Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Is avoiding death possible is principle? In particular, is there a solution to the problem of the universe no longer being able to support life?

I'm always confused when people talk about 'avoiding/conquering/ending death', as if death were one thing. It's rather emphatically not. It's even worse than the stereotypical-by-now adge that theres no such thing as a 'cure for cancer' because every type of cancer and indeed every individual tumor is unique and brought about by unique failures and internal evolution.

1Squark11y

I think that a solution might be possible. According to string theory our universe is likely to be only metastable since its cosmological constant is positive. It means that eventually we get false vacuum decay and the formation of a new universe. If the new universe has zero or negative cosmological constant, its asymptotic temperature will be zero which should (I think) allow avoiding heat death (that is, performing an infinite computation). Now, I think the half-life of spontaneous nucleation within a cosmological horizon is usually predicted to be much longer than the relaxation time. However, this leaves the possibility of heterogeneous (induced) nucleation. Now, I'm not aware of any research about artificially induced false vacuum decay, but I don't know of any physical barrier either. If we manage to induce such a decay and find some way to transmit ourselves into the new universe (which probably requires the new universe to be physically universal), avoiding death is a possibility.

7RolfAndreassen11y

None currently known. But I suggest that this is not a very high-priority problem at the moment; if you solve the more pressing ones, you'll have literally billions of years to figure out an escape path from the universe.

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Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015

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Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015

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