From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 13:05:29 MDT
Sabine Atkins forwards from http://www.nature.com/nsu/020520/020520-11.html:
> Life can go on forever
>
> An accelerating universe does not have to fry life.
> 27 May 2002
>
> PHILIP BALL
>
> Life can carry on indefinitely. Physicists in the United States have come
> to the comforting conclusion that just because the universe is accelerating
> as it expands, this does not necessarily sound the death knell for life in
> the far future[1], as some have claimed[2].
We discussed this paper just last week, see the archives at
Reference 2 provides a good explanation of why this new result is wrong.
It is available at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9902189:
: ... while the Universe might expand forever, the integrated conscious
: lifetime of any civilization will be finite, although it can be
: astronomically long. We find that this latter result is far more
: general. In the absence of possible exotic and uncertain strong
: gravitational effects, the total information recoverable by any
: civilization over the entire history of our universe is finite, and
: assuming that consciousness has a physical computational basis, life
: cannot be eternal.
Contrary to the introductory paragraph above from Nature, the new paper
does not in any way contradict or even address the analysis in this paper
by Krauss and Starkman. The K/S paper essentially recapitulates Tipler's
analysis of why life is inherently limited in an expanding universe.
Astonishingly, they do not credit or reference Tipler, indeed they give
no evidence that they are aware that they are retreading ground which
he covered in his 1994 book.
The bottom line is that in an expanding universe, life is inherently
finite in what it can accomplish. There is a limit on complexity that
cannot be broken. I understand that some people take comfort in the
thought of endlessly cyclying through their old memories, but IMO it
would be a cruel hoax for the universe to play on us, offering a ghostly
half-life with no possibility of growth or redemption. It might be
physically pleasant, but from the philosophical standpoint it sounds
hellish. Life means growth, and if you're not growing, you're not
really living.
Hal
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