Metal Storm logo
The Universe



Posts: 197   Visited by: 214 users

Original post

Posted by , 15.10.2006 - 08:17
No way, there is no thread about the universe in Metalstorm? Was there ever one?

Anyway, the universe is always a great thing to talk about as it always sparks up many debates. I personally beleive that our universe is part of a galaxy that is a part of many galaxies that is part of many nebulas, etc... that exist inside of a layer (a molecular outer film that is very thick and is very hot) that seperates us from other nebulas that also have layers around them; you could call them shields if you want. Basically, that everything inside of our layer would consist of humanoid life. There would thus be multiple constructs of this sort orbiting around that hold different alien lifeforms all made up of a collection of nebulas. All matter around these great orbiting constructs would be simply nothing; not even space; just empty white space. Another arguement one could further get into is that there is one great being, even greater then God, who would control all of these orbiting contructs of multple alien lifeform, including our own, which would doubt my beleif in God very much. I would pawn God off to a being much more powerful then himself who controls all layered nebulas of alien lifeforms outside of our own plane (but that's not a discussion to be held in here...maybe...maybe not...)

Discuss...
12.03.2011 - 22:40
TheBigRossowski

Written by Guest on 16.09.2010 at 06:14

I believe in the current Futurama philosophy that time will keep going on and on until about 1 000 000 000 AD when the universe implodes on itself, creating the exact same cycle that came before it...another big bang and the a repetition of the cycle that came before it...


Would you come off it Kap N', you're not even Futuramistic, you're fuckin' Roman Catholic, man. You're living in the fuckin' past with your sick Cynthia...ugh, Universe repetition... thing and ...you're living in the fuckin' future too. (lol)

But I imagine that's how things will be too.
----
That rug really tied the room together, did it not?
Loading...
14.03.2011 - 12:58
X-Ray Rod
Skandino
Written by Guest on 16.09.2010 at 06:14

I believe in the current Futurama philosophy that time will keep going on and on until about 1 000 000 000 AD when the universe implodes on itself, creating the exact same cycle that came before it...another big bang and the a repetition of the cycle that came before it...


Some people suggest that, others don't believe that the universe have enough attributes like mass/density proportions for doing that and it will probably expand to the point that everything just gets COLD due to everything being far away from everything else.
----
Written by BloodTears on 19.08.2011 at 18:29
Like you could kiss my ass
Written by Milena on 20.06.2012 at 10:49
Rod, let me love you.
Loading...
31.05.2011 - 03:06
F.N.S.C.A.C

Written by X-Ray Rod on 14.03.2011 at 12:58

Written by Guest on 16.09.2010 at 06:14

I believe in the current Futurama philosophy that time will keep going on and on until about 1 000 000 000 AD when the universe implodes on itself, creating the exact same cycle that came before it...another big bang and the a repetition of the cycle that came before it...


Some people suggest that, others don't believe that the universe have enough attributes like mass/density proportions for doing that and it will probably expand to the point that everything just gets COLD due to everything being far away from everything else.


Read somewhere the other day that string theory (if it is actually true) says that there is a point where we would perceive an expanding and contracting universe as the same thing; that is to say that if the universe contracts beyond a certain point then one would not be able to tell if the universe was expanding or contracting, we could not differentiate between the two.
Loading...
18.09.2011 - 05:43
Gelare

When it comes to the beginning of universe, it becomes seriously complicated. not only for me but also for every individual who cares and thinks.
previously I had millions of thought in my mind. including that we may be only some thoughts that are handled by someone else. or we may be a brain ( or anything else that has the ability of thinking) only, that creates body,life,events and everything virtually.
according to Rene Descartes's theory, I could leave my own first theory. now that I have the ability of thinking, then I myself exist.
still I believe we may be a single cell with the ability of creating and living virtually. or even part of a universal society, so it is no big surprise for me if aliens really exist...
Loading...
10.03.2012 - 01:19
DJ Mythos

I love that OP.

My belief is that black holes must be entrance points for other universes, and that our universe is currently emanating from one of these points on the opposite end, a place of infinite mass and less than microscopic size, pushing out matter and continuously expanding the universe. At the same time, there are billions of universes, each of them spawned by a black hole. Imagine a great big rubber ball with several things that look like needles stuck in them. At the opposite end of the needles are rubber balloons, within the big ball. The needles represent black holes and the rubber balloons on their opposite ends represent universes, one universe attached to the opposite end of the black hole. They are syringe needles - you can blow on them and expand the balloons. You inflate each balloon and it causes the big ball to expand. At the same time, the individual balloons cannot expand evenly because they are being crushed on every side by other expanding balloons. That's the way I think it shakes out. There are millions of universes, but none of them are perfectly spherical, since their perfect expansion is being hampered by the expansion of other universes next to them. And then there's the big ball...haven't decided on that yet! The great thing about this topic is that you really can let your mind float from one possibility to the next. Way smarter people than I are pondering these very possibilities.

By the way, if you'll pardon a bit of shameless self-promotion, I have a radio show/podcast called Vapour Bay Radio, and episode 4 deals with the universe, and various other things. Sorry that there is no metal in that playlist, it consists entirely of ambient music. Anyway, Perhaps you'd enjoy it.
----
Vapour Bay Radio

Miasmic anti-modern metal.
Loading...
10.03.2012 - 03:10
DJ Mythos

I can't post threads yet so I'm saying it here. Look outside. The Harvest Moon! It's spectacular!
----
Vapour Bay Radio

Miasmic anti-modern metal.
Loading...
05.05.2012 - 19:05
Bulletdodger

Heraclitus made a good point that could even be a viable basis for a theory today ( with added investigation by physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and all people with a sharp intellect) :
"This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures."
----
Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können.
David Hilbert
Loading...
07.03.2016 - 16:53
Enteroctopus

What man finds troubling about the universe is that it consistently proves itself to be unknowable. We are accustomed to developing stories or theories about the world, models if you will that we use to make predictions: if I plant a certain seed in a certain soil then I will get apples, whatever. We have grown quite used to the feeling that we have conquered the world, that everything is under our control when it is not.

When it comes to something like the beginning of time there are barriers to our penetrating that system, namely First Light before which we can't see a thing! The first several hundred thousand years of the universe were quite alien in terms of the way radiation behaved, which frequencies of radiation could travel and so on. Also the proportion of the strengths of the forces were different because of the proximity of matter, because of its density. Gravity predominates now because it is the strongest over distance, but by far it is the weakest force.

Now we have a lot of space, billions upon billions of light years of space, and our brains are used to how the universe behaves in this state. Our intelligence is built around interacting with matter in this paradigm; stacking bricks, moving water around, things like that. At the level of the extremely small, dense and hot we simply have no ability to comprehend or sense it outside of our theoretical equations.

At the edges beyond the reach of our telescopes and particle accelerators we are left with (let's face it) myths!

String Theory, Multiverse theories, all sound very fancy and intriguing, but in actuality are nothing more than thoughts of a daydreaming child - I used to imagine an infinite number of "me's" out there somewhere and would contemplate, therefore, that there must certainly be a "me" who was the same in every way except that I chose a blue shirt instead of a red one today, etc. So what?

I might as well imagine I'm a honey bee or a bottle of scotch.

The days of physics making broad and profound discoveries upon reality are rapidly drawing to a close. Gravitational astronomy might expand our reason a bit further, and perhaps if they increase the power of CERN a few more times we may discover yet more particles, but the dawning of a new General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics is almost impossible now.

What we will begin to do is resolve more intricate details of the known universe, like imaging nearby planets and determining if they have oceans, continents, atmospheres and so on. When this does happen, and I predict it will within our lifetimes (assuming everyone is roughly 25-35) it will challenge our most basic assumptions about our place in the universe, our understanding of things like God, but such a discovery would not be altogether surprising to an astrophysicist. It would be controversial to say the least, but rather predictable assuming a homogeneous universe where one segment of the Milky Way is more or less the same as any other, and so on.

In truth if there are some roughly humanoid beings inhabiting that planet they are most likely swinging around eating their equivalent of bananas. Why? We have conquered the planet by embarking on this process of becoming a superorganism, working together the way bees or termites do except on much grander scale, and what's it done? It's practically pushed us to the brink of extinction and frankly will probably accomplish exactly that.

The end result (probably) is extinction, or at least coming to the realization that this whole "civilization" business was a mistake and going back to poking termite hills with sticks.

If civilization really resulted in a flowering of interstellar, pangalactic species then there would be someone around to talk to. There isn't.

Either we are the first (highly unlikely) or this thing ends one way or another with things going back to a wild state - as in not foolishly meddled with by some walking ape.
Loading...
28.06.2016 - 22:34
Zombie94

Written by Enteroctopus on 07.03.2016 at 16:53


*Your opinion on existence*



There are many parts of the universe that are unknown, and may never be known. However it is pretty remarkable how much we have understood in what is relatively speaking an incredibly small amount of time. Remember that the scientific method has only existed for about 1000 years. That's only a tiny blip on the timeline of humanity's existence, let alone that of the planet. Only 30 years ago the most advanced computer game was 2D rectangles hitting a ball. Now we have the ability to immerse ourselves in a 3D environment using VR headsets. These were the things of sci-fi movies like Back To The Future only a generation ago. I don't think it's just optimistic to expect this trend of innovation and expanding knowledge of reality to continue.

I'm not knowledgable on physics so I can't comment on our ability to see back in time. This may well be one of those things that we will never achieve due to the constraints of the laws of our universe.

I am interested to know why you think that we have tapped out most big discoveries in physics though? Surely we can never be sure of what breakthroughs may spontaneously occur through research.

I would not say that we are on the brink of extinction. Large scale nature disasters that will wipe out giant segments of the population? Sure. But that has happened many times in human history (See: the plague of the 14th century that wiped out anywhere from 25-60% of Europe's population). And it could even be a help to humanity if our population was to become reduced by as much as a few billion.

I think it's highly unlikely that we would ever decide that civilisation was a mistake and voluntarily opt back to the days of living in caves and rubbing sticks together. Call me an optimist, but almost every measure of quality of life has been trending upwards over history. It's my belief that the most likely situation is that humanity continues to refine society and culture to make it as just, fulfilling, and efficient as possible. Maybe we'll get wiped out by an asteroid or some freak event along the way. However if we make it through the next few hundred years I'd imagine that we will have begun to populate other planets like Mars, which will give us a much better chance of survival.

I think the main reason we have not encountered any other civilisations is because the universe is just so damn big and that the likelihood of the events that occurred on our planet to allow the perfect conditions for us to evolve are so low, that if there is another advanced civilisation out there then they could be very far away from us.
Loading...
28.06.2016 - 23:43
Zombie94

Interested to hear people's opinion on the simulation theory. It's a theory that suggests that we are in fact part of a computer simulation.

With how far computer games have come in 30-40 years, it's not hard to imagine that at some point we may be able to make games that are completely indistinguishable from reality. And if we eventually reach the stage that we can simulate an entire universe, well.. it would be hard to make a case for why our own world is true reality. It could be that we are in fact just avatars in a simulation devised by a highly advanced civilisation.

This has long been a part of sci-fi storytelling, with perhaps the most notable example being the movie, 'The Matrix'.

Interestingly, this seems to me to be the one theory of existence that has the most academics on its side. Recently a physicist called James Gates of the University of Maryland claims to have found what looks like computer code in string theory formulas.

Entrepreneur and all-around tech genius Elon Musk seems to also believe this theory holds a lot of weight. he makes the argument that if it is possible to simulate a universe, then millions or billions of such simulations may already have been created by advanced civilisations. Which would mean the odds that we are living in 'base reality' could theoretically be one in millions/billions.

There is also a very good maths/physics YouTube channel called Numberphile that did a very good video on this concept which I have linked below, along with Musk speaking on the topic.

There are certainly some gaps in the logic of this theory though. For instance, if you take the number Pi, its digits essentially recur into infinity. Therefore a simulation would need to have an infinite amount of memory in order for such numbers to exist in it. In fact many measurements are in fact endlessly recurring numbers that we simply shorten for the sake of convenience. Maybe our understanding of mathematics is still too limited to describe the complexity of the simulation.

Interested to hear others' thoughts/criticisms.



Loading...
29.06.2016 - 11:47
IronAngel

Unless you find positive evidence that supports our universe being a simulation and not 'reality', that theory remains a thought experiment because of Ockham's Razor and the scientific virtue of simplicity: if the same observations support equally the notion of a simulation and of a 'real reality', then the latter is the simpler (therefore scientifically better) model because if we were in a simulation you'd have an entire additional reality to explain.

It does not seem very different from countless other thought experiments. We could be brains in vats, deceived by demons etc. and there really is no way to tell. The point of philosophical skepticism is not, however, that we have good reasons to believe in those scenarios (and you really do need good reasons, positive arguments, to dismiss prima facie beliefs), but rather that because we cannot conclusively dismiss them (i.e. we cannot know for sure they are untrue) we also seem to be unable to know our world is real. This is at least somewhat false, of course, and all the skeptical paradoxes show is that our concepts of knowledge and reality need some fine-tuning to get around them.
Loading...
29.06.2016 - 18:45
Uldreth

Written by Zombie94 on 28.06.2016 at 23:43



There are certainly some gaps in the logic of this theory though. For instance, if you take the number Pi, its digits essentially recur into infinity. Therefore a simulation would need to have an infinite amount of memory in order for such numbers to exist in it. In fact many measurements are in fact endlessly recurring numbers that we simply shorten for the sake of convenience. Maybe our understanding of mathematics is still too limited to describe the complexity of the simulation.

Interested to hear others' thoughts/criticisms.



IronAngel said what I meant to say anyways, but I'd just like to point out that irrational/transcendent numbers are not in any way more "complicated" than any other numbers. Our way of describing numbers is simply based around integers, and the only way to construct the irrationals from the integers is to use a limiting procedure.

Also, numbers are simply mathematical abstractations, there is nothing actually "more physical" about the number 12, than, say, about a Lie algebra over a field of finite characteristic. There is no actual "pi" or "e" or anything else in nature, therefore, a simulation of nature would not have to incorporate such concepts any way.
Loading...
29.06.2016 - 23:23
Zombie94

Written by IronAngel on 29.06.2016 at 11:47

Unless you...


Of course the weight of proof lies solely on those making the claim that the universe is a simulation and there is probably no way that we could ever know whether this is true or not. If we one day lived in a world where there were many simulations of entire universes, then surely Occam's Razor would point towards us not being in base reality because that would be a one in many millions or billions chance.

However this theory relies very heavily on the assumption that that will happen. If I was a betting man I would put my money on us one day being a lot closer to that level of advancement than not. But I am in agreement with you that as of now this is nothing more than a thought experiment, perhaps with more logic behind it than most. And there is no compelling evidence to believe that what we see and hear is not physical reality.
Loading...
29.06.2016 - 23:31
Zombie94

Written by Uldreth on 29.06.2016 at 18:45


IronAngel said what I meant to say anyways, but I'd just like to point out that irrational/transcendent numbers are not in any way more "complicated" than any other numbers. Our way of describing numbers is simply based around integers, and the only way to construct the irrationals from the integers is to use a limiting procedure.

Also, numbers are simply mathematical abstractations, there is nothing actually "more physical" about the number 12, than, say, about a Lie algebra over a field of finite characteristic. There is no actual "pi" or "e" or anything else in nature, therefore, a simulation of nature would not have to incorporate such concepts any way.


Are you saying that because numbers aren't physical, that they don't exist? They are only our limited method of describing the world. But they are an attempt to measure the forces that hold our universe together, no? So if you were making a simulation, you would have to use formulas to create a physical world that has predictable laws as our does. E.g. water will always boil at 100ºc. The numbers themselves aren't real but what they are measuring is.
Loading...
29.06.2016 - 23:51
Enteroctopus

There are limits to what we can know and that is something modern humanity will have to learn to accept. Simulation theory is a variation on multiverse theory, which is nothing more than a speculative thought experiment. While it's fun to think about such theories are unfalsifiable. If there is a multiverse (or simulation) then how would we run an experiment that would prove it? Can we program an Artificial Intelligence that can provethat it is a part of a simulation using the bits it is given?

We are like that AI in the computer system: At some point we run into the limits of what the senses and the mind, even our maths and theories are built to process, or what our technology can probe. What happened in the moments after the Big Bang? These are serious questions in theoretical physics that, essentially, we can no more prove than we can say that god exists. String theory also is in this category. What instrument is small enough to investigate these "strings?" That's one of the main criticisms of these theories and of those who support them.

Perhaps the formulas of string theory are beginning to look a lot like computer programs because humans made them up? This tells us nothing about the fundamentals of reality, it simply reflects on the processes that we use to probe such questions. There may be more of interest to neurologists than physicists in such uncanny similarities, which brings me to my next point:

Neurology, not physics, is the next great scientific frontier. We barely have a child's haphazard scribbling of how the brain works thus far. Where in physics we are basically shining a light on the last few remaining mysteries we can explore, in the brain we have barely put the key in the ignition to start the journey towards opening up the library of knowledge held within. It may prove more practical to learn about ourselves anyway versus the color of the sky on some faraway planet we'll never get to see. If we are to colonize Mars and survive into distant stretches of time, ultimately reaching into the universe, it may prove more important anyway.

Why do we keep returning to patterns of nationalistic paranoia? Why is racism still plaguing us? What causes children to bully each other? We see mass shootings and we all argue for a few days about gun control, then we forget it and a month later there is another mass shooting. Why?

A deeper understanding of the brain may offer insight into all of these confounding problems, and more.
Loading...
30.06.2016 - 00:20
IronAngel

Written by Zombie94 on 29.06.2016 at 23:23

If we one day lived in a world where there were many simulations of entire universes, then surely Occam's Razor would point towards us not being in base reality because that would be a one in many millions or billions chance.

However this theory relies very heavily on the assumption that that will happen. If I was a betting man I would put my money on us one day being a lot closer to that level of advancement than not.


It does not really matter whether we can do it or not. I don't see how running one, a hundred or a million simulations would make our reality any more likely to be a simulation too. The argument, I suppose, is that there might be ANOTHER advanced civilization out there who have developed such simulations and we're in one. Human capability to develop them has nothing to do with it (presumably the simulation would not follow the natural laws of the external universe - otherwise what would the theory even explain?).

But I don't see any way of calculating that probabilty. All probability calculations rely on some representative data, whether observed or inferred. How do you calculate the probabilty, first, of such a civilisation existing at this point in time in some other reality, how do you calculate the probability that they are in fact running simulations, how do you calculate the probability that we're in one? It's not just that we don't know because we lack some observational data - I don't see how we could approach an answer even in theory.
Loading...
01.07.2016 - 23:02
Zombie94

Written by IronAngel on 30.06.2016 at 00:20


It does not really matter whether we can do it or not. I don't see how running one, a hundred or a million simulations would make our reality any more likely to be a simulation too. The argument, I suppose, is that there might be ANOTHER advanced civilization out there who have developed such simulations and we're in one. Human capability to develop them has nothing to do with it (presumably the simulation would not follow the natural laws of the external universe - otherwise what would the theory even explain?).

But I don't see any way of calculating that probabilty. All probability calculations rely on some representative data, whether observed or inferred. How do you calculate the probabilty, first, of such a civilisation existing at this point in time in some other reality, how do you calculate the probability that they are in fact running simulations, how do you calculate the probability that we're in one? It's not just that we don't know because we lack some observational data - I don't see how we could approach an answer even in theory.


Indeed. Much like the multiverse theory, it does not seem to be a testable hypothesis. A fun thought experiment nonetheless.
Loading...