subject: Life and Intelligence [print this page] Life and intelligence could sustain themselves indefinitely in such a universe , even as the stars blinked and the galaxies were all swallowed by black holes.
Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, argued in a landmark paper in 1 979 . "If my view of the future is correct , " he wrote , "it means that the world of physics and astronomy is also inexhaustible ; no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory. " Now, however, even Dr. Dyson admits that all bets are off.
If recent astronomical observations are correct, the future of life and the universe will be far bleaker.
In the last four years astronomers have reported evidence that the expansion of the universe is not just continuing but is speeding up, under the influence of a mysterious "dark energy," an antigravity that seems to be embedded in space itself. If that is true and the universe goes on accelerating, astronomers say, rather than coasting gently into the night, distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another.
In effect, it would be like living in the middle of a black hole that kept getting emptier and colder. In such a universe, some physicists say, the usual methods of formulating physics may not all apply Instead of new worlds coming into view, old ones would constantly be disappearing over the horizon, lost from view forever.
Cosmological knowledge would be fragmented, with different observers doomed to seeing different pieces of the puzzle and no single observer able to know the fate of the whole universe or arrive at a theory of physics that was more than approximate.
"There would be a lot of things about the universe that we simply couldn't predict," said Dr. Thomas Banks, a physicist it the University of California at Santa Cruz.
And perhaps most important, starved finally of the energy even to complete a thought or a computation, the domain of life and intelligence would not expand, but compress and eventually vanish like a dwindling echo into the silence of eternity (5ftft). "I find the fate of a universe that is accelerating forever not very appealing," said Dr. Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Life and Intelligence
By: endeavor
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