IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!! Well… eventually anyways…
Maybe it’s cause I gorged myself on SMBC or it’s my early college roots popping up (was a physics major for a bit), but I’ve been on a crazy Physics kick lately. Doesn’t help they’ve got tons of great stuff on YouTube with stuff like Michio Kaku talking about all kinds of crazy sciency stuff. So I had a numbingly long rant planned… but I think I’ll split that up a bit. Probably should try to be ever so slightly entertaining on a comic site, huh?
Anyways, one of the more troubling things running through my head at the moment is the mortality of not just the Human race, or Earth, but the Universe as a whole. No, not in the morbid cry in the corner sense, but just a realization that the whole thing has an expiration date. It’s kinda messed up when you really think about it.
Ok, so May 21, 2011 was a bust… Maybe we’ll have better luck in October or 2012. But in the slight chance we make it through, despite what all the doom sayers and global warming activists and what have yous (yous is a word? wth?)… The world will actually end. No, not in any of our lifetimes mind you and it’s not something I heard from crazy Joe down on the street corner, but it’s science (cosmology). Fact is… Sun’s gonna get hot. Hotter that is. In about 500 million to 1.5 billion years, Earth won’t be able to support life. Ok, so we figure something out… We’re clever right? Make a deflector dish or fall back on that Nuclear Winter… Too bad, Sun goes kablewy in 5 billion years. Not to mention, around that time, our galaxy will collide with another one (which includes an innumerable variety of was we could go splat). And should we somehow escape our fates, the Universe goes lights out in 10 to the power of 100 years (that’s a long long time). (well… under the assumption the Universe is just in an expansive 3 dimensions… “could” even wrap back around like all curved… and… what? maybe?)
Now, we all thought that things are cyclical… an ecosystem on a grand scale. That once it reaches the end, gravity sucks it all back together and bigbang v2.o and so on and so forth. Then we find out, oh wait, gravity isn’t working as intended and everything is actually moving away from eachother… accelerating! Completely contrary to all logic (which is theorized as a relation to Dark Matter/Energy… but that’s a rant for another time… you’ll like that one! heh!) and somewhat disheartening. Because, well… it means when it ends… it really ends!
So now that I’ve bored you to death comes the polling part! Perhaps it’s just me, but I have a strange desire to know what will become of our species and well… the whole rest of it when the time comes. I mean, it seems almost futile… We’re here for a blip on the radar then poof? At least the whole “re-bigbang” part gives hope that it’s persistent and infinite. But then again… maybe “immortality” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Maybe there’s a reason we have an expiration date. Or heck, maybe we just don’t know what the heck is going on. The more I look at physics and the theories, the more it seems like nobody’s got a clue yet. We get a little further each time though. So maybe we’ll have this thing cracked in a few million years. >)
Anywho… Hope this isn’t bringing anyone down… just thought it was kind of an interesting subject to consider. (and I promise not to do any crazy rants like this too often)
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Sounds like something that’s going to ruin somebody else’s weekend plans.
I might be cynical (might?) but considering how destructive we are, it’ll probably be for the best that we get stopped eventually.
Also, I can’t help but feel paranoid that this physics rant is your revenge for those rants I did about BioArt and the one where I explained why hyenas aren’t canines. I mean how the heck did you know physics is my least favorite science?! *paranoia*
well… when I have my backyard bbq 1.5 billion years from now, I’ll be sure to wear sunscreen.
but but… physics is fun! >D and I know all! mwahahahahhahaha!
hey, it was ME you were trying to explain the hyena thing.
i was already explained that before, but a narrow-minded zealot has a reputation to uphold so now ill doing a trip to africa ( because the whole lot of african countries have hyenas on its national territories, right? right!) to make them all learn to catch the stick :)
Eh, the way I see it all things have to come to an end sometime. Everyone is dying every second of every day. Nothing is really gonna change that. You just have to make the most of the time you are given. Worrying about what you can’t really control is a waste of time, it’s better to just enjoy what you have. Sure, the Earth is gonna blow up eventually, all the trees and junk are gonna burn, but that’s no reason not to go for a walk in your local park and enjoy them while they are here. Sure, the people on this planet are gonna be dead someday, but they aren’t now. Go enjoy a cup of coffee with them.
I try to just focus on today, and making today the best today it can be. Tomorrow I’ll worry about tomorrow, too busy with today to think about it. ^^,
Of course… I always have been a positive thinker.
*walks away humming Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”*
well… except for vampires!
my theory is that nature seems to have a way of balancing itself, so there’s probably something going on under the hood that’ll set things straight. earth however is probably screwed, but I’m sure life will find a way.
i am indeed more worried about the mortality of the individual than in the ending of the universe ( how do they even “know” it will end)
and yes life will find a way, because evil will always find a way.
good and evil are just human constructs… look at all these bugs we hate and try to kill. they sometimes adapt and become immune/resistant to pesticides. same with them germ things too. so I’m sure life can figure things out… though I’m sure the only thing to survive a heat death and a big bang would be roaches… XP
The big blob of text reminds me a little of the Futurama episode “The Late Philip J. Fry”.
I wish I had something interesting to say
hmm… don’t remember that. guess that means I need to rewatch all the futuramas huh. speaking of… where the heck did that show go? last I heard it was on comedy central and ran a small bit of new episodes them vanished… sigh… a shame too cause I loved that series more than the simpsons!
the simpsons started to go really bad after season 15, but here in argentina you can still see futurama on fox and the first and second movies have been adapted into episodes.
Honestly, we’re all gonna die someday, and very few of us will actually have a say in the when and how. If the world goes kaplooey next year, or the year after that, no biggie.
unless, ya know, you go into a suicide booth (darnit Hammokguy! now my head’s filled with futurama!)
lol, especially if you’re on it when it happens… won’t matter a whole lot after that. >)
Oh sh-.. you just made me enter another wiki-physics spree (last time started from boson, finishing on pulsars and the Chandreskar limit). Thinking caps on!
PS. Why so serious? :P A little optimism, mate ^_^
just got through some nice bbc eps on black holes and string theory. weird stuff man… weird stuff. still not 100% about this boson business… gonna have to take a refresher on that.
ha, don’t get me wrong… I’m not like going emo with this and getting pulled down and sad… no no, I just found it interesting that we know there’s a real doomsday, yet we haven’t really ramped up production, of… oh say… interstellar space ships and reseeding other planets and stuff. heck, we just shut down (the US) our own space program for like 5-10 years or more. (ok, that’s over dramatic, but they aren’t running shuttles for a while, which is kind of sad)
I think that we will blow up the universe before it dies on its own, as in yes, we will make it out of our galaxy before it collides
perhaps… with our insane resource stripping and ever increasing warlike ways, we blow up the universe causing the next big bang to restart the cycle! see! it’s fine that we’re a species of insane monkeys flinging 50 megaton poops at eachother! it’s good for the survival of the universe!
wow, with that kind of logic, I should run for office!
for some reason, all those 50 megaton loads of poop, (except for 2 very infamous ones) are gathering dust on a military base somewhere, which makes you think, if those things are not allowed to be used, why not stop making them and dissasembling the existing ones? maybe they are planning to use them when they can no longer take resources from other countries the easy way? who i am accusing of that? you know who you are.
fun fact, they actually DO use them! I forget the number, it’s on wiki somewhere, but since like 1996 they’ve dropped hundreds of thousands of cumulative megatons worth of bombs! yeah, I’m pretty sure nuclear winter is more of an exaggeration…
they drop them for testing purposes, but it’s surprising that it still goes on and in such volume.
galaxies crashing each other? antimatter? the sun blowing up? science refutes myths and legends and replaces them with other ones.
dont tassume that all theories are right, centuries ago a lot of people took for granted the world was flat ( or so the history books tell us).
that kinda goes with another mini I’m working on actually… but yeah, anything we think we know now is just nothing more that a really good educated guess. in 10 years… 100 years… 1000 etc… just think how ridiculous we’ll all look for thinking e=mc2! (that’s a squared… not times 2)
actually, one of the fun things I ran into was the debate on the shape of the universe. you’d think it was just 3d, but many argue it’s actually flat or a big curve (which is fun cause it’d mean we’d collide into a big bang anyways). guess history really does go full circle huh?