Entropy increase would still get us eventually
October 19, 2024 1:21 AM Subscribe
Q: Are we immortal? A. If you trust the mathematics, yes. But it is not an immortality in the sense that after death you will wake up sitting in hell or heaven, both of which – let’s be honest – are very earthly ideas. It is more that, since the information about you cannot be destroyed, it is in principle possible that a higher being someday, somehow re-assembles you and brings you back to life. And since you would have no memory of the time passing in between – which could be 10¹⁰⁰ billion years! – you would just find yourself in the very far future. from Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist: ‘If you trust the mathematics, we are immortal’
[El Pais]
Sabine Hossenfelder, previously
Sabine Hossenfelder, previously
Yeah the load-bearing "somehow" gives the game away. The information may not have been destroyed, but it is certainly un-available.
I feel like this argument hinges on mixing up the technical and colloquial definition of "destroyed".
posted by june_dodecahedron at 2:15 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I feel like this argument hinges on mixing up the technical and colloquial definition of "destroyed".
posted by june_dodecahedron at 2:15 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point. This isl all old hat as it were.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:16 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
posted by zengargoyle at 2:16 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I also think it’s trusting extrapolation of our current cosmological understanding far enough to think there is time that far in the future. And it’s ignoring heat death (the point beyond which anyone in the universe can’t do further useful work).
There’s less than 15 billion years between us and the Big Bang. 10^100 billion is.. well.. a lot longer. I don’t think I been given access to all the data we have allows us to predict what will happen over that time scale (we can only measure our theories to so many decimal places).
That having been said I still believe in unitarity, so maybe I’m on the “sure technically but not usefully”.
posted by nat at 3:20 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
There’s less than 15 billion years between us and the Big Bang. 10^100 billion is.. well.. a lot longer. I don’t think I been given access to all the data we have allows us to predict what will happen over that time scale (we can only measure our theories to so many decimal places).
That having been said I still believe in unitarity, so maybe I’m on the “sure technically but not usefully”.
posted by nat at 3:20 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
Current constraint on the lifetime of a proton is 10^26 years. So, that’s 10^17 billion years.
By 10^100 billion maybe they’ll all be gone.
posted by nat at 3:23 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
By 10^100 billion maybe they’ll all be gone.
posted by nat at 3:23 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
That’s a hard-working “somehow”
doing a pretty solid tag team with "in principle".
posted by flabdablet at 4:05 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
doing a pretty solid tag team with "in principle".
Is there anything after death?Life for any individual organism is insanely brief relative to the duration of everything else, so yes, most things will happen after your death and mine. We won't experience them, though.
What is the meaning of life?"Life is a process characterized by non-trivial self-replicating self-organization" is a meaning of life. There are plenty of others. Any claim of any of them to be the meaning of life is dubious at best. As for the sense of "meaning" that shades over into "purpose", the less said about it the better.
Are we just a bag of atoms?No. We're not "just" anything, especially not when "just" is clearly being used to imply way less intricate complexity than is readily observable.
The scientist Sabine Hossenfelder, born in Frankfurt (Germany) 48 years ago, is convinced that if there is a branch of science capable of finding answers to humanity’s existential questions, it is physics.Existential questions are the purview of contemplation and introspection, not of the sciences. Science is an excellent method for providing answers to "how" questions but it's both useless and potentially horribly dangerous to misapply it to "why" or "what for" questions. That way lies Engineer's Disease, which Hossenfelder suffers from more than a touch of.
posted by flabdablet at 4:05 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
There was an SF story I read a long time ago which used this premise, that consciousness is preserved, you never really die, your existence just becomes less and less likely.
The protagonist gets told this by someone, I can't remember, a crank physicist maybe.
Not quite the same mechanism, this is an infinite multiverse where your consciousness simply jumps to a verse where you do survive.
So the protagonist thinks it's crap, but then he has a car accident and narrowly survives, has a heart attack and is saved by some intervention, and begins to think there might be something to it. His life is extended by some cryo treatment to await a future where they have cured aging. But then he gets woken up by aliens who tell him all of humanity is extinct and they have managed to revive one human for research purposes.
It's basically a horror story that eventually ends with the heat death of the universe, which seemed to be in vogue at the time (90s SF).
posted by xdvesper at 4:08 AM on October 19 [2 favorites]
The protagonist gets told this by someone, I can't remember, a crank physicist maybe.
Not quite the same mechanism, this is an infinite multiverse where your consciousness simply jumps to a verse where you do survive.
So the protagonist thinks it's crap, but then he has a car accident and narrowly survives, has a heart attack and is saved by some intervention, and begins to think there might be something to it. His life is extended by some cryo treatment to await a future where they have cured aging. But then he gets woken up by aliens who tell him all of humanity is extinct and they have managed to revive one human for research purposes.
It's basically a horror story that eventually ends with the heat death of the universe, which seemed to be in vogue at the time (90s SF).
posted by xdvesper at 4:08 AM on October 19 [2 favorites]
This whole line of thought is a cosmic horror story too.
> Think of death as a drop of ink that falls into the ocean. You are the drop, the ocean is the universe. That what made up the drop (you) will spread in the ocean (universe) and become unrecognizable. But it never disappears.
I can tell the author means all this stuff hopefully and spiritually in a positive way, but my god. Pretty sure Lovecraft wrote that same thing.
posted by anti social order at 4:52 AM on October 19 [2 favorites]
> Think of death as a drop of ink that falls into the ocean. You are the drop, the ocean is the universe. That what made up the drop (you) will spread in the ocean (universe) and become unrecognizable. But it never disappears.
I can tell the author means all this stuff hopefully and spiritually in a positive way, but my god. Pretty sure Lovecraft wrote that same thing.
posted by anti social order at 4:52 AM on October 19 [2 favorites]
Here is Wikipedia's Timeline of the Far Future. It's fun to scroll through. And by fun I mean terrifying.
posted by jabah at 4:59 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
posted by jabah at 4:59 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
Sabine Hossenfelder seems to be the all to common example of a person being very smart in one thing assuming they are super smart in all things. This feels like a very common thing that happens with content creators.
She also seems to suffer from the engineers disease where you can just think about things in a vacuum without any social context. I think once she started getting success from some of these more click bait-y controversial things she just started doing more and more of it.
posted by stilgar at 5:02 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
She also seems to suffer from the engineers disease where you can just think about things in a vacuum without any social context. I think once she started getting success from some of these more click bait-y controversial things she just started doing more and more of it.
posted by stilgar at 5:02 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I shall be on a cloud, listening to angels playing the harp.
posted by Czjewel at 5:20 AM on October 19
posted by Czjewel at 5:20 AM on October 19
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posted by Phanx at 1:49 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]