Neil deGrasse Tyson tells Bill Moyers: ‘We’re on a one-way trip to oblivion’

[kentuck]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/10/neil-degrasse-tyson-tells-bill-moyers-were-on-a-one-way-trip-to-oblivion/

<snip>
The universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told Bill Moyers on Friday, and nothing appears to be able to stop it.

<snip>
“No. There’s no evidence to say that we will ever recycle ourselves,” deGrasse Tyson responded. “All evidence points to we’re on a one-way trip to oblivion. So the universe expands, the temperature of the universe drops, all stars eventually will run out of fuel. So the stars, one by one, in the night sky will turn off. And in the extremely distant future, a quadrillion years into the future, there’ll be no light coming to us in the day or night sky.”

The current term for the force fueling this expansion, deGrasse Tyson explained, is “dark matter,” but he clarified that even that term implied that it has matter.

“What it truly is is dark gravity. Boom,” deGrasse Tyson said. “That’s a problem that’s been around since the 1930s. It’s the longest-standing, unsolved problem in astrophysics.”

.....more

[jsr]

1. Dark energy is responsible for expansion, not dark matter.

[Cali_Democrat]

2. data shows the universe could collapse at any moment

Thanks Obama

http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2013/12/16/data-shows-universe-could-collapse-any-minute/

[Warren DeMontague]

3. I don't buy it. I go in for the ever-expanding infinite budding quantum foam multiverse hypothesis.

As above, so below.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-physics-complications-lend-support-to-multiverse-hypothesis

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. quote from the article

Most particle physicists hoped that a more testable explanation for the cosmological constant problem would be found. None has. Now, physicists say, the unnaturalness of the Higgs makes the unnaturalness of the cosmological constant more significant. Arkani-Hamed thinks the issues may even be related. “We don’t have an understanding of a basic extraordinary fact about our universe,” he said. “It is big and has big things in it.”

I don't think that physicists have any room to disparage philosophers. The harder they work to make philosophers irrelevant, the more they fail.

[Warren DeMontague]

14. Certainly past a certain point one blurs into the other.

Three things are, to my skepticism and science-oriented mind at least, important:

One is to acknowledge the limitations of our current state of knowledge, two is to distinguish accurately between evidence or math based scientific theory and hypothesis AND purely philosophical speculation, and three is to recognize the legitimacy and value OF seeking real scientific answers to these questions, if possible.

[lumberjack_jeff]

47. Each advance of physics doesn't narrow the scope of the unknown, it multiplies it.

Scientists set out to understand the universe and the spacetime in which is resides. Instead, in the worst possible example of scope-creep, they find that the "spacetime" which we experience is only 4 of the 11 total dimensions and our universe is simply a slice of an infinitely large number of potential slices of a meta-universe which creates new universes on an ad hoc basis.

"Creating more questions than it answers" is an accurate cliche'.

I'd add a #4 to Clarke's three laws; the boundaries of physics theory is indistinguishable from an acid trip.

[Warren DeMontague]

53. Yeah, behind every exclamation point is another question mark.

Still, I'm a primate. We're curious, that's the way it is.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

34. His philosophies

[MADem]

54. That website shouldn't try to claim him--as he himself has said...

He's agnostic, and he doesn't really care (he says that pretty much precisely around the three minute mark)...

[DrDan]

61. excellent - already admired him . . . now a tad bit more

[lumberjack_jeff]

66. I like this attitude a lot. n/t

[brooklynite]

4. Damn! Maybe I should cancel my weekend plans...

[hunter]

5. Like a drunk driver speeding down the wrong side of the highway...

... our oblivion is staring us in the face. It seems a bit silly to think about the fate of the universe as our own oblivion.

If we're like most species we will only exist for an instant in deep time.

[Warren DeMontague]

6. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

We're so doomed, even our doom is doomed!

[RainDog]

19. LOL n/t

[Warren DeMontague]

23. Some have, of course, an alternate take:

[RainDog]

26. I thought that would be

this quote:

"Come here Harris, come here. Fuck the doomed!"

flip side - but a version I prefer - I've never like Jagger for some reason.

[kentuck]

36. +1000

good song!

[RainDog]

38. magnolia is the best

from him, imo.

and, here, take the RainDog word association test... Rolling Stones, Fool to Cry, Crazy Mama (oh, I don't like those lyrics/that version, but J.J. is oooooookay.)

The universe is, again, in equilibrium.

eta. and I still can't spell and type at the same time...

[kentuck]

40. That reminds me of ...

Ophelia.....by The Band.

[RainDog]

56. glad you liked it.

here, I'm having a "the world's gonna burn up but for now the weather sucks" luau

[Warren DeMontague]

45. "You play football, Harris?"

Yeah, I was actually never that much of a Rolling Stones fan, myself. For some reason I've had that particular tune stuck in my head for the past day or two, though. No idea why.

[RainDog]

55. yeah

I know how that goes. I've been listening to this to pretend I'm not watching the temperature jump to cold to freaking cold to oh shit that's cold to oh lovely, now rain. Before that it was calypso. lol.

[Throd]

7. I guess I won't bother fixing the side yard gate then.

[LuvNewcastle]

8. I wish I could be here when the lights go out, but I'll be long gone by then.

[longship]

10. Dark matter is not dark energy.

Both are very unfortunately badly named. It is inevitable that the two would be confused.

When the article quotes "dark matter", I am sure that Tyson said "dark energy".

I highly suspect that this is a case of ignorant reportage. And it will not help the public understand science, as usual.

Horrible article. Absolutely horrible.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

29. I read Tyson as saying that the current *nomenclature* is "dark matter"

but he says afterward that dark matter is not a very good term. It's more like *dark gravity* but even that term isn't very good….



He's an astrophysicist talking to a reporter. He has to speak in language the laypeople can understand.

[joshcryer]

63. If you watch the video he mentions both.

He prefers to call dark matter "dark gravity" and dark energy "dark pressure." At least those were his analogies.

Or, alternatively, "Fred" and "Wilma" specifically.

[Tom_Foolery]

11. And I haven't even seen the movie "Her" yet...

I better get my ass to the theater.

[Eleanors38]

12. I've thought it over, and I can slip in another deer hunt

before the precursor fractalgeometric analog to the plasma anomaly rolls into the Nueces Valley.
God, there's a lot of cabbage surrounding Uvalde.

[alterfurz]

13. "We are so far beyond fucked now...

...that the light from fucked won't reach us for 10 million years." -- Roseanne Barr

[zappaman]

15. Awesome!

Now I can tell my wife I don't have to clean out the garage!
What's the point???

[Skittles]

17. the point is, make the most of your time while you're here on this earth

yes INDEED

[zappaman]

18. Exactly!

That's why the garage stays cluttered!

[struggle4progress]

16. I appreciate the concern, but we have more pressing problems right now, Neil

Our sun's going to burn out in only four or five billion years, for example, long long before the universe expands into thermodynamic oblivion

And in the next million years we're likely to have another large asteroid impact, as well as another super-volcanic eruption

Plus, as you may have noticed, the polar ice caps seem to be melting

And about 20 000 kids die every day from starvation and diseases related to poverty

[YOHABLO]

28. You are so right. Let's deal with the problems that haunt us within the next 10 years.

An absolute take over by the Right Wing, Christian Zealots, & Corporations etc.etc.etc.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

35. Don't worry, Tyson's got your back

[kentuck]

20. Don't worry about.

Obama's got it!

[MerryBlooms]

21. Khan!!

[donco]

22. and the last words

heard from our planet will be BENGHAZI.

[eggplant]

24. What would a two-way trip to oblivion look like? n/t

[silverweb]

25. Not worried about this at all.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]What happens to the cosmos billions or trillions of years from now is really pretty irrelevant to us.

I'm a whole lot more worried about Planet Earth and her denizens within the next 100 years or so.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

27. "There is no safety in the cosmos." Alan Watts

[Jessy169]

30. I thought Neil had gone "doomer" on us!

When I read the title, my first thought was that Neil was going to explain the scientific facts of finite resources, global warming and inability of the planet to continue supporting humanity the way we are carrying on. But no! He's talking about total oblivion.

I personally believe that when the universe expands to a certain point, that the stretched material will snap back like a rubber band, all matter will be once again sucked down into an infinitely small point, and it will "big bang" on us again, creating another expanding universe. Just what I like to think...

[BlancheSplanchnik]

33. I don't think about astrophysics often, but when I do

I look at it the same way.

I think the microcosm echoes the macrocosm. One natural law we live within is that all life (and all phenomena, really) follows cycles. Or oscillations, like vibration frequency waves.

Some cycles are in a time frame we can perceive, others are not.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

31. good to know there *will* be an end to Fux Spews. n/t

[Arugula Latte]

32. "All sparks will burn out in the end."

You're answering questions
That have not yet been asked
All sparks will burn out in the end

You burn like you're bouncing
Cigarettes on the road
All sparks will burn out in the end

You're casting opinions
At people who need them
All sparks will burn out in the end

Well, be careful angel
This life is just too long
All sparks will burn out in the end

All sparks will burn out
In the end

[derby378]

37. It's okay...

The two d-branes that collided to produce our universe may collide yet again and spawn yet another universe at the nexus.

Or at least I can hope.

[man4allcats]

39. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorites today, and though

I think he may be right about the ultimate expansion of the universe to the point of "cold death," that scenario may not be true. An oscillating universe with a new big bang could also be true, although if it were/is true, those intelligent beings who experienced it would have no way of knowing that truth since it would have occurred in a new expansion, i.e., a new experience of the universe with a new big bang. Those beings could speculate that it might have happened before (as can we), but there is no way to prove that because doing so would take them beyond space and time, and they, like us, would simply not be qualified to make that trip. I am no expert in these matters, that's for sure, but for those who may be interested, I recommend the following books that I have read or am reading/re-reading (all readable without a degree in advanced mathematics):

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, Ph.D. (re-reading)
The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav (vetted by professional physicists) (read)
The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami, Ph.D. (read)
A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, Ph.D. (read)

[kentuck]

42. In time and space...

we tend to think of tomorrow as going forward in time. How do we know we are not going backwards in time? How do we know that gravity pulls rather than pushes? I think we assume a lot in science.

[Gravitycollapse]

43. You're arguing semantics, not functional differences.

Similar in structure to the "New Riddle of Induction."

Macroscopically, the Universe has an asymmetrical flow of time.

[man4allcats]

48. I agree that we do not know much.

Last edited Sat Jan 11, 2014, 12:31 PM - Edit history (1)

We think we do, but that is probably just an illusion. I read somewhere recently that reality (in terms of time) is presented to us in chunks. We think it's sequential because our minds work in such a way that we interpret things in that manner, but it could very well be that all the chunks - past, present and future - are there already just waiting for us to realize them. There was a weird, crazy scientist (now deceased) named Hugh Everett III, Ph.D. who wrote about such things. There is a book about him and his work entitled The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III by author Peter Byrne. I haven't read it yet, but it is on my list.

[Kaleva]

41. Soon, the oblivian deniers will be showing up here.

[cherokeeprogressive]

44. "...we’re on a one-way trip to oblivion" Fucking hello. Stupidest SHIT I've ever read...

A quadrillion years into the future and US (as in "human existence" I'm assuming) goes into the same sentence HOW?

Fucking STOP already.

[Squinch]

49. I guess I have time to get the laundry done before it hits then. But only barely.

[cherokeeprogressive]

50. Don't use the second rinse cycle. You might find yourself without undies when the Universe ends.

I don't think I've ever read any more pointless BS in my life.

[Squinch]

51. It's up there with the "what will earth be like after the people all die off?"

As information goes, that's not that useful.

[cherokeeprogressive]

52. I know the answer to that question by the way...

It will be like...

A satellite without humans.

Think about it... Earth is a HUMAN construct.

Without humans, what is "Earth"?

A satellite.

[joshcryer]

64. I assume 'we' as in "the contents of the universe."

The fact that neutrons decay rapidly and the fact that all living matter has them I suspect life will decay eventually. That's not the question.

[Vashta Nerada]

46. The Earth won't survive to a quadrillion years from now.

It'll be engulfed by the dying sun in another four-and-a-half billion years or so.

[Nevernose]

57. But if it doesn't (50/50 chance)

It will be about a hundred quintillion years before the orbit finally fails and we fall into the dwarf star that Sol used to be. So, there's that to look forward to

[Vashta Nerada]

58. Hmmm.

What's going to happen in a centillion years? Or a googolplex years, which is 10^googol?

[Nevernose]

59. No idea. I just happened to see this chart earlier :)

http://io9.com/speculative-timeline-looks-quadrillions-of-years-into-t-1498735543

[Vashta Nerada]

60. Here's an idea:

In the PBS science program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 9: "The Lives of the Stars", astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan estimated that writing a googolplex in standard form (i.e., "10,000,000,000...&quot would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than is available in the known universe.

A typical book can be printed with 10^6 zeros (around 400 pages with 50 lines per page and 50 zeros per line). Therefore it requires 10^94 such books to print all zeros of googolplex. If each book has a size of 210 mm × 297 mm × 13 mm, the total volume of all the books is 8.1×10^90 m3, which is many orders of magnitude larger than the visible universe, which has a volume of 'only' 4×10^80 m3.

With only about 10^80 elementary particles in the observable universe, even if only one elementary particle is used to represent each digit, there are not enough particles to represent a googolplex.

Printing digits of a googolplex in one long line would be unreasonable, even in one-point font (0.353 mm per digit). Writing a googolplex in that font would take about 3.53×10^97 meters. The observable universe is estimated to be 8.80×10^26 metres, or 93 billion light-years in diameter; the required line to write the necessary zeroes is therefore 4.0×10^70 times as long as the observable universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex

I cannot even wrap my mind around the enormity of a googolplex.

[joshcryer]

62. Dark energy could be an illusion.

I suspect Tyson isn't up on the latest in theories on this subject. He needs a refresher. If the local galactic flow is moving faster than other flows then the measurements could easily be off. And there's no suggestion that it can't be flowing faster because everything is relative anyway.

My guess is that the universe is unstable and we'll have a vacuum collapse eventually. But it might not happen until the universe is hundreds of trillions of years old. Or it's happening now. No way to know.

[RainDog]

65. ...

[TheKentuckian]

67. I'm more of a hand to mouth thinker, let's focus on the next 10 billion years or so

and see how that goes.