Starship Asterisk*

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex
This is near where I lived till I was in my twenties. Weird.

Geek's Guide to Britain
Kelvedon Hatch is a superb example of absurdist geek life. Not only is the site technically very impressive, it is also completely useless and frequently prompts the question “what on earth were they thinking?”... A tour reinforces this view as the experience now is as enjoyably peculiar as the history behind the place.

Blimey, that was a bit of alright.

There's something similar not far from here, in Debert, Nova Scotia, though it doesn't have a bungalow atop it. In the 70s, I think it was, the public was made aware of how expensive and how useless it was, under an anti-war rallying cry of "Debunk Debert!" Another nickname was "Diefenbunker", after Prime Minister Diefenbaker, under whose government these things were built.

Wise governments most fear looking silly in the eyes of voters, so eventually the Debert Bunker and its ilk were quietly moth-balled. It has been used in various ways over the years, once as a movie scene, most recently as a paint-ball game site.

Rob

The bunker at the end of Essex. Or something. With a little bungalow on top. A bunkalow?

Too weird. But funny!

Ann

Well, you got me thinking about the end of the universe. I have a philosophical conundrum that I'm sure has been brought up before, but I can't seem to find a name for it.

Anyway, so currently we have the Big Bang, the start of the universe, the beginning of time, whatever you want to call it. We can call it t=0 and just ignore any negative t for the sake of sanity. We're currently at t=x, x being 4.354 ± 0.012 × 10¹⁷ seconds if the authors of the Wikipedia article are accurate. So on and on and on t goes and where it stops, nobody knows. Maybe never. Or maybe it stops when we stop measuring it. I don't know.

Current theory states that the universe most likely expands forever (here we go assuming that t can be infinity, or at least the universe itself is) and then at some point everything freezes. Ok, so nothing much happens during that time. If that's where everything stops and time keeps going on forevermore after that point, does the universe spend most of its existence in that state? Or is it more reasonable to say that once it reaches that state it no longer exists?

On the one hand, if it continues to exist forever on after that point, then the universe literally explodes into existence for the merest fraction of time (x/infinity means x is pretty much nothing, right? or is it nonsense?) and then freezes in a cosmological instant, spending most of its time... well, chillin'. On the other hand, if the universe stops and at that point that's when t reaches its maximum, we get x/[some really big number]. That's a lot more manageable but I can't seem to shake the idea that we are super lucky to just happen to exist on this tiny slice of time.

geckzilla wrote:Well, you got me thinking about the end of the universe. I have a philosophical conundrum that I'm sure has been brought up before, but I can't seem to find a name for it.

Anyway, so currently we have the Big Bang, the start of the universe, the beginning of time, whatever you want to call it. We can call it t=0 and just ignore any negative t for the sake of sanity. We're currently at t=x, x being 4.354 ± 0.012 × 10¹⁷ seconds if the authors of the Wikipedia article are accurate. So on and on and on t goes and where it stops, nobody knows. Maybe never. Or maybe it stops when we stop measuring it. I don't know.

Current theory states that the universe most likely expands forever (here we go assuming that t can be infinity, or at least the universe itself is) and then at some point everything freezes. Ok, so nothing much happens during that time. If that's where everything stops and time keeps going on forevermore after that point, does the universe spend most of its existence in that state? Or is it more reasonable to say that once it reaches that state it no longer exists?

On the one hand, if it continues to exist forever on after that point, then the universe literally explodes into existence for the merest fraction of time (x/infinity means x is pretty much nothing, right? or is it nonsense?) and then freezes in a cosmological instant, spending most of its time... well, chillin'. On the other hand, if the universe stops and at that point that's when t reaches its maximum, we get x/[some really big number]. That's a lot more manageable but I can't seem to shake the idea that we are super lucky to just happen to exist on this tiny slice of time.

Yes... well, maybe.
While you seem to be stuck on the idea of being super lucky to just happen to be here, now...
I lean more toward being stuck in an unfortunate series of bad circumstances, and would rather it all just went away.

It's true, it could be incredibly bad luck. Either way, really good luck or really bad luck seem very improbable. But here we are.

geckzilla wrote:It's true, it could be incredibly bad luck. Either way, really good luck or really bad luck seem very improbable. But here we are.

ha-ha, the worst of all luck is mediocre luck. It's like being stuck in mud up to your waist. Which is just higher than the 7th planet from the sun.

Last weekend I decided I would get some of my astronomy magazines away from my coffee table, so that they'd either go into paper recycling bin (which would have been the sensible thing to do) or end up in the attic (where I already have too much stuff, so of course that's where they went).

Anyway, before these magazines were being sent away one way or the other, I leafed though them. In one of them was a column by this man (Bob Berman?) musing about the current majority opinion of leading astronomers and cosmologists on the fate and state of the universe, which is that it is infinite. The man writing the column was almost tearing his hear out of his skull over this, to him, awful and abhorrent possibility. The reason for his despondecy was the fact that if the universe is indeed infinite, then any part of it that we can know, no matter how much more we keep learning and knowing, nevertheless amounts to 0% of the universe. Any finite part of an infinite universe amounts to 0% of it.

I don't share this man's sense of gloom and doom. I'm so impressed by what we do know, and I have believed for a long time that we have been incredibly lucky. I'm one of those who believe that the knowable universe (because I'm not offering any opinions on the whole infinite shebang ) may not necessarily be teeming with little green men at all. To me, the idea that we could be the only technological civilization in the Milky Way doesn't seem impossible at all. Yes, of course I could be totally wrong about that. But that's how I feel, and that's why I think that I and the rest of humanity are so incredibly lucky to exist in the first place.

I also think that the universe - make that our tiny little part of whatever is out there, beyond the horizon where everything is expanding away from us so fast that no signal from "that" will never reach us, or beyond whatever "walls" may separate us from other, parallel universes, if any such universes exist - well, like I said, I believe that the tiny little part of the universe that we are stuck in is probably only going to be habitable for biological life for a rather short time. And that time is now. That's why we are here now, and also because we are so lucky.

I have come to think of the universe as "semi-alive". Don't get me wrong. No, no,, NO, I don't believe that the universe is alive in that it has some sort of biological processes going on inside it or that it has a consciousness. Most certainly not!

No, but I believe that the universe has its lifetime, in moderately the same way as humans have their lifetimes. Stars and galaxies have their lifetimes, too. Planets may have them, too.

More importantly, we humans don't stay the same during our lifetimes. We change, grow up, grow old. I think that the universe is forever changing, too. Which means that it is not going to stay the way it is now, when we can live in it.

I think that everything in our universe changes over time. Just imagine how much the Earth has changed since it was born out of the gaseous disk surrounding the young Sun. It boggles the mind to think how much the Earth has changed. We couldn't have survived on the Earth for most of its existence, that's for sure.

And think how much human societies and cultures have changed. Just think how much everything is changing.

Sometimes I remind myself of the eons that went by before I was born, and the eons that will go by after I'm dead.

Will the universe end? Perhaps we should rephrase the question. What will the universe evolve into? Will it be recognizable as "our" universe? If it changes irrevocably into something incredibly different, do we still call it "the universe"?

And do we care if it lives or dies, particularly in view of the fact that we ourselves will have died eons ago?
Ann

Ann wrote:The bunker at the end of Essex. Or something. With a little bungalow on top. A bunkalow?

Too weird. But funny!

Ann

I feel a bit like Hamlet - as in "I KNEW him."
The really weird thing for me is that this weird thing was built almost on my doorstep. And in seriously rural Essex .

Kelvedon Hatch is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Brentwood in south Essex, England. It is situated just north of Pilgrims Hatch, approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) to the north of Brentwood and is surrounded by Metropolitan Green Belt. The village today is no longer a rural backwater with a large proportion of its population commuting to work elsewhere. It has a population of 2,563.[1] .

Wikipedia - census for 2001.


And it now has a website
http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/