Looks like a new test case scenario for libraries that handle time/date.

https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA

What reader do you use? I've only ever used vanilla HN.

It's really a question of when it will stop decaying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay

The Big Bang happened at the "north pole" of spacetime. Eventually all matter and energy will reach the "south pole" and recombine. The Big Crunch theory will never die!

The net energy loss comes from the gravitational field of the object, and its mass decreases. We don't have details on just what that means at a Standard Model level, but the net loss of energy means something is going to disappear even without any kind of previously understood decay.

Aren't we pretty sure due to things like quantum tunneling that the probability of any quantum particle existing trends to zero given a long enough time?

“In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.”

A billion is just 10 to the power of nine, and that number of years in time is itself a long, long time that’s difficult to imagine. Looking at 10 to the power of 78 is…it wouldn’t matter much for us if it were to the power of 60 either. (I think!) I seriously doubt humans (as we know of now) can meaningfully affect the expansion or decay of the universe.

We are barely able to handle technological progress that would seem like stone age or even worse to a potential species that may exist at that time (ie those that may have such technology to stop the death of the very universe they are living)

They might just be indistinguishable from a god if there is one. And if they have enough power to perhaps prevent the death of the universe, they might have enough technology to just recreate another one. Or open a wormhole and transport to a new one or travel the multiverse or something.

Basically I feel if such kind of technology can be created to bend the universe to your will, it would be misused so badly, it might be catastrophic for the existence of such a species.

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

It is a big project, but don’t worry, you’ve got quite a while to work it all out. I would start working on it in earnest in about a million years. If you wait a couple billion, more of the stuff in the universe might have decayed, and the end result might be less interesting, I guess.

Please tell whatever else is around about the rest of us!

When things are predictable they can be simulated fast : A spinning ball in the void can be simulated for 10^78 years in O(1).

When things are fuzzy, they can be simulated fast : A star made of huge number of atoms is not so different than another star made of a huge number of atoms. When processes are too complex they tend to all follow the law of large numbers which makes the computations memoizable.

What you want is a way to prevent the universe from taking shortcuts in its computations. Luckily its quite easy. You have to make details important. That's where chaos theory comes to the rescue. Small perturbations can have big impacts. Bifurcations like tossing a coin in the air create pockets of complexity. But throw too many coins in the air and its just random and boring. Life exists on this edge where enough structure is preserved to allow enough richness to exist.

One way humans have found of increasing precision is the lathe, which lead to building computers. Build a big enough fast enough computer and you will run-out of flops faster than reaching the 10^78 endgame.

But you have to be smart, because computation being universal it means that if you are just building a big computer what matters will be what runs on it. And your universe can be reduced to a recursive endgame state of "universe becoming a computer running universe simulation of a specific type", which doesn't need to computed more than once and already was, or isn't interesting enough to deserve being computed.

That's why we live on the exciting edge before the Armageddon, boring universes having already been simulated. The upside being universe hasn't yet decided which endgame we may reach, because the phytoplankton aliens of k2-18b have not yet turned on their supercomputer.

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12326

I think about how some relativists think you could see a Hawking Radiation like effect if you're accelerating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

although the idealized case of endless acceleration implies a certain kind of horizon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindler_coordinates

maybe the horizon doesn't matter much,.

This sounds tedious, but it might help to realize you can just gather all the atoms together first, and then count only every 1000th one.

Who knows? Maybe when and if that happens, civilizations will be advanced enough to try to reverse this: manipulating the local Higgs field, pocket universes, and counter-decay waves

If you were in a place where time was still you'd have no idea it were the case. Time would still tick at one second per second. You could only tell when you looked at some other object/patch of space that had a different ticking clock.

The same question goes for space. Is there any size to the nothingness? To go further when you have notions like inflation, can you have nothing that is increasing in volume? That would suggest a change in state an thus a sense of not yet ended.

It would be a weird thing for nothingness to change state. It seems like fertile soil for sci-fi. Imagine if space itself was kind of Turing complete and once the noise of matter ended it could start the real work, which of course would be simulating the next universe.

https://youtu.be/mht-1c4wc0Q

The actual concept of time does not exist (at least in my humble year 12 physics understanding and having read Brief History Of Time a long time ago :) )

You'd like this book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547222/an-infinity-of-worlds...

All of the enzymes in your body might stop working if you stepped into even a slightly different universe. You could just turn into a gas, and not in a good way.

Over periods of time that long it's much more likely you'll run into some other object, say fall into a gravity well or something like that.

Even if you don't, pure erosion from neutral hydrogen and space dust will have disintegrated your capsule long before then.

I think you've gotten away pretty well.

I started to read this book, but never finished it, but the whuffie idea has legs. Stuck with me longer than many ideas from books I did finish. Need to pick it up again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...