Universal Expansion And Space Collapsing Into Emptyness.

[Joker]

Pt 1.

What is the future of all existence?

All discussions of the future are of course theoretical but instead of indulging in romantic absurd fantasies of utopian grandeur within wide sweeping generalizations guided by assumptions filled with mythological narratives that leave us in insane almost impossible dreams I shall instead speak about the future through that of quantum physics one in which that is very non-ideal if not horrificly dreary.

What I speak of through that which we call quantum physics is universal or space expansion which specifically states that our cosmos as we know it will undoubtedly cease to be.

What this specifically relates to is not just the destruction of our own galaxy but in actuality all galaxies that exist even the ones beyond our own.

In quantum physics all of our existence expands until it collapses onto itself. That is the futre of existence.

The future of existence is total annihilation of everything that exists which is again not just limited to just our own galaxy but eventually expands into all other galaxies that exist too.

Most people have this romantic picturesque vision of the future on the lines of a star trek novel in which through the wonders or innovation of technological space travel we will avoid the inevitable extinguishment of our own galaxy by escaping to another by that of cosmic migration in survival yet through that of ignorance by not understanding quantum physics and that of expansive theory where they do not realize that all galaxies through expanse are inevitably doomed not being exempt at all from expansive annihilation most do not realize that if we move to another galaxy it too will be destroyed and the next galaxy after that almost like a domino effect into ad infinitum until the point that there exists only one dying galaxy that is left which will also be inevitably destroyed.

In quantum physics through that of universal expanse eventually all stars will slowly start disappearing through that of supernovas one by one within a combination of existence at the same time ceasing to create newer ones which is called the era of cosmic degeneration where our very basis of sunlight which keeps us alive on a biological basis will cease altogether until our only source of light or energy remains in one single dying dwarf star.

Supernova

Dwarf Star

Once the last star in existence ceases to exist in the expansion of space collapsing amongst itself we will be annihilated with it and assuming if we ever achieve a effect form of space travel no level of sophistication in technology or giant space craft will allow us to escape this fate.

What happens after the era of degeneration through that of quantum physics where all of universal space collapses amongst itself?

The age of emptyness and blackholes begin with freezing temperatures unheard of in that only wandering black holes exist amongst a void of emptyness where nothing lives.

Eternal space revolves around birth, creation, and destruction which is very similar to Hindu belief of existence.

Man will not live forever as our present absurd delusions which guide our current cultural histories would have us believe.

We will become extinct slowly but surely in that our entire cosmos through expanse will collapse amongst itself destroying everything that exists including ourselves.

We may not be destroyed in this particular galaxy( then again it is also very likely) but we surely will be annihilated in another for in quantum physics all galaxies in our existence like a domino effect are doomed to non-existence until there remains only one dying galaxy left.

In quantum physics existence has only about between two hundred to three hundred trillion years left before everything collapses on itself where everything is destroyed.

Why do I today choose to focus my attention on this dreary observance?

For starters taking into account quantum physics with the complete destruction of all existence we clearly can see that all of the cosmos is a nihilistic one.

There is no amount of religion, technology, philosophy or science that will stop this future cataclysmic event from happening as there exists only aimless relativity between ourselves and the future destruction of all existence.

What is ironical about this is that all of this explains how we live in a rather purposeless existence which is determined.

As explained no amount of pretensious free will can abstract future cosmic existence from collapsing on itself in expansion by that of destruction and we can be rest assured that no cultural god device will come to save us.

Even with technological accumulation it is simply impossible to harness the awsome power of the cosmos to stop this future cataclyst from happening without having being gods ourselves where clearly we are not.

By acknowledging all of this what exactly is historical progress by our own mythological narratives of ourselves that today we are so consumed with by enslaving each other over or by that of also making war against each other?

By understanding the destruction of existence as being inevitable or unstoppable that through expansion of everything that exists will someday collapse all of reality amongst itself extinguishing every life form in philosophy we come to know cultural historical progress merely as a delayment if not a distraction of our inevitable extinction. That is all that it is.

[Joker]

Pt 2.

Suppose we move out of our own galaxy before it dies, then what?

By acknowledging quantum physics all galaxies will eventually be destroyed until there is a single dying galaxy that is left.

What exactly here is so seemingly progressive?

If we move to other galaxies they too shall eventually be destroyed and so on.

If and when our species come to exist in the last dieing galaxy comprised of one last dieing star facing our inevitable extinction assuming if we ever find a way out of our own galaxy I doubt progress will be on our minds at all.

The irony of our present is that we fight, kill, enslave and exploit ourselves for nothing beyond our hedonistic desires of living in this present moment since we are delaying our own extinction.

Progress is merely a fantasy we delude ourselves in as a form of delayment in that we try to pretend as being gods fooling ourselves that we can outrun our own existential annihilation.

I watch in irony seeing the humanistic grand sweeping religion which calls itself the faith in the future considering that the future of everything is total annihilation by understanding quantum physics.

It may be a slow reaching total annihilation but it is there nonetheless.

Our history and efforts are futile not to mention they will not save us nor will they point us to some narrow define cosmic purpose.

We are only delaying the inevitable deluding ourselves that we can be like gods in our constructed mythological narratives much like a ship of fools deluding ourselves that our species will live forever.

[Nothingness]

Do you really think the physicists have enough knowledge to truely declare these things to be so? You give them too much credit. The future is uncertain, especially the far far future. They must first even try to understand how the universe came into such a low entropy state in the first place. Entropic decay may not be our fate…

The irony of our present is that we fight, kill, enslave and exploit ourselves for nothing beyond our hedonistic desires of living in this present moment since we are delaying our own extinction.

Exploitation has a strong moralistic element to it. Why do you use this word?

[realunoriginal]

Assuming that the human civilization survives for another 10 billion years…

What will stop us from inverting blackholes and recreating the matter that has supposedly been “destroyed” within them?

What will stop us from creating new stars and solar systems through our scientific volition?

What will stop us from maintaining a stasis on our universe or from simply creating new universes?

Alien civilizations will stop us, if they feel threatened by us, that’s who.

[Joker]

I will answer the posts in this thread at another time since at the moment I don’t have enough time to indulge in.

The point I was making at the end of my initial two posts was this articulated by another website:

The reason that Russell was profoundly affected by the second law of thermodynamics was because he figured that if the entire universe is doomed, then ultimately, all humanity’s striving counts for nothing. There is a famous quote in which he talks about all our hopes and fears and aspirations, all our striving – ‘all the noonday brightness of human genius’ were the words he used – being lost in ‘the vast death of the solar system’. I think there are a lot of people who would agree that human life is ultimately futile if the entire universe itself is doomed.

abc.net.au/science/bigquestions/s459858.htm

[Joker]

A discussion or debate on cosmic degeneration and entropy.

In Conversation with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams

Phillip: Nature: a continual struggle between order and chaos. It was from this struggle that the complexity of the world about us emerged, from snowflakes to star clusters, from bacteria to brains. Nothing less than the fate of the universe hinges on the final outcome. Although scientists are only beginning to understand how complex order arises, a fundamental law of cosmic disorder has been known for a long time.

Paul, among the laws that govern the universe, there are three rather melancholy municipal regulations.

Firstly, Murphy’s Law. Secondly, Catch-22. And then there’s the really bad one.

Paul: Yes. The grand-daddy of them all has got to be the second law of thermodynamics.

Phillip: Incidentally, what’s the first law? We never heard about that.

Paul: Oh, yes you do. It’s really the law of conservation of energy, and it just says that heat is a form of energy. Thermodynamics is the subject that investigates the exchange of heat and energy. So it was very big in the nineteenth century with the invention of heat engines and steam engines and so on.

Phillip: But the second law is really the death notice for the universe, isn’t it?

Paul: That’s right. But it didn’t start out that way. It began innocuously enough with the investigation of the efficiency of engines. The industrialists in the nineteenth century wanted to discover if there was any limit in principle to the efficiency of heat engines and steam engines. If you were ever so clever, could you have 100 per cent conversion of heat into work, for example? Well, it turns out that for very fundamental reasons you can’t achieve this. There are basic limitations imposed by the laws of nature on the efficiency of heat engines.

So far so good. But then these laws of thermodynamics were applied to the universe as a whole, quite outside the domain of human machines. In particular, the second law of thermodynamics was found to have universal applicability, and it led to a shocking prediction. It was stated in its most gloomy form by the German physicist Herman von Helmholtz in the 1850s. He pronounced that the entire universe is dying, choking so to speak, on its own entropy.

Let me explain the concept of entropy. One of the ways of thinking about the second law of thermodynamics is that all physical systems, however efficient they are, inevitably undergo some sort of degeneration over time. The ordered energy within them degrades into disordered energy or chaos. Physicists measure the degree of chaos using a precise mathematical quantity called entropy. So you can think of the amount of entropy in a system as roughly the degree of disorder it possesses. The second law of thermodynamics, when applied to the universe as a whole, states that in any physical process the entropy of the entire universe goes up a little bit; the universe overall gets a little bit more chaotic.

The Unbreakable Law

Phillip: Well, in practical terms this law means we not only have to deal with personal mortality but with the mortality of the whole shebang. Now, one of the first people to react, quite spectacularly, against the second law of thermodynamics, was the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. While Russell didn’t argue about the truth of the second law, he was most upset by its implications. Why was that?

Paul: The reason that Russell was profoundly affected by the second law of thermodynamics was because he figured that if the entire universe is doomed, then ultimately, all humanity’s striving counts for nothing. There is a famous quote in which he talks about all our hopes and fears and aspirations, all our striving – ‘all the noonday brightness of human genius’ were the words he used – being lost in ‘the vast death of the solar system’. I think there are a lot of people who would agree that human life is ultimately futile if the entire universe itself is doomed.

Phillip: Well, count me amongst their number, Paul, because it has always seemed to me that this law, which one cannot break, in fact informs the pessimism of our century. To a large extent it may account for the anti-science feeling in contemporary society, to the widespread reaction against science, and the popularity of the existential movement.

Paul: I agree. Throughout history there have been various paradigms or models for the universe as a whole. In ancient Greece the Pythagoreans thought that the entire cosmos was a manifestation of music and number and geometry –

Phillip: The harmony of the spheres.

Paul: That’s right. Then Aristotle perceived the cosmos as a gigantic organism, a living thing. Centuries later, Newton proposed that the universe is like a huge clockwork mechanism, slavishly moving towards some destiny that has been programmed into it since time immemorial. The prevailing nineteenth-century image of the universe was, by analogy with a heat engine, a thermodynamic universe dying, degenerating, running out of fuel, running out of steam. Curiously, in recent years attempts have been made to argue that the universe as a whole is like a gigantic computer, and that nature is a computational process. So each age brings with it an image of the universe, a world view, which reflects the prevailing technology of the time. Each view is incomplete, of course, but each captures, in one form or another, some important aspect of cosmic change.

The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore

Phillip: When we were children, I suspect we both had the experience of being sat on a board in a barber’s chair to have our hair cut. Though I could barely read, I vividly recall being perched up there looking at a magazine which proclaimed that the sun was going to go out in a billion years. At the age of five, that was an appalling prospect. For us to contemplate the end of literally everything is beyond belief, beyond bearing.

Paul: The conclusion that the sun will one day burn out is the obvious and most conspicuous application of this second law of thermodynamics. When you stop to think about it, it is inevitable, because the sun can’t keep burning for ever and ever. Quite simply, it’s going to run out of fuel.

Now, the sun is but one of a myriad stars. Furthermore, as old stars die, so new stars are born. However, the same inexorable processes that ensure that the sun will eventually cool and fade govern the life cycles of all stars; they will all die – burn out – eventually. And because the stock of raw material to create new stars is finite, in the fullness of time no new stars will arise to replace the dying ones. So you reach the inescapable conclusion that the whole universe is slowly sliding towards a final state of degeneration (often called the heat death) in which the stars are all burned out, and the heat and light is scattered chaotically through the depths of space. It is a depressing prospect.

Phillip: The good news is your conviction that there’s another great force to counter the second law.

Paul: I don’t like the word ‘force’ because it implies there’s some sort of supernatural manipulation going alongside the conventional forces of nature that we recognise. It’s not a question of a force, as such, it’s more a question of a natural tendency. Let me just try and explain this. For a hundred years, scientists and philosophers have dwelled excessively on the gloomy aspects of cosmic degeneration we’ve just been talking about, the fact that the entire universe is on a sort of one-way slide towards a final heat death.

Now let me raise the question: Is this image of a dying universe the most appropriate characterisation of cosmic change? If you ask about the history of the universe so far – that is, what has happened since the beginning – if you ask, ‘Has it been a story of degeneration and decline?’ the answer is clearly no. From what we understand about the earliest moments after the big bang, the universe was in a more or less featureless state – no more than a uniform soup of subatomic particles, and perhaps just expanding empty space. All the richness and diversity and variety of physical forms and systems we see around us today – the galaxies and stars, the clouds, the trees, the people, and so on – weren’t there at the beginning. They emerged slowly in a long and complicated sequence of self-organising and self-complexifying processes.

I might say that there is nothing miraculous about this emergence of complex organisation. The laws of nature are such that they encourage matter and energy to develop in the direction of ever-greater complexity, ever-greater richness.

Phillip: But at least this epic form of evolution – from hot soup of subatomic particles to stars and trees and people – is very positive.

Paul: That’s the whole point. When you look back over the history of the universe, you don’t see a story of Paradise Lost. You don’t see a record of degeneration from primordial complexity; you see a history of what I might call progress – an advance from simple beginnings to complex outcomes, of featureless origins to richness and diversity.

Phillip: You realise that it is politically incorrect to talk about progress, don’t you?

Paul: That’s absolutely right, because progress implies some sort of value judgement, that in some sense the present state of the universe, including the existence of human beings, is somehow better than the universe was, say, five or six billion years ago. Well, we can come back to that topic, but the important point to make here is that there is undeniably a trend from simple to complex, from uniformity to variety, from featurelessness to richness. It’s like a law of nature. It’s clearly not an infallible law, however, because if the Earth were zapped tomorrow by a huge asteroid, it would obviously set back the complexity, at least of this planet, by a considerable amount. But nevertheless, taken overall, the story of the universe so far is the story of – I’m going to use it again – progress – the advance of complexity and organisation.
Now you might think that there’s a conflict here –

Phillip: At least a paradox with a capital P.

Paul: Indeed. People have often regarded the emergence of complex order out of primordial chaos as paradoxical. They point out that the second law of thermodynamics insists that things are degenerating and dying. And yet we see many examples of the opposite. The most conspicuous of these examples is biological evolution. Generally speaking, over evolutionary history things seem to have got better and better rather than worse and worse. So there seems to be a contradiction.

In fact there is no incompatibility here. It’s very important to realise that any advance of complexity, wherever it occurs in the universe, comes at a price – an entropic price. Every time a new, more highly organised, physical form or system comes into existence, the total entropy of the universe goes up a bit. Again, the most obvious example is in biology. When a baby is born and grows up to adulthood, resources – food, material, useful energy – are expended. When a new species emerges there is also a price to be paid in extra entropy in the environment, because for each successful mutant there are scores of unsuccessful ones that die –

Phillip: Paul, basically, you’re not changing the pessimistic outcome, are you? There’s a battle to the death between organisation and entropy. Entropy will win, but until it does we’re going to –

Paul: Well, we don’t know that entropy is going to win. All we can say is that we’ve got two arrows of time, as I prefer to call them: the pessimistic arrow which focuses upon the degeneration, and the optimistic arrow, which dwells on the emergence of complexity and organisation. They’re both present, and although the one is not strictly the opposite of the other – it’s not actually a zero-sum game – nevertheless it’s quite clear that at the end of the day the one or the other is going to win. And people always want to know which. In the very, very far future of the universe, will the second law of thermodynamics triumph, as Bertrand Russell supposed? Will the universe simply run out of sources of useful energy – energy needed to keep this marvellous complexification and self-organisation going? Well, the answer is: we don’t know. It depends on the fine details. From the most careful projections of the present state of the universe into the immensely distant future, one cannot actually be sure, given our limited understanding, whether the universe will in fact completely die.

[Joker]

The Poetry of Nature

Fortunately there is another possibility, although it remains a long shot. If it’s the case that life has evolved, as I am claiming, along a general trend towards the emergence of intelligence and technology, then we might expect there to exist advanced alien beings out there in the galaxy – beings who may have achieved intelligence and technology a long time before homo sapiens. If so, it’s just possible that they will be trying to contact us using, for example, radio signals or laser signals. There is a long and somewhat tortured history of astronomers using radio telescopes – including here in Australia – to listen in to see if there are any messages from aliens coming our way –

Phillip: And there’s also been the ‘message in the bottle’ that Carl Sagan and his colleagues stuck in one of our rockets – in the hope that it might be found some day bobbing about on the other side of the ocean of space.

Paul: Yes, a very symbolic sort of gesture because the chances of it ever being discovered are infinitesimal.

Phillip: But even if your hypothesis is correct, our symbols, our diagrams, our metaphors, our crude attempts at greetings, might not be intelligible to them at all.

Paul: You see, we’re back to chance and necessity. How much of our makeup, you and I, as human beings, is legislated by necessity? How much of it is law-like? How much of it is inevitable? Because to make sense of the world we have to have certain sorts of concepts, certain internal representations of the world, and so on, which we might expect to share with all intelligent beings everywhere. And how much is just an accident of our evolution?

Well, my own personal point of view is that there are certain basic aspects of human nature which are inevitable, given that we have arisen from the law-like order in the universe, and I count mathematics as perhaps the most important of these. The fact that humans can do mathematics, that it applies so well to the physical world –

Phillip: Are you suggesting that this may be a universal language?

Paul: Yes, I am. You see, the laws of nature are mathematical in form. The great book of nature, remarked Galileo, is written in mathematical language. Any species of intelligent beings out there that has developed technology is going to be familiar with these basic mathematical laws of the universe. So that will be the starting point of any dialogue.

Phillip: Paul, you realise that the universal language you speak so fluently is unavailable to many others. I don’t speak it and our film crew doesn’t either. You’re the only person in this remote location who does. I suppose we should take comfort in the thought of you being able to communicate with another species, even if you can’t communicate with many of your fellow human beings!

Paul: One of the great tragedies in trying to explain basic physics and cosmology, indeed any science, to the general public is that most people are afraid of mathematics. They don’t like it and they don’t know much of it, and consequently they are shut off from the language and the poetry of nature.

Phillip: Many people also see it as reductionist. Yet that isn’t true of mathematics.

Paul: Absolutely not! There is a feeling that if you can reduce nature to bare formulae this provides a very bleak way of looking at the world. Well, of course it’s not bleak, because it is through those formulae that the world comes alive, that you see the subtlety and beauty and harmony of nature that is expressed in this mathematical way.

So mathematics is the universal language – the language of the universe. If there are any aliens – and there may be none, I might say – but if there are any, and if my ideas are correct, then they probably would understand absolutely nothing of our politics, of our music, of our religions and so on, but I think they would understand our mathematics. So any dialogue would have to start on the basis of mathematical exchange.

Phillip: As self-organising processes continue, is it possible, is it likely, is it perhaps even inevitable, that the form of consciousness that we share will deepen and develop?

Paul: It’s very hard to say whether humanity is just a transitory phase in the evolution of intelligence on Earth, or whether we are as far as it is going to go. Now, again, if you ask a biologist you’ll probably be told that life is unique to Earth, and human intelligence is the best that there is, and we’ll probably wipe ourselves out within a few generations and that will be it. The story will end with us. That is a rather sad way of looking at things. But if I am right – that there is this general trend towards greater organisation or complexity – then I would see humanity as just an intermediate step in the general advancement of what we might call mind in the universe, and the influence of mind over the universe.

Phillip: That sounds a bit mystical.

Paul: Let me stress that I’m not talking about anything supernatural here. I’m not talking about mind over matter. All I’m saying is that when human consciousness and human intelligence began to have an impact on the world through technology, we began to reshape this little corner of the universe. We’ve now reconfigured the surface of our planet. There are pockmarks all around us here at Coober Pedy, evidence of how individuals have changed the landscape in a little way.

Phillip: Whilst looking for opals.

Paul: Quite. But we need only think of the dingo fence down there or the Great Wall of China to see that humans have had an impact on the surface of our planet on a rather large scale. And we could imagine, seeing as there are billions of years before the universe is likely to die, that intelligence and technology can spread out into the universe and bring about enormous changes, changes which would reconfigure not only the surface of a planet, but maybe a whole star system or even an entire galaxy – if we let our imaginations run free!

The End

Phillip: Enough of this frivolity. Let’s get back to some good healthy pessimism, and to Herman von Helmholtz. Let us not cavil about it – the second law of thermodynamics is a cosmic death sentence. Tell us how it may be carried out.

Paul: Right. If the universe goes on expanding for ever and ever, as it will if there’s not enough matter there to drag it back to a big crunch, then it is a case of death by boredom, really: the slow degeneration of the cosmos over the aeons. The sun, as I’ve mentioned, will burn out, but only after some billions of years. The galaxy as a whole will start to dim and fade in say, a hundred billion, or a trillion years. After such an immense duration, the whole universe will start to cool and fade. The lights will start going out all around the cosmos.

Phillip: That is the good news, is it?

Paul: That is the good news, because it is by no means the end of the story. It turns out that gravitation, which is ultimately the force responsible for killing all those stars, has within it the power to deliver enormous quantities of useful energy in its own right. Energy sources connected with black holes, for example, that can be tapped by a sufficiently resourceful community – if it can get over the energy crisis of the next trillion years or so! These gravitational processes could in principle extend the longevity of a super-technology for – words fail me – trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years.

But the logic of the second law of thermodynamics is remorseless. However much energy there might be available at the outset, eventually all the sources are going to run down, and it is going to get harder and harder for even the most resourceful, most advanced technological community imaginable to be able to harvest it.

An interesting question therefore arises, one that was extensively investigated by the physicist Freeman Dyson. If the universe goes on expanding for ever – if there is literally an infinite amount of time in the future – but only a finite resource of useful energy, is it possible for a sufficiently resourceful community to nevertheless enjoy an infinite lifetime, by efficiently husbanding and utilising the energy that there is?

It turns out that the answer to this poser depends on the fine details of the physics. It may be yes or no. But it may be possible, if the community hibernates for ever-longer durations, for it to survive for eternity. Indeed, the total amount of active time, integrated over the whole of the future of the universe, might actually be infinite. However, the down time has to get greater and greater. They have to spend an ever-greater fraction of their time in hibernation.

You can imagine these pathetic beings, eking out a desperate existence in the cold and the dark, scavenging –

Phillip: A bit like parliamentary backbenchers.

Paul: It’s a bit reminiscent of that . . . scavenging for scraps of energy around the cosmos, and then conserving that energy by going into hibernation for longer and longer periods, really up against it but nevertheless always hanging in there. I must admit it’s a very, very bleak vision.

Phillip: I think I’ll settle for the giant asteroid!

Paul: Well, I would prefer the big crunch scenario. Remember, this is the theory that the universe reaches a maximum size and then starts to collapse. Well, then it’s totally hopeless of course, because in a finite amount of time – maybe billions of years, but certainly a finite amount of time – the entire universe will be crushed and squashed into a single point. All the matter and energy will be obliterated, and space and time will come to an end – time itself will literally stop. The whole show goes off the road at that point. Whichever way you look at it, that is very definitely The End.

abc.net.au/science/bigquestions/s459858.htm

[Nothingness]

Here is a poem called Darkness by Byron that is somewhat fitting for this thread of nihilistic despair.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light;
And they did live by watchfires -and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings -the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those which dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch;
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire -but hour by hour
They fell and faded -and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash -and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them: some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless -they were slain for food;
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; -a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought -and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails -men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress -he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage: they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects -saw, and shrieked, and died -
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless -
A lump of death -a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge -
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them -She was the Universe!

[nano-bug]

I’m open to the idea of the universe ending. And i’m open to the idea of it beginning again. Billions and billions of times more. Hey, I’m up for anything. Hit me with your best shot. Fire away.

Fear not, the extinguished flame.

[NoItAll]

Here’s what I think existence would look like if we could picture it in totality
without our personal perspectives…

An energetic vibrational pulse.
Just a guess.
The Vedas and some people have said it makes a sound like ‘aum’.
I don’t know about that but I have deduced that the appearance of temporary
images/forms/patterns in an ‘always present’ setting indicates the inherent behavior
of existence is cyclical.

[Joker]

@Nothingness

Do you really think the physicists have enough knowledge to truely declare these things to be so? You give them too much credit. The future is uncertain, especially the far far future. They must first even try to understand how the universe came into such a low entropy state in the first place. Entropic decay may not be our fate…

The irony of our present is that we fight, kill, enslave and exploit ourselves for nothing beyond our hedonistic desires of living in this present moment since we are delaying our own extinction.

Exploitation has a strong moralistic element to it. Why do you use this word?

Exploitation has a strong moralistic element to it. Why do you use this word?

How is there a strong moralistic element in the word exploitation?

The word exploitation is no different from words like extortion or blackmail.

Seems to be a neutral word in my opinion describing relative behaviours.

Do you really think the physicists have enough knowledge to truely declare these things to be so? You give them too much credit. The future is uncertain, especially the far far future. They must first even try to understand how the universe came into such a low entropy state in the first place. Entropic decay may not be our fate…

From what I’ve seen I believe that what quantum physicists have to offer is very believable and accurate.

I have seen nothing that would leave me to believe that their conclusions isn’t what they appear to be.

[Joker]

@realunoriginal

Assuming that the human civilization survives for another 10 billion years…

What will stop us from inverting blackholes and recreating the matter that has supposedly been “destroyed” within them?

What will stop us from creating new stars and solar systems through our scientific volition?

What will stop us from maintaining a stasis on our universe or from simply creating new universes?

Alien civilizations will stop us, if they feel threatened by us, that’s who.

These are just fantasies and naive romantic hopes.

There are no guarantees and there exists a very powerful chance that we will be entirely wiped out in a indifferent cosmos that swallows up planets or galaxies on a daily basis.

[Joker]

Cool images Noitall.

[realunoriginal]

@Joker

These are just fantasies and naive romantic hopes.

There are no guarantees and there exists a very powerful chance that we will be entirely wiped out in a indifferent cosmos that swallows up planets or galaxies on a daily basis.

That’s true Joker, but there’s no guarantee about the converse either.

So then, which will occur?

I see either as arbitrary in their ends.

[Joker]

@realunoriginal

@Joker

These are just fantasies and naive romantic hopes.

There are no guarantees and there exists a very powerful chance that we will be entirely wiped out in a indifferent cosmos that swallows up planets or galaxies on a daily basis.

That’s true Joker, but there’s no guarantee about the converse either.

So then, which will occur?

I see either as arbitrary in their ends.

With there being no guarantees we are left in the unknown.

We can calculate, model and observe describing a certain amount of events as having the highest probability but we are always left with the uncertainty principle in the end.

[realunoriginal]

As expected…

[laozi]

If you think of the Universe as a network of connections between divergent matter this expansion and collapse is merely an artifact of minds still attempting to visualize it in terms of three dimensions which requires whichever axioms that determine that. If each point or clump of matter in space behaves as if it is the center of everything, then these transcendental connections in matter are implied. The average person thinks of space as “filling” the universe. When matter diverges, it creates virtual space: an apparent widening of distance between objects relative to each other, but in addition, this virtual space allows the networking of other divergent material through the same channels.

A universe “accelerating while expanding” is not so hard to understand if this is true; the enormous mass of the universe and vast tracts of space have an underlying connection. As distance between objects increases, the networking of all matter through the virtual space created “expands” like a brain increasing its neural pathways. It doesn’t break the light barrier because it has not moved; it was never truly separate, only virtually or relatively divergent. The virtual matrix allows particles to move at the speed of light, and as they do they shift their connections with everything else without action at a distance because there is no true substance to their divergence in the Universe.

[Nothingness]

@Joker

From what I’ve seen I believe that what quantum physicists have to offer is very believable and accurate.

I have seen nothing that would leave me to believe that their conclusions isn’t what they appear to be.

Some have speculated about mutliple universes and escaping to them and all kinds of wacky stuff. Only time will tell if these physicists are correct or not. The future seems a bit uncertain to me.

[NoItAll]

What’s really trippy is what is the difference between ‘vibration’ and ‘movement’?
How can energy vibrate outside of form and space and time?

Or to state this another way…we think of ‘vibration’ as a motion…how can there be motion withouy any physical
conditions/limitations in which to osscilate?

Personally I think it has something to do with the inherent ‘sense’ of being found in consciousness.
Of course that is just my attempt at picking words from our current available pool. This ‘sense’ which is
not officially a feeling (most configurations of matter have no nervous systems) is different than our familiar
animal sense of objective reality due to our bodies and brains but I think it equates to what many call
the prime energetic vibration.

[Joker]

@realunoriginal

As expected…

Huh?