Could intelligent life cheat God?

[GladScientist]

Let's say that, billions of years into the future, as the universe is beginning to burn out (by spreading itself too thin), humans decide to change the fate.

Would it be possible to, say, build millions or billions of machines to go around collecting all the matter in the universe? They could just burn the matter they collect into fuel via e=mc^2, and then just go around collecting every spec of matter in our universe.

Then all of these machines fly toward a single point and collide, until they recreate a singularity, much like the one that the universe began as. Would such a thing be possible? If so what possibilities do you guys see coming from it?

 

[Chalnoth]

Let's say that, billions of years into the future, as the universe is beginning to burn out (by spreading itself too thin), humans decide to change the fate.

Would it be possible to, say, build millions or billions of machines to go around collecting all the matter in the universe? They could just burn the matter they collect into fuel via e=mc^2, and then just go around collecting every spec of matter in our universe.

Then all of these machines fly toward a single point and collide, until they recreate a singularity, much like the one that the universe began as. Would such a thing be possible? If so what possibilities do you guys see coming from it?

Well, first of all, given infinitely-capable propulsion technology, they could only collect matter from the local region. Most of the universe they could never reach, even moving at the speed of light.

The second point is that it'd just make a big black hole. There are some extremely speculative ideas that maybe black holes do actually form other universes. Though I think the idea is interesting, personally I think this is extremely unlikely.

Finally, this is a somewhat small point, but collecting all of that matter would require a lot of energy to use for propulsion. And propulsion generally involves expelling matter out one end of a craft. Perhaps if the craft used light for propulsion, it wouldn't lose as much mass getting there and back. But ultimately it's going to have to lose a good fraction of it to collect matter from near the limits where it's possible to do so.

 

[Chronos]

In this universe it would be very difficult to collect enough matter to star hop, even with 100% matter to energy conversion.

 

[Nabeshin]

No matter what you do you eventually bump up against the 2nd law of thermodynamics. No clever scheme you come up with will circumvent that.

 

[GladScientist]

No clever scheme you come up with will circumvent that.

If it weren't for you meddling kids and your second law of thermodynamics!

 

[marcus]

Let's say that, billions of years into the future, as the universe is beginning to burn out (by spreading itself too thin), humans decide to change the fate.

Would it be possible to, say, build millions or billions of machines to go around collecting all the matter in the universe? They could just burn the matter they collect into fuel via e=mc^2, and then just go around collecting every spec of matter in our universe.

Then all of these machines fly toward a single point and collide, until they recreate a singularity, much like the one that the universe began as. Would such a thing be possible? If so what possibilities do you guys see coming from it?

This idea, in its essentials, goes back to the 1990s and some papers by Louis Crane, a math prof at U. Kansas.

His version of it is simpler and more straightforward than yours and you might want to read. He got sizable research grants in 2007 and in 2009 to study the details (with the help of whatever grad students and postdocs he can corral) as I recall.

This non-scientist blog talks about it:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=11751

The Crane papers are:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9402104 (1994)

http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 (August 2009)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3887 (January 2010)

I am not saying that Crane's idea has merit. I am telling you about it so you can study it if you want to, and perhaps improve your own thinking.

The heart of the idea is that the Hawking radiation from more massive black holes is very weak---a BH the mass of a star or of many stars would produce very little wattage---but the power output of less massive black holes, say with the mass of an asteroid or a mountain, is very great. The less-massive black hole burns hotter and produces more power (though is less long-lived).

A black hole converts its mass efficiently into radiant energy as it evaporates. The E=mc² conversion is complete. It the most efficient source of energy. Or would be if we knew how to make low-mass black holes, which we do not!

Crane is the only mathematician in the world today crazy enough to speculate about ways to manufacture low-mass black holes. This is why the Foundational Questions Institute gives him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It is suspected by some people that the creation of a black hole results in a 'big bang' event and the expansion of a new universe----you cannot get to it because this would require going through the black hole.

Crane suspects that a civilizations need for energy eventually compels it to manufacture low-mass black holes and thus (as a by product) cause new universes, new spacetime regions not intersecting our own, to come into existence.
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This is probably a bad idea. Most creative interesting ideas turn out to be wrong. It's life.

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Roger Penrose also has a loony idea about what caused the Big Bang, and how our universe will, eventually, give rise to a successor Big Bang.

Penrose idea explicitly avoids problems with the Second Law of Thermo.

However it is not clear that Crane's idea actually violates Second Law because it is not clear that you can formulate the Law in such a way that is observer-independent and that can be proven to apply to passage down a black hole through a quantum regime (where conventional geometry and matter as we know them do not exist) and so to a re-expanding stage. People who research quantum black hole models do not seem to be much worried by Second Law. Maybe black holes have an "outlaw" mentality. They chew up Carnot Cycles and Heat Engines and Definitions of Entropy for breakfast. Maybe.

Penrose and an Armenian named Gurzadian just figured out a way to TEST Penrose cyclic cosmology and they just posted a paper on it this month. Penrose has also many entertaining slideshows online about this idea.

There is no urgent need to make up crazy cosmologies with black holes and future universes because people like Louis Crane and Sir Roger Penrose cannot resist doing this and they are better at it than most of the rest of us.

Does anyone have some Penrose links handy. If not, and if anyone is curious, I will go look one up.

 

[marcus]

Here is a recent Penrose paper.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706
Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity
V.G.Gurzadyan, R.Penrose
8 pages, 6 figs
(Submitted on 16 Nov 2010)
"Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) posits the existence of an aeon preceding our Big Bang 'B', whose conformal infinity 'I' is identified, conformally, with 'B', now regarded as a spacelike 3-surface. Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky, of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low, the centre of each such family representing the point of 'I' at which the cluster converges. These centres appear as fairly randomly distributed fixed points in our CMB sky. The analysis of Wilkinson Microwave Background Probe's (WMAP) cosmic microwave background 7-year maps does indeed reveal such concentric circles, of up to 6 sigma significance. This is confirmed when the same analysis is applied to BOOMERanG98 data, eliminating the possibility of an instrumental cause for the effects. These observational predictions of CCC would not be easily explained within standard inflationary cosmology."

It is too technical for most people. However Penrose has many entertaining colorfully illustrated slideshow talks, some with cartoons drawn by himself, that are online, explaining the Cyclic Cosmology idea. Even discussing how his scheme evades the Second Law of Thermo! Charming guy, I saw him give one of these talks in person at UC Berkeley.
The TESTABILITY angle is new. The talk I heard was like 4 years ago. There was no thought at that time of any observable consequences that you could look for in the sky to test the idea.

 

[Tanelorn]

I happen to think that Penrose is correct in that for Cosmology to move forward we have to be willing to go beyond our present ideas and to continue to Brainstorm and do imaginative thought experiments.

Cosmology is the branch of philosophy dealing with the origin and general structure of the universe, with its parts, elements, and laws, and esp. with such of its characteristics as space, time, causality, and freedom. It is also the branch of astronomy that deals with the general structure and evolution of the universe.



My view is that at the present time we still only see a fraction of reality, and so it is too early to stop thinking about all the other ideas and models which may or may not be related to LCDM. The LCDM still has some unelegant features and it can only say that the universe may or may not have been the size of a singularity, may or may not be infinite, may or may not expand forever, and may have something called dark matter and dark energy to make things work. I believe that we don't even know what space or time actually are.

So its not enough really, we are just taking the baby steps. Clearly something pretty extraordinary and energetic happened maybe 13.8 Billion years ago. Energy doesn't spontaneously create itself out of nothing but changes from one form into another eg. when opposites interact.

 

[Chalnoth]

I happen to think that Penrose is correct in that for Cosmology to move forward we have to be willing to go beyond our present ideas and to continue to Brainstorm and do imaginative thought experiments.

Well, if you spend some time on arxiv.org, you should see that this is just not a problem.

 

[FlexGunship]

If it weren't for you meddling kids and your second law of thermodynamics!

Okay, this is win.

 

[BBruch]

Well, first of all, given infinitely-capable propulsion technology, they could only collect matter from the local region. Most of the universe they could never reach, even moving at the speed of light.

The second point is that it'd just make a big black hole. There are some extremely speculative ideas that maybe black holes do actually form other universes. Though I think the idea is interesting, personally I think this is extremely unlikely.

Finally, this is a somewhat small point, but collecting all of that matter would require a lot of energy to use for propulsion. And propulsion generally involves expelling matter out one end of a craft. Perhaps if the craft used light for propulsion, it wouldn't lose as much mass getting there and back. But ultimately it's going to have to lose a good fraction of it to collect matter from near the limits where it's possible to do so.

It's my understanding that a body in motion (atleast in a vacuum) will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside object, so going by this logic you wouldn't need to be constantly expelling matter in and out, just once. Although I'm just going by logic, I'm not sure if this is a valid point or not.

 

[Chalnoth]

It's my understanding that a body in motion (atleast in a vacuum) will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside object, so going by this logic you wouldn't need to be constantly expelling matter in and out, just once. Although I'm just going by logic, I'm not sure if this is a valid point or not.

Well, you'd need to do it at least three times (once to start the journey, once to stop at the destination, once to start again), but it is even more of a practical impossibility doing it that way than doing it under constant propulsion.

 

[qraal]

It's my understanding that a body in motion (atleast in a vacuum) will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside object, so going by this logic you wouldn't need to be constantly expelling matter in and out, just once. Although I'm just going by logic, I'm not sure if this is a valid point or not.

The problem is that the universe's expansion maybe accelerating due to a cosmological constant - the tension of space itself. If so then our Galaxy's Local Group will become isolated from the rest of the cosmos in a few billion years, as will all other small galaxy groups bound by gravity. Eventually there will be nothing left to collect for energy. That'll be the End as we know it.

 

[qraal]

The problem is that the universe's expansion maybe accelerating due to a cosmological constant - the tension of space itself. If so then our Galaxy's Local Group will become isolated from the rest of the cosmos in a few billion years, as will all other small galaxy groups bound by gravity. Eventually there will be nothing left to collect for energy. That'll be the End as we know it.

Of course making a black hole bigger shouldn't be too hard. The hole in the Galactic core is already huge, so all we need to do is direct more mass in it's direction. But whether there's anything on the other side of that particular rabbit-hole is anyone's guess.