Saturday, April 2, 2011

Future Civilizations

Will see the universe a bit differently.  There are a few things that make this point in time very special.  Most people know the universe is expanding.  This is slightly misleading, however.  Space itself is expanding.  Alex Filippenko, professor of Astronomy at Berkley, explains it with the best analogy.  Imagine ping pong balls side by side on a stretchy tube of rubber.  Then if you pull apart the tube, the ping pong balls separate from each other.  The ones in the center separate the least (this is because the center is expanded the least).  It's a really good analogy for how dark energy is pushing the objects further away from us further away even faster.

The other big thing that makes living now very unique is the afterglow radiation of the big bang.  About 3% of it remains, and it has been mapped with a microwave telescope a little while back.  That radiation is the only other evidence a big bang ever existed.  Civilizations that spawn several billion years from now will see no other galaxies in the sky, and no afterglow from the big bang.  The only thing they will know exists is the Milky Way.  Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist from Arizona State, says no evidence at all will exist of these other hundreds of billions of galaxies.  Sad isn't it?

It makes me wonder if we missed some event 2 billion years ago that would have made it clear how the universe started.

Comments welcome

11 comments:

  1. Pretty out there train of thought

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  2. Civilizations won't sprout in several billions of years. Our planet's 'life support' cycle won't last that long, it's expected that won't last that long mainly cos of changes in the sun. The sun itself will blow into a red giant in 5 billion years and swallow earth. That is sad indeed.

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  3. This stuff is just to much for my mind to comprehend honestly.

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  4. ah yeah it'll be totally different...

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  5. Shouldn't we be taking billions of pictures and videos for future civilization, maybe with their technology they can figure it out.

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  6. I like your blog style! Keep up the great blogging!

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  7. This is the kind of stuff I stay up wondering about late at night. Experience is relative. They may not know there are other universes outside the Milky Way, but it is really just a step down the ladder of ignorance from our current state.

    Think about the collective intelligence of a civilization. If there were some near-extinction level event tomorrow, and just a handful of humans were left, it would not matter how much technical skill and training they had received before. They could not replicate or rebuild human civilization to even a fraction of what it is now. Specialization and the inherent limitations of the human mind have dispersed knowledge among the billions rather than collected it in a single location/individual. It would be thousands if not millions of years until they neared our current relative point of technological sophistication.

    How many times has this cycle already been rebooted?

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  8. Man, I reallllly love reading your blog man. This is some very thought provoking stuff. I often wonder what future people will think of us.

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  9. Thanks for the explanations, I learned a lot. I wish we knew how the universe started too.

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  10. No Body knows for sure whats gonna happen, but I do know one thing, I can't wait to find out!

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  11. This is a really great blog, I especially like this post. This topic is of great interest to me, I am thinking about it a lot. Nice design too.

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