From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 23 1998 - 16:56:52 MST
"Billy Brown" <bbrown@conemsco.com> writes:
> The short answer is, you can't. There are all sorts of fancy tricks you can
> use to keep yourself going for a very long time, but you can't reverse
> entropy. The energy density of the universe declines until it becomes
> impossible to build any sort of organized system.
On the other hand, you also have a lower temperature and more space
which can be used to put the ever lower energy to better uses - the
signal / noise ratio gets better, and previously too disordered energy
can be used. The important thing here is is which factors increase the
fastest; this seems to be dependent on the actual development history
of the universe and can be tricky to calculate a priori.
> Fortunately, it doesn't matter. The entire big bang/inflation model has
> been under increasing strain for the last two decades, as it becomes
> increasingly difficult to reconcile its predictions with actual
> observations.
Even if that is true it doesn't change the problem of indefinite
survival. As far as I know nobody is suggesting steady state theories
at least, and without them you get a Dyson or Tipler choice, so to
say.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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