Comment by Jason D. Johnson on January 1, 2011 at 1:36pm

Thank you Doone.  Surprisingly, you have coaxed me into feeling less hopeless.  :)  I appreciate this for sure.

Comment by Allen Sneed on January 1, 2011 at 3:19pm

Sorry, but the universe doesn't care about you. Actually, the universe doesn't care at all. And neither does science.

Comment by Albert Bakker on January 1, 2011 at 3:25pm

This always puzzled me. Why some people would slip into a sense of existential despair at the thought of the Universe reaching a state of thermal equilibrium zillions of zillions of years from now, a time-interval where "now" can't even be distinguished from the moment of the Big Bang with microscopic resolution. People find that a much worse scenario for some reason than Big Crunches. At least, so they seem to reason, that fate might be equally fatal but not equally final. The basis for that conclusion not entirely clear or made explicit.

The same for people who get a sense of urgency to start seriously thinking about and working on the plan to leave the planet at the thought that we have but a few billion years left before the Sun starts going weird on us.

I do not get why that would cause you any mood swings. When I want to feel down and feel hopeless about the fate of human life, I just switch on television.

Comment by Allen Sneed on January 1, 2011 at 3:28pm

Very true doone. And many scientists care. Perhaps when stop anthropomorphizing non-existent and/or inanimate things we can learn that love, kindness and hope can be found in each other.

Comment by Albert Bakker on January 1, 2011 at 3:29pm

But I do like the comparison.

Comment by Dave G on January 1, 2011 at 7:17pm

Jason, you might enjoy reading Michio Kaku's Physics Of The Impossible. One of the 'Impossible' technologies he discusses is the possibility of our (or at least, our far-future descendants) developing the needed technology to travel from our universe to another, younger one, thus escaping the inevitable end of our native plane.

 

It's a fun book, with all kinds of interesting takes on what is probable, what is possible, and what would require a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics to achieve.

Comment by Shine on January 1, 2011 at 8:38pm

I think that your apprehension is normal for a finite being that can conceive of the infinite.  I'm dredging the internet but failing to find a study I saw once about the belief in a god being theorized as a result of this dilemma.  In short, the disappointment that you feel at the universe's eventual death is analogous to the disappointment that people feel towards their own eventual death.  When many people feel anxiety about the finite nature of their existence, they invent an eternal god to resolve the dilemma.  Maybe you just transferred this method of resolution from an eternal god to an eternal universe.  Now that this comforting source of infinity is found to be false (potentially), you are left with the initial anxiety present in a finite being that conceive of the infinite.

 

I think that accepting change and impermanence is the key to resolving the dilemma. 

Comment by Shine on January 1, 2011 at 8:39pm

Of course, much easier said than done. :)

Comment by Albert Bakker on January 2, 2011 at 4:29am

And some of those giant Buddha statues you have outlived in your lifetime. They once were thought eternal and now they are dust. Silly bearded men thought they gained a victory. Not so. It was their fate all along.

I think maybe end-of-the-universe anxiety is a slightly more sophisticated variant on your regular end-of-the-world anxiety for more educated people.

There's so much more to worry about and so much more room for imagination and even real scientific valid reasoning when you scale up your end-time stage to cosmic proportions.

The earth will cool off. Our earth magnetic field will decay. The moon will leave us. The Sun will cook us and in about 8 billion years will run out of helium and will toast us again. Meanwhile our beautiful galaxy will collide with Andromeda, will we become orphans? Much later galaxies will leave our Hubble bubble, what will become of our romantic nights? Astrologers and astronomers are going to poison the job market. How many earth-shattering impacts are going to kill us waiting for these spectacular events to happen. Will we be caught in the head lights of a near by gamma ray burst? Are we going to have to worry more about protons decaying than reaching unsurvivable levels of entropy or the other way around, will we red-shift into oblivion?

Another reading suggestion that might in a very amusing way alleviate your existential crisis is Phil Plait's "Death From The Skies."

Comment by Jason D. Johnson on January 2, 2011 at 6:44am

I love that some of you had to reply with sarcasm when it was totally unnecessary.  Sorry, but you have to be less intelligent than a wet bag of hammers to not know that when I say "the Universe is leaving us", I
don't mean that I literally thought it loved me.  But you don't need to
pull your spare IQ points off of the shelf to understand that I'm generally
disappointed by the notion that our race may not have a chance at
outrunning extinction, which I used to (and might still) think possible
through science, astrophysics and space exploration. 

 

For those of you who feel compelled to hunt down good opportunities to use the clever sarcasm you seem to be so proud of, I will try to dumb it down for you next time so that you, like everyone else, are not in
danger of being caught up in the emotionally-metaphorical semantics. 
That was totally my bad.  Sorry.

 

For those of you who had educated and friendly replies, I am thankful indeed.  Think maybe I just got caught up in a moment.  Sometimes learning too much at once can be overwhelming I think.

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