Nullnor+DMT+Fresno Bob = ????

[nullnor]

i should start my own website like Kevin Trudeau and call it The Universe, answers they don't want you to know about. although i am not handsome enough to pull it off.

yeah that was pretty weird, i was able to sit there for 12 hours and think. i had a crazy friend once that i saw go schizophrenic. for him it wasn't a one night thing tho. i am drinking now again but, it's also a combination of getting old. when you get older time goes by slower. it's proportional. obviously.

you'd never know it but in addition to having a super immune system, i also have an anti-crazy gene. even if i have trouble convincing people i do. or you can look at it this way, everyone is crazy, unless they have an anti-crazy gene. because i surely would've gone crazy by now. so i got that going for me...which is nice.

[rhd]

i suppose i can't stress enough the privileged situation that our technologically advanced civilization currently finds itself in. the universe is expanding. someday future technological civilizations will never be able to see that the universe had a beginning. space will expand so fast and far that all the juicy things we are able to see right now will not be visible to them. the only way they will ever know is by making some sort of contact. or somehow passing the information along.

If we had been around about 5 billion years ago, we would have no way of knowing that the universe's expansion was accelerating because back then it wasnt. Gravity had been slowing it down up til then so our theories might have been that it would eventually stop expanding and contract into a big crunch. We dont even know why the expansion is accelerating, just that it is because of some unknown force which we call "dark energy". The universe is in its 4th phase of expansion now. What makes us think that this is the last one? The universe is "only" 13.8 billion yrs old. The longest-lived stars wont burn out until around 100 trillion years from now so there potentially could be intelligent life at least until then. And there is quantum phase change which could change everything. There is so much that our science hasnt discovered yet about our universe. I dont think it is wise to draw conclusions about the meaning of the universe from it.

[nullnor]

but we wouldn't have been around 5 billion years ago. nobody would. you'd have to take all the sciences and put it together. galaxies to collide and stars to reform to forge the necessary materials. there were no stars in the early universe stable enough to support life. only now is the universe stable enough. even then it's still kind of early. this is why we haven't found anyone else yet.

there was an article in discover once where Max Tegmark was on his 'is the universe mathematical thing'. and he was talking to some kids in a classroom and one of them asked if space went on forever? because no-one knows.

i don't know how long a red dwarf sun will last. is it 50 billion years or 50 trillion? but why would something be created to last longer than the universe. it would seem to be an awful waste of time. so you have to look at what the universe is trying to do. and then make all the parts fit. like mechanic.

i do think one of the important answers is knowing it had a beginning. not withstanding everything we seem to know, there's no way the universe is ever going to have a big crunch.

i don't know. i suppose i am falling into the 'we are truly unique trap. and it sort of pisses me off that the universe is set up to hide it's best secrets even when you are in a unique position to know it is.

[rhd]

only now is the universe stable [enough to support life]. even then it's still kind of early. this is why we haven't found anyone else yet.

Both of these assertions are completely unsupported by anything I've ever heard about. Solar systems w complex elements out of which life could have evolved have been around for billions of years. The universe probably is teeming w life in billions of places, perhaps even in our own solar system. Intelligent life may be a different question, tho. There are many reasons given for why we havent found any intelligent life yet. Most compelling to me is the fact that stars are separated by such tremendously great distances and effective travel at any significant fraction of the speed of light seems so difficult to achieve.

there was an article in discover once where Max Tegmark was on his 'is the universe mathematical thing'. and he was talking to some kids in a classroom and one of them asked if space went on forever? because no-one knows.

The universe may be mathematical in nature - or maybe not. All we really know is that math is what we use to study it. The fact that it works so well might be an illusion, like the way that modern physicists say cause and effect is an illusion.

i don't know how long a red dwarf sun will last. is it 50 billion years or 50 trillion? but why would something be created to last longer than the universe.

The longest-lived red dwarfs are expected to live 100 TRillion years. But the universe will go on far longer than that. Black holes eventually evaporate and the last ones wont do that until an unimaginably longer time than that. A black hole w merely the mass of the sun wont evaporate for an estimated 10 to the power of 67 years. The biggest black holes are billions of times bigger than that. Of course, as I said, a quantum phase change could change everything.

not withstanding everything we seem to know, there's no way the universe is ever going to have a big crunch.

No big crunch according to what we now know about the universe, but we probably couldnt have known that 5 billion years ago and the universe may undergo a new phase of expansion because of some forces that we havent discovered yet that may cause it to eventually contract. The point is that the limitations of science limit what we can know about the fate of the universe.

and it sort of pisses me off that the universe is set up to hide it's best secrets even when you are in a unique position to know it is.

This is exactly how it seems to me. There is still an unbelievable amount that science will tell us about the universe, but it gives up its secrets w great difficulty.

[nullnor]

The longest-lived red dwarfs are expected to live 100 Trillion years. But the universe will go on far longer than that. Black holes eventually evaporate and the last ones wont do that until an unimaginably longer time than that. A black hole w merely the mass of the sun wont evaporate for an estimated 10 to the power of 67 years. The biggest black holes are billions of times bigger than that. Of course, as I said, a quantum phase change could change everything

i always thought that stat was amazing. the bigger the black hole the longer it lasts. i think the slower it rotates and loses heat and energy and mass. and how long it would take. they would say longer than the universe. if someone ever asked what the longest lasting object in the universe, it would be a supermassive black hole. if you were to use wormholes to travel, or if you could turn one into a time machine it will always be around. and it would be the last form of energy. i always like that idea, i think there is a name for it. you can bounce an electron off a black hole or is it a positron? a black hole has a negative charge and sucks in positively charged matter. and make it bounce back and forth for your kinetic energy needs... i sometimes wonder if the universe is a giant black hole. actually it would be more like a white hole.

i haven't thought about quantum phase change. you mean like the universe expanding so fast it overwhelms the electromagnetic force? i believe if that happened electromagnetism would get stronger and prevent it. although i don't have any science behind it. i suppose someone could try to work it out on paper. we would probably know at what point expansion would and how the other forces would have to adjust, if that were possible or realistic.

i think they say red dwarfs happen later and the first stars were blue giants. like really huge. the bigger the star the shorter life so did they say some first stars only lasted 100 millions years? but red dwarfs bode well for life. they make up a 3rd of all stars now and the environment if much more stable and longer lasting. a planet's habitable zone would be close to the star. i guess if there were solar flares it would make it more dangerous. but i think as a sun gets older it has less.

sure there could be some technologically intelligent life that developed before us. i like to think a few that developed 5 billion years before us. that would be neat. there is a trend as the universe gets older it becomes more conducive to multicellular life. so we got that going for us. which is nice.

[rhd]

if you were to use wormholes to travel...

You hear about wormholes a lot as a possible way to travel around the universe. This seems pretty far-fetched to me. I read somewhere that in order to make a wormhole big enough and keep it open long enough for a spacecraft to go thru, it would take half of the energy of the entire Milky Way galaxy. But even if you could create a wormhole and travel thru it, how could you control where you came out? And then how could you ever get back? Whatever means you used to create the wormhole that you went thru would be unavailable to you to create another one to come back thru. So it would be seemingly completely impractical even if somehow you could do it.

i sometimes wonder if the universe is a giant black hole. actually it would be more like a white hole.

This is another fascinating subject. A white hole theoretically is what's on the other side of a black hole. So a black hole in 1 universe would be a white hole in another. Some people think that's what the big bang was, the creation of a black hole in some "higher" universe which created this universe via a white hole. But black holes, at least the ones in this universe, continue to swallow up matter. If this universe is a white hole, then matter would continue to flow into this universe from the higher one, at least as long as the black hole in the higher universe existed, which should be a very long time. If this is true, the universe would have a more or less constant influx of matter into it, which could turn into material out of which galaxies, stars, planets and life could be formed. So star formation could continue long after the current galaxies become "dead". So even after the smallest current red dwarfs died out after a 100 trillion years or so, the universe would not be dead for life but it could possibly continue for an unimaginably long time after that. A very attractive idea. But, as far as I know, no one has ever found evidence of new material flowing in or otherwise being created in this universe. Perhaps this is 1 reason why many scientists dont think this is the case.

i haven't thought about quantum phase change. you mean like the universe expanding so fast it overwhelms the electromagnetic force?

Off the top of my head, a quantum phase change is a change to the laws of physics of the universe that occurs for a quantum mechanical reason, i.e., randomly, in a certain region of space and this change is propagated across the rest of the universe at the speed of light. So, the "immutable" laws of physics that we have discovered would be wiped out and replaced by some new set of laws, which theoretically would cause all matter in the universe to disintegrate and perhaps organize again in a different way under the new set of laws. Some people think that somehow the laws of the universe already have changed slightly, e.g., the speed of light may have been slightly different in the past (definitely a minority view). Anyway, for all we know a quantum phase change has already happened and just hasnt had time to reach us yet because it is "only" travelling at light speed. This is an incredibly scary idea. If the essence of what people are is some form of energy, like "soul" energy, that we dont know anything about scientifically, it strikes me that this energy still has a physical nature to it which is subject to the laws of the universe, some of which we perhaps havent found yet. If quantum phase change disintegrates all the physical things in the universe, our souls may be disintegrated, too. How our souls would survive this event may be one of the most important questions of the universe.

i think they say red dwarfs happen later and the first stars were blue giants. like really huge. the bigger the star the shorter life so did they say some first stars only lasted 100 millions years? but red dwarfs bode well for life. they make up a 3rd of all stars now and the environment if much more stable and longer lasting. a planet's habitable zone would be close to the star. i guess if there were solar flares it would make it more dangerous. but i think as a sun gets older it has less.

ACtually, I think red dwarfs make up at least 90% of stars. Yes, they emit massive solar flares that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for life to arise and be sustained. Their rotation slows down over time so the flares get less intense, or at least less frequent. So, at some point in the future after their flares get less intense, they may be good candidates for life. But their planets probably would become tidally locked so that the same side always faces the star and the other side always faces away, like our moon. This may make it too hot on the bright side and too cold on the dark side. But life perhaps could survive in regions in between the light and dark side. Also, some of these could be "eyeball" planets, where any water there would be mostly frozen, but might be liquid in the center of the bright side. So maybe life could exist near the shores of the "eyeball" lake. If we can overcome the problems of inter-stellar space travel, we have a nearby red dwarf to study which has at least 1 planet - Proxima Centauri, about 4.2-4.3 light years away.

sure there could be some technologically intelligent life that developed before us. i like to think a few that developed 5 billion years before us. that would be neat. there is a trend as the universe gets older it becomes more conducive to multicellular life. so we got that going for us. which is nice.

One of the great mysteries of life on Earth is why it took so long for complex life to arise. It probably was impossible for life to survive in the late heavy bombardment period, which ended about 4 billion years ago. But we think life arose "only" about 150-200 million years after that. Then it was another 3.2 billion years before macroscopic life arose. AFAIK, we dont have much of an idea rt now why this took so long. I've never heard that as the universe gets older it becomes more conducive to multicellular life. Why would that be?

[nullnor]

i think as the universe gets older there are less galaxies merging. they say it's hazardous. maybe it depends on the sizes. like a smaller galaxy can merge with a bigger one and people living in the bigger one would survive. and there are collisions with asteroids and comets, as more time passes i think there would be less stuff to bump into. and there would be less stars going supernova. although there would be more black holes and gamma ray bursts maybe. but i think single celled organisms could survive on a planet hit with a GRB.

i am just guessing. there's probably a lot of examples. maybe the bigger shorter lived stars help spread out the materials needed for life by creating more stars. but there could be counter reasons to some of those examples. merging galaxies cause stars to explode but create new ones. or developing life is assisted by having a moon, or by panspermia which happen by collisions.

multicelled life happened on earth very shortly after the atmosphere had enough oxygen. it took 3.2 billion years for the singlecelled guys to convert the methane and stuff, but once they did it didn't take long. perhaps you could use something besides oxygen but it seems to work pretty good. potentially it's not that it took life that long to turn multi. it took earth that long to get oxygen. i suppose if you terraformed a planet artificially it wouldn't take as long.

[nullnor]

we really should be terraforming mars right now i guess. i don't know how long it would take but pollution on earth would be an atmosphere on mars. would do you think a 1000 years? and then one day we'd have a second planet in the solar system. we could use all the dirty fuels we want on mars and it would be a good thing. i think technological intelligent life should have 2 planets in a solar system. i don't think it's too greedy. there are what 9 or 10 planets!?.. i think they can give us 2 of them. also, another neat thing when our solar system first formed there were like 20 planets. so they crashed into each other over time or got flung out farther maybe. i don't know how long that took. i like to think it all adds up to making us early birds in the universe.

and then we could go to venus if we ever solve the global warming thing and suck the atmosphere out! like in the movie spaceballs. we would need to build a mega maid.

[Steve 2.0]

we really should be terraforming mars right now i guess..

You mean RIGHT NOW? Like right this minute? DAMNATION, dude.