Humans have be using nuclear energy for decades by means of constructing large reactors and power plants. Obivously there is a large amount of energy to be harnessed from radioactive elements or perhaps from extremely large and complex organisms fission of hydrogen as a means of energy?
Now perhaps this is a bit of a question like ‘Is there alien life?’ but perhaps this question is ‘What is alien life?’… In the future when we venture out into deep space outside our Star System and discover new and strange structures of matter, ex. Stars that react to stimuli and “swallow” other stars to gain hydrogen to feed their fission metabolism!
Couldn’t we say that our star, Solar, is actually an organism… It consumes itself, it will react to stimuli (if the stimuli is large enough… perhaps like when you poke a jelly fish with a stick), it has a life span, it reorganises matter and energy.
I believe that life is mearly a process for the universe to organise matter and energy. Eventually this reorganisation of matter and energy lead to intelligent beings (relative to the life forms so far encounted by the Human Race). These intelligent beings start off by reorganising matter and energy locally, then globally when they discover they have effected their planets environment. Then the humans will eventually reorganise matter across this galaxy and then across the universe, discovering many new ways to change both matter and energy from one form to another and through different types. The humans loose interest in life… they have done so much and they have discovered so much, is there a point to being?? And then as in their ancient history the main driving force of their advancements and inadvertantly reorganinsing matter and energy, when confronted by an obsticle or life threating challenge. The humans then focus their intelligence and effort on stopping the universe from spreading out into a sparse cold and dark wasteland… They pull the universe back and stop it from spreading. Eventually after trillions of trillions of years humans… or what ever form of energy or matter that might be of human origin, will decide that everything that can be discovered has been discovered and they will pull the universe together and make it collapse on itself in an almighty crunch causing it to instantly explode into the next big bang!
The universe found a way to discover itself, reorganise it’s energy and matter and eventually give it a rebirth!
Iam PerfectDark and these are a brief overview of some of my theories,
Humans have be using nuclear energy for decades by means of constructing large reactors and power plants. Obivously there is a large amount of energy to be harnessed from radioactive elements or perhaps from extremely large and complex organisms fission of hydrogen as a means of energy?**
One problem. Stars use fusion (of hydrogen) NOT fisson.
Now perhaps this is a bit of a question like ‘Is there alien life?’ but perhaps this question is ‘What is alien life?’… In the future when we venture out into deep space outside our Star System and discover new and strange structures of matter, ex. Stars that react to stimuli and “swallow” other stars to gain hydrogen to feed their fission metabolism!
Hrm…another problem. Stars (most of them, at least) don’t reproduce. Reproduction is one of the qualifications of life. Only supernovas go thru any sort of “reproductive” act.
Can you show that stars respond to stumuli? What sort of stimulus? Can you give an example?
Anyway, I ,ight have missed the ability of us to make matter out of energy. I was under the impression that generally all the matter in the universe was created under the conditions of the big bang and such conditions are impractible. Thus, if the universe is expanding, there won’t be anything more than background radiation when all is said and done.
Plus, I don’t think we could ever propagate, no matter if we were energy beings or not, fast enough to have a net effect on the universe on the scale you recommend. We’d have to expell a lot of energy just to get to where we wanted to be to convert energy back into matter for what I presume would be a net loss.
Humanity may be able to postpone the heat death of the universe on a localized scale?
I think perhaps the OP over-rates our importance in the grand scheme of things.
Could OP please describe what is meant by “reorganization of matter and energy”? Because it seems to me that “Mother Nature” does a far better job of re-organizing matter on this planet than we are capable of doing in any conscious way.
jmullaney I’m with you; I thought that, by and large, the amount of matter in the Universe was fixed. Smaller atoms are forged into larger ones (fusion), and then broken down again (fission) but new matter is not created.
never did understand that, jackasses don’t reprduce, can’t but they are alive aren’t they? are robots going to be considered alive if/when they can make more of themselves?
as for the OP we don’t even know what “life” is outside of our own limited knowledge. the majority of scientists say that life has to be made out of carbon, I don’t agree.
Stars DO reproduce, the matter from one supernova can spawn many new stars - yes, not all stars produce more stars, but not all life produces more life, look at worker bees, mules, and homosexuals.
Stars do interact with each other, too. Their evolution is accelerated if they are close to many other stars, and if a star goes supernova in close proximity to another star that is nearing that point it can set off a chain reaction.
As to how intelligent life can reorganize matter in the universe, we could create - arrgh, I forgot the name for machines that can create more machines of the same type (it will come to me after I hit submit) but it has been proposed that such devices could quickly (in the astronomical scale of time) devour many stars and other celestial bodies. Right now it looks like the universe is not massive or dense enough to stop it’s expansion, and will eventually decay into nothingness. Perhaps our role in the life cycle of the universe is to create devices that will gather all the matter in the universe and gather it in one place, causing a Big Crunch and creating a new Monobloc.
Von Neumann devices! That’s the word I was looking for.
I’m sure it’s been discussed here before in some thread…but can anyone list the commonly cited qualifications for defining life? (ingestion, respiration, reproduction, etc…)
I know this can lead to strange conclusions (like saying fire is alive…or a star), but at least it’s a starting point.
But does the information for how the star is to be built and behave get transmitted from one generation of stars to the next? (My first guess would be, no.)
I thought “Von Neumann device” was another word for a conventional computer.
Von Neumann device: Self-replicating machine. In other words, a machine that apes a bacterium by eating things and making more of itself.
Life as we know it has genetic information. Here, it’s guanine, adonine, cytosine, and thyamine arranged in a double-helix molecule. Stars, fire, crystals, etc. lack that. So they aren’t alive. Genetic information isn’t all life requires, but it’s one of the biggies.
Matter and energy must be interchangeable we just haven’t figured out how to turn energy into matter yet. There is a famous equation that links matter and energy… E = mc²
No energy is ever lost it just interchanges… this means that it would be possible to create matter from enregy.
Sorry I mixed up my fission and fusion I was thinking of something else…
If genetic code is one of the qualities of life… Isn’t genetic code just that, It’s a set of instructions for construction and maintainance of the cell. The structure determines it’s actions and the way the cells interact with each other is the operating system. This sounds much like a computer doesn’t it?? There is nothing unique about life… It is just another form of matter arrangement that interacts in a far more complex array of situations forming new structures and altering the matter and energy around it.
Can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to know everything??? I believe that this stage will come in the evolution of life, after life slows down the spreading of the universe. Once life knows all and can do everything possible within the confines of whatever confines us (being either the constantly changing boundary of the universe or something beyond the universe which incases many other universes or something else). Life will then seek to renew the universe in a new big bang via a big crunch of all matter in the universe.
This great debate is evolving into different topics and is becoming interesting…
On the other hand, a lot of work has been done to examine how it is that biological organisms do not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics – since there is no reason to think that living beings should be exempt from it. One of the core issues is that entropy does not necessarily equate to uniform distribution of energy; or to put it another way, biological organisms are highly organized, not highly ordered (which would violate the Second Law).
In grad school I wrote a paper on this topic. If I can dig it out, I can post some references if anyone is interested.
I’ve heard and read arguments that the 2nd LoT means that evoltuion is impossible. Ah, but entropy is increasing only in a closed system. With the input of solar energy, the earth is an open system, hence the order produced by life is not in violation.
I’ve heard and read arguments that the 2nd LoT means that evoltuion is impossible. Ah, but entropy is increasing only in a closed system. With the input of solar energy, the earth is an open system, hence the order produced by life is not in violation.**
Tho this is a bit off-topic…
I’d like to suggest that sentient life needs to be warm- blooded to evolve. Being warm-blooded means we spend and extraordinary amount of energy keeping our bodies at the right temperature; we put off a LOT of heat. We create entropy, LOTS of it. This counteracts the otherwise negative entropic effects of sentience.
Other (possibly) sentient animals like dolphins, whales, elephants and the great apes are all warm-blooded. No animals that are cold-blooded have evolved sentience, as far as we can tell.
I don’t see the point of collapsing the universe and killing ourselves, as the OP suggested. Because we discovered everything? If we discover everything and decide that there is nothing left to do (not likely), what good would re-making the universe? Wouldn’t that just be more of the same? Besides, the universe is really, really big. We may not be able to explore all of it before the heat death thing that others in this thread mentioned does us in. Predicting the future that far ahead can’t be anywhere near accurate; remember, there will likely come a day when A.D. 2000 will be considered part of the dark ages.
Oh, and a metabolism based on nuclear fission or fusion probably wouldn’t work. The human metabolism breaks down glucose in a multi-step process because breaking it down in one step would destroy the cell in which the glucose was broken down (essentially, we would char-broil ourselves very quickly if our metabolisms worked that way). Nuclear reactions are several orders of magnitude higher in terms of energy released. No life form (as we know it) would be able to survive for any appreciable length of time using this metabolism.
