On 18 July 2004 Hal Finney wrote:
QUOTE- We had some discussion a while back about a paper which proposed some similar ideas, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0208013, Disturbing implications of a cosmological constant. If you want to look in the archives, the thread was called "Doomsday-like argument in cosmology" and was in August 2002... ...I still wonder about the physical assumptions that treat the de Sitter state as a steady state. That little coordinate transform seemed pretty fishy to me. -ENDQUOTE
Yes, I know there are all sorts of twists on the standard models in cosmology out there, most of them controversial. But what I am looking at is the "worst case scenario" for many world theories: no "Big Crunch", no Tipler Omega Point, no daughter universes from black holes, no God, just a finite universe expanding and cooling forever. In a zillion years from now, the universe will be a zillion light years across, almost all the "stable" matter will have decayed, and the temperature will be extremely close to absolute zero. My understanding is that even in this bleak scenario, standard, non-controversial physics does not exclude the possibility that new matter/energy will arise out of the vacuum. In the MWI of QM, this possibility MUST be realised in some parallel universe, albeit one of very low measure if the new matter is something like the event "P" I defined in my original post, an exact copy of our solar system complete with conscious inhabitants. In a non-MW interpretation of QM, P is possible but fantastically unlikely. If the probability of P occuring in a unit time period remains constant, or increases, with time, then - remember, we still have eternity ahead even though a zillion years have already passed - P will certainly occur. If this probability falls with time, P may or may not occur, depending on the equation. Can anyone write down the equation showing how Pr(P) evolves as a function of time in the above situation?
Stathis Papaioannou
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