 civilization, one powerful enough to engineer a stable
wormhole leading to a new universe, we would have to gain control of
our entire galaxy. That means colonizing something like a billion
habitable planets. But if this is what the future is going to look
like, then almost all the intelligent observers who will ever exist
will live in one of these billion colonies. So, how come we find
ourselves sitting on the home planet at the very beginning of the
process? The odds against being in such an unusual situation-the very
earliest people, the equivalent of Adam and Eve-are a billion to one.

Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, in his 1977 book
about the birth of the universe, The First Three Minutes, glumly
observed, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it
also seems pointless." It was Weinberg's pessimistic conclusion in
that book-he wrote that civilization faced cosmic extinction from
either endless cold or unbearable heat-that had inspired Freeman
Dyson to come up with his scenario for eternal life in an expanding
cosmos.

"For me and you and everyone else around today, the universe will be
over in less than 10^2 years," he said. In his peculiarly sardonic
way, Weinberg seemed as jolly as all the other cosmologists. "The
universe will come to an end, and that may be tragic, but it also
provides its fill of comedy. Postmodernists and social
constructivists, Republicans and socialists and clergymen of all
creeds-they're all an endless source of amusement."

It was time to tally up the eschatological results. The cosmos has
three possible fates: Big Crunch (eventual collapse), Big Chill
(expansion forever at a steady rate), or Big Crackup (expansion
forever at an accelerating rate). Humanity, too, has three possible
fates: eternal flourishing, endless stagnation, or ultimate
extinction. And judging from all the distinguished cosmologists who
weighed in with opinions, every combination from Column A and Column
B was theoretically open. We could flourish eternally in virtual
reality at the Big Crunch or as expanding black clouds in the Big
Chill. We could escape the Big Crunch/Chill/Crackup by wormholing our
way into a fresh universe. We could face ultimate extinction by being
incinerated by the Big Crunch or by being isolated and choked off by
the Big Crackup. We could be doomed to endless stagnation-thinking
the same patterns of thoughts over and over again, or perhaps
sleeping forever because of a faulty alarm clock-in the Big Chill.
One distinguished physicist I spoke to, Andrei Linde of Stanford
University, even said that we could not rule out the possibility of
their being something after the Big Crunch. For all of the
fascinating theories and scenarios they spin out, practitioners of
cosmic eschatology are in a position very much like that of Hollywood
studio heads: Nobody knows anything.

At the end of the 19th century, figures like Swinburne and Henry
Adams expressed similar anguish at what then seemed to be the certain
heat-death of the universe from entropy. In 1903 Bertrand Russell
described his "unyielding despair" at the thought that "all the
labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the
noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the
vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's
achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a
universe in ruins." Yet a few decades later, he declared such
effusions of cosmic angst to be "nonsense," perhaps an effect of "bad
digestion."

Why should we want the universe to last forever, anyway? Look-either
the universe has a purpose or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then it is
absurd. If it does have a purpose, then there are two possibilities:
Either this purpose is eventually achieved, or it is never achieved.
If it is never achieved, then the universe is futile. But if it is
eventually achieved, then any further existence of the universe is
pointless. So, no matter how you slice it, an eternal universe is
either a) absurd, b) futile, or c) eventually pointless.

Despite this cast-iron logic, some thinkers believe that the longer
the universe goes on, the better it is, ethically speaking. As John
Leslie, a cosmological philosopher at the University of Guelph in
Canada, told me, "This is true simply on utilitarian grounds: The
more intelligent happy beings in the future, the merrier."
Philosophers of a more pessimistic kidney, like Schopenhauer, have
taken precisely the opposite view: Life is, on the whole, so
miserable that a cold and dead universe is preferable to one teeming
with conscious beings.

If the current runaway expansion of the cosmos really does portend
that our infinitesimal flicker of civilization will be followed by an
eternity of bleak emptiness, then that shouldn't make life now any
less worth living, should it? It may be true that nothing we do in
A.D. 2004 will matter when the burnt-out cinder of our sun is finally
swallowed by a galactic black hole in a trillion trillion years. But
by the same token, nothing that will happen in a trillion trillion
years matters to us now. In particular (as the philosopher Thomas
Nagel has observed), it does not matter now that in a trillion
trillion years nothing we do now will matter.

Then what is the point of cosmology? It's not going to cure cancer or
solve our energy problems or give us a better sex life, obviously
enough. Still, it is bracing to realize that we live in the first
generation in the history of humanity that might be able to answer
the question, How will the universe end? "It amazes me," Lawrence
Krauss said, "that, sitting in a place on the edge of nowhere in a
not especially interesting time in the history of the universe, we
can, on the basis of simple laws of physics, draw conclusions about
the future of life and the cosmos," he said. "That's something we
should relish, regardless of whether we're here for a long time or
not."

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