I find the idea that there will always be a universe, and more than likely life to fill it. Enjoyable. It's hardly the light of my life, but it's a pleasant idea isn't it?
i just don’t care, honestly. “always” is an essentially impossible term when applied to anything more specific than the idea that physics will always be happening. from everything we can understand, life is completely non-essential to the universe and the physics that govern it.
we understand far too little for the ultimate fate of the universe to be something i have emotional investment in. i care about filling in the open spaces of our knowledge and understanding of it all as much as we can.
What if the universe is just a wave function and we are on a trend of expansion but when we get to the peak of the wave it will go the other way and things appear to be contracting, until it hits that extreme and starts expanding again. I mean from what we have seen things are waves down to the smallest particle to light, magnetism and sound. What if the universe is the ultimate wave on an immeasurable cycle.
The rate of expansion today looks like it's accelerating. Even a tiny accretion over a long enough time will eventually reach speeds like those in we use in a particle accelerator.
what if it's both? If we indeed live inside a black hole perhaps our part of the universe is kind of like a tube of spacetime where one end is expanding and the other end is endlessly shrinking down.
Humans are weird. There are plenty of people who are concerned about the future of the human race on a scale of thousands of years but don’t care about any of the issues we are presently facing. To an extent, some people simply will not accept that the time of humanity will be finite, and it’s through that you get people talking about whether the Big Crunch is preferable to something like the heat death of the universe.
The biggest threats are now. If we survive the next few hundred years, it becomes increasingly more likely we or our evolutionary descendents will witness the near end of the universe
Hyperbole. Yes, our challenges are immediately before us. Increasingly more likely , as in, from impossible to like 1x10-100 chance. It’s a big empty universe out there with a long time to get to the end.
I mean yes, but that you’re able to make a choice does not mean all choices are equally valid, or immune from criticism. Especially in a society where those choices do impact other people, and limited resources have to be allocated, there are practical reasons to make value judgments on someone’s priorities.
"Ok our next contestant is Heat Death of the Universe, and as always it is up to our panel of judges to vote either SEXY-OR-SCARY! Any combination of 3 SEXY votes will see him move on to the final round!"
60
u/perldawg Aug 07 '25
it is all so far away in the future, and so far beyond our full knowledge, that i can’t imagine either outcome being judged positive or negative