What will happen to the universe?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
KH

is there any talk, from a meta POV, of a kind of Copernican view of the history of cosmology, etc?

What i mean is, the standard Copernican principle says (IIUC) that theres nothing unique about earth and its environs.

Applying that to time it would seem odd that, in a universe thats billions of years old, and has billions of years to go, that its JUST NOW that we should have established, to a pretty close degree of truth, exactly how everything began, and how it will end.

Errr...I don't get it.

The concern that you might well be proven completely wrong a hundred years in the future can be brought up in all scientific investigations. Secondly, your pseudo-"Copernican" concern does not make any sense. There's no principle which says that human beings are not unique in the history of the planet Earth, or that our current level of technology and scientific advancement is not unique in the history of the human species. In the past 15 years a mass of obvservations of many different phenomena has made a precise cosmological synthesis feasible where before it was not. Above and beyond that, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Furthermore, there are more scientists alive today than there are scientists who have lived and died through all of human history. More total effort has been put into science in the last 50 years than in all of human history before that. I do not claim to have any final answers, simply better answers than did anybody who came before me.

[KrazyHorse]

More like just taking a certain skeptical POV when non-physicists (or, well, physicists for that matter) worry about the end of the universe, or try to derive metaphysical conclusions from the current statements of physics about the start and end of the universe. It just seems kinda silly is all.

I agree with you. I hate "metaphysics".

More than we know what the physical state of the universe will be like in a few billion years

The physical state of our Universe in a few billion years had better damn well be pretty close to predictions, or else something is quite definitely wrong. I'm much more confident in my ability to predict relevant cosmological measurements as they will be in a billion years than I am in my ability to predict the continued existence of humanity as a species in a hundred years....

[KrazyHorse]

If you want an example of a valid "Copernican" concern in modern cosmology then you don't have to go any further than the discovery that the Universe became dark energy dominated in the very recent past (our current time is much closer to the inflexion point than we have any reason to predict). Why do we just happen to be observing things at a very special time?

Now that's a fact that bothers cosmologists...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
p.s. Blaupanzer, I am a cosmologist

Aren't you a condensed matter kind of physcist?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Vesayen
Shift in climate resulting in a much higher protein and fat diet seems one of the better ones.

Eating more protein and fat alone will not cause an increase in cranial volume.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Eating more protein and fat alone will not cause an increase in cranial volume.

and

Originally posted by Vesayen
There are an ###load of theories on that. Shift in climate resulting in a much higher protein and fat diet seems one of the better ones.

It seems to me you two both agree that the details of how human intelligence evolved are not yet completely understood. What exactly is the nature of your disagreement?

[Berzerker]

Lancer, I believe the largest creature to ever live is alive today - the blue whale

as for the Earth gaining mass, it does gather up debris and gas but it also loses mass through gas leaving the atmosphere and when a big rock hits us, we might even lose mass if the collision is big enough as debris goes flying into space.

Now for the interesting question: is the universe expanding endlessly or will it eventually stop expanding and start contracting, thus ending with a "big crunch"?

Then what? Does the big crunch trigger another big bang and the process repeats? What if the next big bang requires less mass than that contained in the current universe and there is still debris from the previous universe as the crunch triggers the next bang? Wouldn't this cause fluctuations in the background radiation for observers in the next universe?

[Berzerker]

cranial capacity "exploded" within the last ~300,000 years matching well with the DNA "Adam and Eve". Neandertals and sapien sapiens are comparable on average but there are some really large brained modern humans, like double homo erectus who were still living as recently as ~75.000 in Indonesia and may have survived until very recently in the form of the little people recently in the news. I understand some of the early aborigines (Kow Swamp) had much more "primitive" features, heavier bone structure, brow ridge, lower forehead, etc...

Something weird happened about 300,000 years ago, the Sumerians believe their gods created humans by mixing the "blood" of the gods with a creature already in existence - to create slave labor so the gods wouldn't have to work so hard - worship = workship. The Zulu claim the gods created "the artificial ones" and these people waged a war or wars on "the apemen".

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Berzerker

Something weird happened about 300,000 years ago, the Sumerians believe their gods created humans by mixing the "blood" of the gods with a creature already in existence - to create slave labor so the gods wouldn't have to work so hard - worship = workship. The Zulu claim the gods created "the artificial ones" and these people waged a war or wars on "the apemen".

, those ancient sumerians were a gulible lot weren't they.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Geronimo
It seems to me you two both agree that the details of how human intelligence evolved are not yet completely understood. What exactly is the nature of your disagreement?

Ves disagrees with the first statement. That's why.

[Flip McWho]

KH -

Any handy websites or books you would recommend to read on cosmology?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Wouldn't this cause fluctuations in the background radiation for observers in the next universe?

No, because the laws of physics do not transcend the universe they are in.

[DaShi]

How can you be certain?

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by Vesayen
I'm off to work.

Evolution is a simple concept. You don't need a PHD to have a simple understanding of it.

He's right, I understood the basics of evolution when I was 9. The complex feilds that some are citing as proof that evolution is complex is like claming you need to understand relativity or modern concepts like
11-dimentional supergravity in order to understand why an apple falls on your head, when in reality you only need to understand some basic Newtonian physichs or just the concept of gravity.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by DaShi
But really I have no scientific basis for that.

Anyway, about dark energy and dark matter. Has anyone ever figured out what that stuff is?

Another physics question, when you get down to it, isn't everything basically just some form of energy?

Yes, a bright lad named Albert figured that out some time ago.