On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 12:44:17PM +1300, LizR wrote: > > Yes, I think that's what Carl Sagan said about the possibility of life > existing indefinitely, too. The entropy ceiling goes up indefinitely, but > the energy remaining goes down, and ultimately I would imagine it ends up > at the noise level. Since entropy is an emergent concept I'm not sure where > the rising ceiling gets us in the long run, although it certainly helps in > the "short" term (the big bang was near equilibrium, yet we're now far from > it). >
It's not as clear cut as that. In a Friedman universe, gravity eventually slows the expansion of the universe, (whether open or closed) so the entropy ceiling slows down in being raised. This would imply that eventually that dissipative process will eventually assymptotically consume the available free energy. (Apparently, in a closed Friedman universe, it is possible to obtain energy from the big crunch - Tipler's Omega point, so I probably haven't got this quite right for closed universes. Something to do with reversing the direction of the second law, I suppose.) But it now appears that the universe's expansion is accelerating due to dark energy. This would entail that free energy will forever be created faster than the dissipative processes can consume it. Again, consider this to all be revised again in our lifetimes. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
