A Universe of Nothing

thanks, gonna record the audio and listen to it in my car this weekend on a long drive. i hope there aren't too many visual slides that will be missed only having the audio...

there are...:p

indeed, since i learned about the big bang and shit, i kind of instinctively assumed that the universe has to be a big pulsating whosawhatsit, expanding and contracting over an seemingly infinite amount of years.

it's pretty interesting to look at the universe as an equation that must equal 0. krauss has a good way of making math seem real. i can't really wrap my head around a flat universe though.

whn he says 'flat' understand he means 'flat' in a four-dimensional sense. which isn't really flat in the same way we understand a piece of paper to be 'flat', yet is.

science is fun and difficult at times

the best description i've encountered yet of an expanding universe is thus:

inflate a balloon slightly and draw points randomly on it; now inflate the balloon.

the balloon pops, right?

i think stephen hawking used that analogy but i've never quite got it. If the flat universe model is like a balloon, then what's the 3D version look like? (the one Krauss shows as a sphere)? I prefer Krauss' overlay of the dots in this video, it doesn't require that the surface wrap around and connect to itself. Also don't see how the red shift as you go back in time to the big bang works in the balloon analogy...maybe a peach growing on a tree would be a better analogy, as at least it has a pit inside to simulate the limit of observable data at the beginning of time

I think the balloon is magical and can inflate forever.....

the end is near

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26271024-952,00.html

just kidding

Dawkins is kinda pathetic.

Miracle Mile is a fucked up film....

This stuff always makes me go huh? I'll never understand it. Things that are little are immense. Stuff be pulled is being squeezed. Things moving away from me are getting closer. Black holes are now universes and they can live in the hadron collider. Light is fading away into darkness. its all one big oxymoron. Unless Im the moron. which makes more sense

it just occurred to me that once we create AI that will be the game changer...I'm sure this has been said before, but it stands to reason that if there are truly interstellar races out there, they are all artificial. Why do people continue to imagine aliens as little grey critters? Seems to me they will most likely be large AI craft able to live forever and harvest and process raw materials from stars and planets...the universe Krauss describes is only truly hospitable to robot life...

  On 10/28/2009 at 7:20 AM, lumpenprol said:

it just occurred to me that once we create AI that will be the game changer...I'm sure this has been said before, but it stands to reason that if there are truly interstellar races out there, they are all artificial. Why do people continue to imagine aliens as little grey critters? Seems to me they will most likely be large AI craft able to live forever and harvest and process raw materials from stars and planets...the universe Krauss describes is only truly hospitable to robot life...

Yeah, good point and agreed

  On 10/28/2009 at 7:20 AM, lumpenprol said:

it just occurred to me that once we create AI that will be the game changer...I'm sure this has been said before, but it stands to reason that if there are truly interstellar races out there, they are all artificial. Why do people continue to imagine aliens as little grey critters? Seems to me they will most likely be large AI craft able to live forever and harvest and process raw materials from stars and planets...the universe Krauss describes is only truly hospitable to robot life...

Book form with this idea, please lumpster!?

  On 10/28/2009 at 7:27 AM, Atop said:

  On 10/28/2009 at 7:20 AM, lumpenprol said:

it just occurred to me that once we create AI that will be the game changer...I'm sure this has been said before, but it stands to reason that if there are truly interstellar races out there, they are all artificial. Why do people continue to imagine aliens as little grey critters? Seems to me they will most likely be large AI craft able to live forever and harvest and process raw materials from stars and planets...the universe Krauss describes is only truly hospitable to robot life...

 

 

Book form with this idea, please lumpster!?

The Rama series from Arthur C. Clarke is basically this.

Also (and this will piss people off): religion - old myth. Science - new myth.

  On 10/27/2009 at 3:00 PM, vamos scorcho said:

i hate how the science people treat religion like a dog.

yeah, it never happened the other fucking way around

  On 10/28/2009 at 8:18 AM, chenGOD said:

 

 

Also (and this will piss people off): religion - old myth. Science - new myth.

yeah but science is actually based on real shit that people found out and wrote about and shit

  On 10/28/2009 at 8:44 AM, triachus said:

  On 10/27/2009 at 3:00 PM, vamos scorcho said:

i hate how the science people treat religion like a dog.

 

yeah, it never happened the other fucking way around

"science" doesn't. Dawkins and the other new hardcore-atheists do. nowt to do with science, just so happens that the current king of atheism is a scientist.

  On 10/28/2009 at 8:18 AM, chenGOD said:

  On 10/28/2009 at 7:27 AM, Atop said:

  On 10/28/2009 at 7:20 AM, lumpenprol said:

it just occurred to me that once we create AI that will be the game changer...I'm sure this has been said before, but it stands to reason that if there are truly interstellar races out there, they are all artificial. Why do people continue to imagine aliens as little grey critters? Seems to me they will most likely be large AI craft able to live forever and harvest and process raw materials from stars and planets...the universe Krauss describes is only truly hospitable to robot life...

 

 

Book form with this idea, please lumpster!?

 

The Rama series from Arthur C. Clarke is basically this.

 

Science - new myth.

Have read the first Rama but the second, I have, but haven't read yet...

the first seems like that in a very abstract way, but not focusing on how the mechanical life was created...

I am thinking the second one goes into detail about where the cylinder came from...

And science being the new myth......

Technological advances shall keep happening, hopefully, and in the near future we shall see some mind-blowing shit that we never thought possible....

this is already happening, e.g. Kraftwerk's Computer World and today being a computer filled world....

Yes, Kraftwerk were scientists in a sense and apparently prophets(really really smart guys)...

Science will breed something(s) so mind blowing, it will make us not need religion for mental support when wonder, amazement and bliss are brought eternally into our lives....

Einstein showed us that if you can think about it, it can be proven, figured out how to be explained and thus created....

the unified theory was something too lofty even for Einstein...

perhaps a computer program needs to be invented to figure it out and if it did, it would change everything...

then maybe everything CAN be possible...

The Computer Deity!

or a man capable of one-upping Enstein and all of the other super-nerds...

*cue Ogre*

One day, all of us will go to space

i enjoyed that quite a bit, thank you.

Yeah, the thought that some day (on a scale of billions of years, which is almost impossible to comprehend anyway), all evidence of the big bang and even other galaxies will vanish from our field of view, is still blowing me away.

  On 10/28/2009 at 11:17 AM, lumpenprol said:

Yeah, the thought that some day (on a scale of billions of years, which is almost impossible to comprehend anyway), all evidence of the big bang and even other galaxies will vanish from our field of view, is still blowing me away.

And the moon too.

An utterly dark and deserted (un)solar-system.

someone bring back rambo's technological singularity thread.

it's a tough topic, as we cannot really get a grip on what is "alive" (especially not if we cling to dualism), we won't know when we've created life. have we already? even sensory robots that can track an object and catch/throw/squeeze/jerk it off are more complex and no more conscious¹ than bacteria. when do machines do enough stuff for us to classify them as their own being?

¹ - science still can't come up with a good definition for consciousness either, and rightfully so. trying to objectify an inherently subjective world is tricky stuff when all you've got is your senses and a biological computer.

so what are the odds of being in that magic window we live in? in how many years will the universe be unobservable?

yeah, I mean I know the earth gets burned to a crisp by the sun before we get to the point where we can no longer see the big bang and other galaxies (at least I think so), it's just really disturbing to me for some reason that either our race (if we make it to the starfaring phase), or some other race, will one day be floating around out there and potentially have no fucking clue about the big bang or other galaxies because all evidence has been erased.

it's a mind fuck, but it's quite humbling. circumstance allowed us to conceive the universe in this one particular way, and as he said, if some civilization developed a few billion years into the future on planet x they will be literally alone (unless visited by ETs), and have no way of even observing their native galaxy.

kinda makes you think, what if we're way off with all this shit? what if we're being egocentric (again) by assuming that we live in a special time. perhaps the universe is really quite different than our data and math would lead us to conclude and other societies know of and pity our silly ideas about the world around us.

oh well, hopefully not, since all we have is observation we must trust that it is correct.