The heat death of the universe is inevitable anyway 🤷♂️
Comment on One million years from now...
Sordid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s cute and all, but it ain’t gonna be birds and deer who gets life off this rock once the Sun starts threatening to swallow it in a few billion years. We’re screwing up badly in the short term, but we’re the only hope Earth life has in the long term.
scottyjoe9@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Sordid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
So? Death from old age is inevitable too, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop breathing or eating. All of life is just postponing the inevitable, but just because the inevitable is inevitable doesn’t mean we should stop postponing.
letsgocrazy@lemm.ee 9 months ago
If human beings were the only intelligent life in the universe, then the difference between being wiped out by the sun versus the heat death of the universe is so mind boggling big, that it beggars belief.
So many - near infinite - civilisations could come and go.
Perhaps one of them would find a way to endure.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Oh good, just what I needed with my comics. A side of existential dread.
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It probably won’t be us for sure. Where did this heat death of the universe idea originate? First time I’ve heard of it here in this thread. I’m questioning now my participation in Lemmy, because I hated Reddit and this is rapidly becoming Reddit 2.0, just without spez
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Where did this heat death of the universe idea originate? First time I’ve heard of it here in this thread.
It came from Kelvin’s work on thermodynamics in the 1850s, and has been refined by many scientists since then: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
It’s also the subject of a famous short story by Isaac Asimov: www.thelastquestion.net
SuicideEnthusiast@lemmy.world 9 months ago
because I hated Reddit and this is rapidly becoming Reddit 2.0, just without spez
lmao this place is already worse than reddit. Somehow more reddit than reddit.
I recommend investing your time into a different instance and letting this one collapse.
Sordid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
this is rapidly becoming Reddit 2.0, just without spez
Becoming? Always has been.
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t agree, I think it’s merely someone’s hypothesis… That being said, what we think about it is kinda irrelevant… We won’t be around to see if it happens or not lol
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Of the universe? You claim knowledge of things far beyond your comprehension… Or did you mean this tiny galaxy?
abbotsbury@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Love seeing someone act like a smug know-it-all while being ignorant to a pretty basic concept in cosmology.
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I said I never heard of it before yes I was ignorant of the hypothesis, read about it now and I think it’s bullshit, so my smugness remains 😂😂. Ignorance can be removed, but smugness is perpetual. Lord Kelvin never extrapolated that law
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m calling bullshit on that ‘hypothesis’, you can believe it if you want
jarfil@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Earth will become a molten blob in a few billion years… then over a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times later…
AffineConnection@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You’re assuming an eternal universe (as opposed to, e.g., a big crunch).
hydroel@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t understand if this is sarcasm or if some people are actually that dense.
tubaruco@lemm.ee 9 months ago
eh, birds are already very intelligent. one of the species wil probably end up creating technology at some point (assuming all humans die without ending all life on earth)
Sordid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There is enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after us, the problem is that we’ve already used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. That means they won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever (or rather until the oceans boil off).
Kase@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Is that true? My understanding was that there’s still plenty of coal, oil, etc, we just can’t keep burning it cause of the greenhouse effect
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
There are still plenty of fossil fuels, but we’ve used up the deposits that are easily accessible with 1700s technology.
Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
It’s only recently been proven untrue… IIRC… because it apparently turns out crude oil is actually the poop of a particular ancient microbe that is still around and that’s partially (along with Oil Fracking) why we still have fossil fuels and why a far future non-human civilization will have plenty of fossil fuels to work with.
You’re right, though, we have 5x more fossil fuels than have been burnt since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If we DO use the rest, the climate would be so unrecoverable that 99% of multicellular life will die, but even the most corrupt oil executive would be dead years before the last animal because most - especially the wealthiest - humans need agriculture to eat, and if shit hits the fan the poor outnumber the rich and the crop-killing pests outnumber the poor.
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
We’re really doing our best to totally leave this planet an uninhabitable mass… But I think the earth will have the last laugh.
letsgocrazy@lemm.ee 9 months ago
OK but then they’ll fuck it up worse.
Spliffman1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Continue in your delusion if it helps you my son
letsgocrazy@lemm.ee 9 months ago
A thousand times this.
I’ve used this argument before arguing with hippies about “integrating with nature”.
Any society that isn’t on track to developing the science and engineering necessary for interstellar tavel is a dead end.
It’s a tragic waste of human intelligence to keep making the same bamboo huts indefinetly.
So some noble savage can live their lives on repeat for hundreds or millenia, and that’s somehow better than inventing an arc that can save every form of life on this unique Planet?
Bloody stupid hippy nonsense.
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
What makes life on another planet more worthwhile than life here? Also humans didn’t take that long to evolve so there’s plenty of opportunity for a successor to us to reach the stars in a way that causes less suffering. For that matter, we could have simply taken a couple hundred extra years to get there and reduced human suffering by like a thousandfold with a more equitable society. Bloody stupid capitalist nonsense.
Sordid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No, there isn’t. We’ve already used up all the easily accessible sources of fossil fuels, so whoever comes after us won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever.
Blyfh@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Great! So they’ll skip the fossil energy era and jump directly to renewables? We paved the for them to avoiding another climate change.
SimplePhysics@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
That’s right, if we kick the bucket, a new intelligent civilization would not have the resources to advance at our pace. They may figure out the atom, but they won’t have the resources to utilize their knowledge. Then there is the ever looming threat of a disaster, and these preindustrial civilizations will be wiped out.
Also: what are the chances a species similar to us in intelligence will emerge again on this rock? I’m going to bet it’s pretty darn tiny.
macrocephalic@lemmy.world 9 months ago
We’re not going to make it until the sun swallows the earth. If there’s anything related to us left at that point then it wouldn’t be recognisable to us.
Soulg@lemmy.world 9 months ago
But if they’re coming directly from us, what’s the difference
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What makes them ‘savage’?
HawlSera@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Amen, all those movies where “All tech stops working, people learn to do things for themselves! Utopia acheived!” are garbage
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 9 months ago
As individuals, a lot of people are content to live a simple life of prosperity. They have a basic job, and a small family, and some basic luxuries - and they call it enough. Some people have a one-eyed focus on increasing their wealth throughout their lives; but not everyone is like that. People generally recognise that their lives are finite. Some try to aim for some kind of imaginary high-score in their life, and others just live a ‘normal’ life.
I’m now making an analogy. As a species, we can recognise that are time is finite; and we can choose to live that out in a stable simple prosperity, where we just look after our world (house) and get what we need for some basic luxuries, and be content. We could have a billion years of that. It’s a very long time. Or… we could aim for endless growth. We could consume as much as possible, and always aim for more. As we run out of resources and livable habitat on Earth, we must look to interstellar travel and spread to other planets. I don’t necessarily think that is a better choice.
When I was young, I use to think that humans needed to settle on other planets. But I don’t think that any more. Partially because I learnt about special relativity, and decided that unless we’re very very wrong about science so far, having connected colonies on other planets is not possible. But also because I realised that there is no intrinsic goal to spread human life as much as possible. There are other things of value. We don’t need that particular goal. I also use to think that personal immortality would be a good thing. I don’t really think that any more.
Daft_ish@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Until you find our unity with nature allows humans to transcend human form and ascend to a higher plane of existence. Oops.
ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I’ll take one of whatever this guy ordered
Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
I call bullshit. You know why?
I literally had a dream that predicted the worst year of my life, 5 years in advance, by having a friendly dream character tell me I died and went to a dream afterlife.
The catch was that I am autistic and I acted and act much like I did when I was 10 years old, and that was reflected by me taking the form of the kid sidekick in the fictional world that I was trying to write a story about at the time. I was told I was adorable and intelligent-looking (I was not the smartest kid but I was well-read and paid attention to what was in my textbooks) and not particularly unlikeable, and all of that was because that dream afterlife was a place where your personality determined your appearance. Yet despite the fact that I did not look monstrous or untrustworthy and that people who died quickly realised that in the dream world people are exactly what they appear to be, I was warned people would discriminate against me anyway, and there was nothing I or my apparent dream friend could do; said dream friend told me they thought I at least deserved to know it would happen and to just try and enjoy eternity, since I would never wake up, but that it would be hard because people would hate me unfairly.
I woke up anyway. That’s not why I call BS. I recorded that dream in a text file and I keep backups of all my unique files.
I’ll finish editing this soon but my phone is at 2% battery…
Daft_ish@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Please do.
I will say I don’t really have a stakes in this argument especially when you consider my contribution to humanity will probably be dead end evolutionary branch responsible for creating higher order polymers.