My big question on the universe is this.
Given that time past is infinite, why is it taking so long for the universe to reach equilibrium ? Billions of stars not yet burnt out…how long is this going to take?
I asked the same question recently. As best I recall, the answer was that no one is sure.
Sorry I was absent from this thread for awhile. FWIW anyone can feel free to hijack this thread in any way they see fit assuming the hijack still at least in some small way pertains to the gist of this whole thing.
Others have already done a good job of expounding on what I was talking about but if it helps I’ll try to be more clear.
You can play the game of ‘what came before’ ad naseum. Even if you wish to invoke God you can still ask the same thing of God (i.e. where did God come from?). If you want to say that God is eternal then I see no reason why you can’t say the Universe is eternal without a need for God.
So these guys (mentioned in the OP) and suggest that something must be out there, be it God or a law of nature, that forced our Universe to be the way it is. That is, they seem to suggest that you just can’t leave it to random chance because the chances of our particular Universe happening the way it did are astronomically small.
I still don’t see why it can’t just be plain old dumb luck no matter how improbable it is. If the Universe is eternal (an assumption I know) then why can’t the Universe have recycled itself a jillion (scientific term) times before now and had a jillion different results? Some with life and many without?
Of course you can opt for a Many Worlds Interpretation in which case all possible Universes exist simultanesously. While it solves many problems as far as the OP is concerned is it a bit out there even though it’s kinda cool to think about.
Finally, I thought by definition we cannot ever know what ‘caused’ our Universe assuming it had a cause (that is an initial state before the Universe as we know it came into existence that determined how our Universe would be). Once back to the Big Bang singularity (or whatever it was, a Brane Universe perhaps) you lose the ability to predict or know anything.
I’m not sure I follow the question. Our Universe is on the order of 15 or so billion years old (give or take 5 billion years) as near as astronomers can tell. If our Universe recycles itself then the last go around was 15 billion years ago. If the Universe isn’t infinite (in terms if existence) then it just started 15 billion years ago.
I suppose you could also speculate that the Universe out beyond 15 billion light years (assuming there is space there) is older and everything out that way is burnt out but we could never know such a thing.
For my money I think the Universe does recycle itself. My evidence? None whatsoever. It just appeals to my aethetic sense. Also, the alternative of a Universe chilling out to practical nothingness for eternity is depressing so I choose the recycled Universe be it a Big Crunch (which doesn’t seem likely), a Brane Universe as linked to above, de Sitter space (which I know nothing about), Many Worlds or something else no one has thought of (or I forgot to list).
Here’s some misconceptions I spotted…
From grienspace:
Sorry, no can do. There was an initiation, a “t=0” point. It’s called the Big Bang. If there was infinite time in the past, then you’d be right in expecting a Heat Death universe. Unless we had too high an initial density in which case we’d all be on top of each other in a singularity by now. The question “why is it taking so long to reach equilibrium?” is a wonderfully hot topic in cosmology these days. Lib is cursorly right in saying we don’t exactly know why, but we do have some very good clues. First of all, inflation (or quintessence or something like it) drives the universe to a point where it will be in a very stable growth pattern, not too fast or the stars and galaxies can’t form and not too slow or we end up back in that singularity. We have very good evidence right now that such an expansion epoch occurred in our universe. Any further answer at this point is basically speculation about the nature of vacuum energy densities and theories of quantum general relativity.
From ElJeffe
Or perhaps not. That’s the beauty of inflation, it doesn’t matter what kind of nonsense happened, the universe had to turn out the way it did because of the “nature” of the vacuum energy density. One (or at least a minimum number of) initial condition driving all the rest.
Unless our concept of nothing is fundamentally flawed.
Why did there have to be a “nothing” (mental contruct invented by humans) for the universe to come out of?
If the idea that “nothing” is a logical starting point (or the idea that we have to have a starting point for that matter) is thrown out as being baseless, nothing more than a usefull theory for how the universe currently works, (not to mention helpful with maths ;)), then first cause itself, let alone argument of what that first cause is, is up for grabs.
There no areas of “complete non-existence” we can find any proof of now. Just space between matter.
[pure bullshit I just made up]
Just because you have “nothing” between your bits of matter and energy now doesn’t mean that that was ever all there was. You might as well posit the “great disapearance”. At some point, the universe was just chock full of stuff, and one day, most of it started disapearing. Heck, the only reason we had the big bang is because all the other stuff except for one highly concentrated area just disapeared into non-existence, and the resulting instability and breaking of energy bonds caused the initial outward explosion we theorize from the universe’s expantion [/bullshit]
The big bang, universe expanding stuff, just supports the idea that everything was more compressed (possibly extremely compressed into one area) at some point prior to now. We’re just theorizing that there was some point at which it all had to begin because we think and live in a linear fashion through time a space. Time and existence do not necessarily “exist” in a form that can be understood in a linear way.
Cause and causelessness of existence, let alone the origin of life as we know it are interesting to consider. All the theories I’ve run across rely on so many “givens” that I’m not prepared to “give”, that they make for interesting speculation, not convincing logic.
I don’t think there’s any more or les proof for accidental than anything else. Forget statistics of “how the universe was likely to be formed”. How likely is it that it was never formed and simply is? At that point, likely and unlikely are meaningless.
How that for what’s “likely”?
I was thinking about my response here, and I thought maybe I should expound on it a little. When one makes the assumption that there are very few initial configurations that would lead to “life”, what data is one using? We basically know of only one type of life - that on Earth. And while all the different life-forms on Earth may seem diverse to us, they have really all stemmed from the same place. In actuality, there is only one type of life here, with a lot of variations on that one type. If we were not carbon-based life forms, would we even be able to conceive of such a thing as a carbon-based life form? How is it that we imagine ourselves to be not only capable of conceiving of ANY type of “life”, but in addition, able to rule them all out. We currently have the capability to observe a very limited part of our own solar system, and have only recently encountered evidence of planets in other solar systems. I don’t see how this qualifies us to rule out all other conceivable states of the universe as being impossible for life to develop. We don’t even have a firm grasp of how life came about here on Earth - how can we say “It had to have happened exactly this way, or it could not have happened at all.”? There simply is not enough evidence to make such a definitive statement.