I’d heard that “runaway expansion” or inflation was considered one possibility. Is it now favored enough that one can comfortably say the portions of space-time are currently receding from us at ftl (expansionary/inflationary) rates? Have competing models pretty much been knocked down? (Last I saw on the subject was in Scientific American, some months ago, but they seemed to suggest it was only one idea in a wider field of competing notions.)
(My old Astronomy prof spoke of going to conventions in the 70s and 80s, where there would be informal votes on whether or not Cygnus X-1 was a black hole or not. Each year, the votes swung more and more in favor. He emphasized that science is not done by voting…but he also noted that, sometimes, consensus among scientists resembles voting in some ways.)
Der Trihs: I’ve heard of that sf story, but have never actually read it. Sounds like fun!
Hans Moravec alludes, in non-fiction, to the idea, in his book “Mind Children,” in the chapter on Limits to Computation.
ETA: if memory serves, Moravec’s idea was to set up a computer to solve a very difficult question, such as factoring a very large composite number into two primes. The computer would simply guess at the answer, and then multiply the two guess-estimates together to see if they produced the original composite number. If so, hooray, the problem is solved. If not, you destroy the cosmos. Since we only continue to exist in those rare cosmoses where the problem is solved correctly, then, by a variant of the anthropic principle, we can solve huge problems in a shorter time than we ought to.
This is what I think is the most probable (well, to the extent that anything can be predicted when talking about events this abstract). I imagine it like an uncut block of Swiss cheese; many expanding bubbles of destruction, each centered around some alien scientist who pressed the Big Red Button. The universe is so incredibly, unbelievably, indescribably big, though, that the chances of our little planet being caught up in one of these bubbles during our lifespans is infinitesimal. Still possible, though. But there’s literally absolutely nothing to do about it, so worrying is pointless.
It’s rather poetic when you think about it; if one of the waves of destruction came to Earth, we’d first see one star in the far distance extinguished - then another, and another, and another. Long before it actually came to our doorsteps, we’d be watching its progress.
But did he at any point say it would be inevitable?
That given an extremely large number of possible worlds and an extremely large period of time, anything that’s nominally possible will happen, is not necessarily how things work.
OTOH erasing existence itself is one rockin’ awesome achievement
Apparently the hypothetical accelerator in question would have to be the size of the earth. So the universe might be here because destroying it is just too costly to bother with. Also the calculation might be wrong anyway.
It’s got nothing to do with inflation, it’s a feature of bog-standard big bang cosmology: if the universe expands at a constant rate, then whatever’s two times as far away from us recedes two times as quickly, and at some point, that’ll simply increase beyond the speed of light. It’s often said that this is allowed because it’s ‘space itself’ moving that fast, not the stuff in space, but really, it’s more accurate to say that velocity in general relativity is a local notion, so the bound of c simply doesn’t apply in this case.
There are, in fact, galaxies that we can observe which are travelling away from us at a speed faster than c (which we can observe because their light was emitted way in the past). See the discussion in the ‘faster than light’-article on wikipedia.
Sounds like a variation on: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
This is, I think, one of the stronger arguments for either Quantum Immortality or for the concept that we’re living in a Matrix.
QI Interpretation: the universe has been destroyed (or never actually came into being). Billions of times. However we’re not aware of those universes, because we’re not in them. If we were ever in one of those destroyed universes, that version of us just ceased to exist- but “we” still exist in some universe, no matter how likely.
It’s a great hypothesis, but completely untestable.
Matrix Interpretation: whoever made the Matrix engineered the universe such that we’re either the first species intelligent enough to destroy it, or they put in safeguards to keep us stupid little algorithms from screwing everything up the whole simulation.
Perhaps they did and due to the limit of the speed of light, we just haven’t realized it yet.
The universe may have been destroyed many years ago. But we just may not have seen the effect yet. It could take thousands of years for that “Bang” to get to our door.
