What happens after we explore everything?

[dsaun777]

Try to imagine a society that has reached essentially immortality through advanced technology and has also mastered intergalactic travel, can tap into unlimited energy sources, has no need for food, have some nanobots repair all their damaged DNA, can manipulate spacetime time etc.. What would be next for them? Would they try to create their own sub-universe or even just a little solar system where they take some deity like presence among their own creations? Or maybe they would integrate themselves with the this universe through advanced technology?

Basically like a star trek like civilization after they boldly went were no one has gone before and returned and are asking themselves what now? After you have discovered everything, if such a task is possible, I guess the next step would be to create?

 

[Michael Price]

Such creatures would (most likely) have unbounded intelligences. But, we know, by Godel, that mathematics is infinitely complex, so maths alone could keep these mega-brains occupied for ever.

Our monkey brains have evolved to handle social networks - fire, tools etc were just a side-effects. With greater intelligence would come more complex social networks, which would require greater brain power to handle etc etc.

 

[Bystander]

What would be next for them?

Jack Chalker, The Well of Souls.

 

[dsaun777]

Jack Chalker, The Well of Souls.

Seems like an interesting read thank you!

 

[symbolipoint]

This topic again is one which asks for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the best of likelihoods though, what you propose is an impossibility followed by another impossibility.

 

[profbuxton]

When that occurs it's the end of the universe. No need to go on any longer!

 

[Aparna Sharma]

Isn't the universe dynamic even if we learned and explored everything in universe at this moment there might be something new happening in the next moment which will again pique our curiosity

 

[member 656954]

What would be next for them?

In many sci-fi novels they leave our physical universe because it has become so well known and go...somewhere else. We mere mortals cannot comprehend where they go, but it is not death, merely another plane of existence.

Iain M. Banks called this subliming in his Culture series, with mature alien races taking up residence in several higher dimensions. Humans have not yet sublimed in his novels because while we could, there are still things for us to do in the current universe. Banks' characters often wish that the sublimed would intercede within our dimensional plane, as they could sort out the 'big issues' that vex humanity, but to the best of my recollection, they never do

 

[Whipley Snidelash]

much of the older science fiction describing civilizations in this situation pretty much described them as being on the way out through decadence, apathy or suicide. More often described as already gone.