Comment on Fictional

• Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Do you really believe that in all of eternity, we happen to be just four and a half billion years in? We are probably on our infinite life, and have infinite more to go. Just completely random lives, no idea where we will end up, nothing persists.

  Yes I do. There’s a difference between the philosophical idea of an eternal process of cosmological rebirth, and the experimentally observed behaviors of the current universe we live in captured with our most powerful instruments and our best mathematical models.

  In the 20th century we built telescopes powerful enough to see into the very distant universe and track the movement of galaxies. Because of this technological achievement we observed some strange things.

  First was that galaxies seemed to be moving further and further away from each other. Not only that, they were moving away at an accelerating pace. This uncovered the idea of cosmological expansion, that over time our universe “spreads out” and creates new space between already distant objects.

  Second, because the speed of light is finite, this creates fundamental limits to how far we can observe (the cosmological horizon) and a crazy cool phenomenon where the further you look into the distant universe the further back in time you look due to the age of the light from the star and the distance it traveled. We can literally see how the universe looked billions of years ago and calculate how far back we are looking.

  If you look back far enough with extremely low frequency radio telescopes you can map out the thermal radiation from when the universe was extremely hot and dense about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This is called the Cosmic Microwave Background. It shows the universe was in a very condensed high energy state.

  Third, we have concepts such as the second law of thermodynamics that says entropy increases in closed systems. Energy always spreads out and systems tend toward disorder on a global level. We have equations that very accurately describe this distribution.

  With these breakthroughs we had enough data to simulate accurate matter distributions of the current universe, observe and accurately model matter distributions in the distant past, and use that model to find a best prediction of what may happen in the future with what we currently know. All three lines of evidence point to a universe that is roughly 13.8 billion years old with a definite beginning and end state.

  This can still be reconciled with spiritual beliefs if your willing to redefine eternity to something more like an eternal cycle of rebirth with the heat death of one universe bootstrapping the creation of the next iteration. You may enjoy Futuramas bit on it.

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  • Rumbelows@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Well this thread got a hell of a lot more interesting than I expected… That was an amazing explanation thank you

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  • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I have no religious beliefs. The thing that trips me up is how is there matter in the first place if none can ever be created? Why was there stuff at a single point at some time?

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    • Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I have no religious beliefs. The thing that trips me up is how is there matter in the first place if none can ever be created? Why was there stuff at a single point at some time

      The “matter/information can’t be created or destroyed” thing only applies to closed systems within their own operational bounds. It’s about logical consistency within a closed set, but that tells us nothing about where the closed set itself came from. All the energy from the big bang/first universal iteration was loaned from somewhere else. The how and why of this is probably going to remain a mystery forever because our simulations of the laws of physics can’t go back to before the big bang.

      So the nature of the big bang and why anything exists is one of the big open-ended philosophy-of-science questions that there isn’t an easy falsifiable answer to. It’s up to interpretation. I have my own theories on the topic but any guess is as good as another.

      From the good old classic “Because God Did It™” to “bubble universes that foam out from a hyperdimensional substrate with random laws of physics/math that sometimes allow for observation and life” and everything in between. It’s all the same to me because we can’t prove anything one way or the other.

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      • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        My favorite is random fluctuations causing space to “borrow” matter. That we are just an imbalance. I don’t know, but one thing that is certain is if there is a chance of it happening, it will happen inevitably.

        Fine, I concede until we have more science shit.

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• BrundleFly2077@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Username checks out.

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  • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ah yes, disagree with me = Dumb.

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    • Saryn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Well, to be fair, you are talking about “infinite life”, and even a collective (“our”) infinite life, which unfortunately makes no sense. Mind you, the comment you are replying to, where the universe apparently has agency, is equally as scientifically valid.

      And to be even more fair - it’s in your own username.That said, there’s no reason for name calling.

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      • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Fair enough. It makes more sense if you are a reductionist, and you also deduce that matter coming into being makes no sense, and that it could probably happen the same way again.

        It also makes no sense that there would be nothing for an infinite amount of time, then the universe just pops into being one day, and we happen to be those lucky few that come to exist by sheer chance.

        It’s more likely that the universe just has boom and bust cycles. Over time, through sheer randomness, it comes into being again. I don’t believe there is anything so special about us that can’t be recreated by sheer randomness. If we are just patterns, any pattern that can happen, can happen again as well.

        So there we go. There are a lot of things that aren’t clear, like how specific does this pattern have to be (do we have to start with the exact same lives? Or will we be some alien snails with mild sentience).

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• AeonFelis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  What’s so special with four and a half billion years (or 13.8 billion years, if you measure from the big bang instead of the formation of the Solar system and Earth) that makes it so weird for us to “just happen to be” during that time?

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