The End of the Universe and Possibility of Intelligent Interaction

Eric A. JacksonC. Graham Buffkin

Dr. Orville Day

The Beginning of the Universe

• In order to fathom the End of the Universe one should have a firm grasp on its beginning.

• One theory suggested by Morris states that at the first fraction of a second after the universe began some X particle was created. This X particle decayed into either matter or antimatter, but not equally so.

After all the X particles disappeared, there may have been something like a billion and one particles of matter for every billion particles of antimatter. The particles and antiparticles began annihilating one another… only matter particles remained (77).

This explains why the prevalent detection of antiparticles has not been observed throughout our current universe. And confirms the attribute of their rarity.

The Current Age of the Universe

•The age of the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years.

First Life on Earth

• The earliest forms of life on Earth emerged about 3.8 billion years ago, or 9.9 billion years after the Big Bang.

• Furthermore, the first Homo Sapiens evolved just 250,000 years ago, or 3.79975 billion years after life emerged on Earth.

Evolution of Our Intelligence• Chyba and Hand purport that the best means of quantifying intelligence in

animals is to create a ratio of the size of a species brain compared to the typical size of a brain of a species of the same expected mass.

• Encephalization Quotient, EQ= (brain weight)/[ 0.12 (body weight)0.67] which is Jerison’s 1973 definition.

• If Homo sapiens evolved from Homo habilis and Homo erectus respectively, then the EQ evolved in such a fashion of 4.3 (habilis) to 5.3 (erectus) in a matter of 600,000 years. That is a rate a 1.67x10-6 EQ per year. Then subsequently from 5.3 (erectus) to 7.1 (sapien sapien) in an elapsed time of 1.65 million years; which is a rate of 1.091x10-6 EQ per year.

• This might not seem like such an extraordinary jump, however if one considers the fact that the evolution of intelligence went from practically non existent (i.e. single celled organisms) to low intelligence (i.e. from EQ<1 to EQ>1) over a course of approximately 3 billion years that is a rate (0.3x10-9 EQ per year) increase by 3 orders of magnitude in a period of time less than 1% from the first stage to the third.

The Potential of Future Intelligence• The potential for intelligence of life say 1 million years from now could

possibly then yield a life form with an EQ of at least 10. The capabilities of such a life form are practically imponderable to us, just as an ape (EQ=1.9) would not be able to ponder our capabilities of performing calculus.

• With such an evolved state of intelligence these beings could perceivably be able to manipulate the space around them similar to the way humans are changing the planet Earth today, except instead of a planet, they might be able to change the solar system, galaxy, or galaxies.

• How this might effect the fate of the universe can only be imagined by humans today, let that tremendous feat be the responsibility of those to come, but let’s attempt to give them an accurate model of the end towards which to work.

Critical Density

• Just 12 years ago we determined that the universe is at the critical density. This would imply an ever-expanding universe with time going to infinity.

• However, life's place in this universe seems to have a more finite place.

• This is because of the energy that we are so dependent upon. This energy is limited to the lifetime of our star’s nuclear fuel.

The Inevitability of Energy Exhaustion

• In The Fate of the Universe, Morris states that “nothing goes on forever (129).” He estimates that 100 billion years from now, galaxies will effectively die out, black holes will evaporate, radiation become weaker and weaker, and the proton itself will decay into bits of energy. Despite everlasting expansion the fate is that of nothingness.

• In other words, the supply of nuclear energy that the stars as we know them will be nearly exhausted, leaving only a few white dwarves, neutron starts, and black holes in a sea of “stellar corpses (130).”

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

• Therefore, that leaves the universe filled with nothing but energy as protons decay and black holes evaporate. All matter is inevitably changed back into other forms of energy. The fate of the universe is predicted by the second law of thermodynamics to be one of uniform distribution throughout the confines of the volume of the universe.

Bibliography

• Richard Morris, Cosmic Questions: Galactic Halos, Cold Dark Matter, and The End of Time, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.

• John Baez, A Brief History of the Universe, 2008, <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/timeline.html>

• Christopher F. Chyba, Kevin P. Hand, Astrobiology: The Study of the Living Universe, Annual Reviews, 2005.

• Richard Morris, The Fate of the Universe, 1982.