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[Akura]

Time to put myself in a freezer marked "Open in Trappist".

Hope you're ready to skip fifty thousand years and get woken up by the post-apocalyptic remnants of humanity orbiting a dead world singed by a red dwarf because they think you're the prophesied savior because their badly rampant AI guardian told them so.

Come on man, have some foresight here.

You're saying that like that's not exactly what I want to happen.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You people sure have a thing for watching emaciated transhuman descendant children with damaged cybernetics looking up at you with their weird too-wide but still pathetic eyes as they ask why you, the Ancestral Savior promised to them by their silicon god can do nothing to ease the burden of their chronic algae feed shortage or stop the downward spiral of entropy that will soon claim the last degenerate remnant of the human race.

[Reelya]

As far as I understand it, entropy is not certain to go up, it's that the likelihood of it going up is vastly more probable than it going down. It's quite plausible that sometime in the next 10 billion years someone might actually stumble on the design of an "anti-entropy engine" (some particularly unlikely arrangement of matter and energy) that can basically sustain a civilization even in a heat death scenario.

[Max™]

Sounds like someone needs to read Manifold: Space*, but seriously:

1. Silicon instead of say, a lattice woven from near Planck-scale wormholes or some other loosely plausible but way out in distant hard sci-fi territory.
2. Children in 50,000 years implies people still die enough to need enough replacement to use the plural, which is a weird niche of "our tech got us this far, but no further, yet we didn't get wiped out for some reason" type doomsday scenarios.
3. Not only are they living mayfly lives at this point, but they've got an AI god (obviously not a Strong AI God) which can't (or won't) try to even teach them how to make things to fix anything which breaks.
4. Tech tends to break as we are developing it, and then if you don't maintain a built-in obsolescence there is no reason to assume we'll be hard up for self-repairing stuff that just doesn't break at all within a few centuries, much less a few kiloyears in the future.
5. Cybernetics kinda implies obvious implants, we're hitting that stage now, dear god what is with the apocalyptic mindset man, how are these people smart enough to reach that point in the future while being so stupid?
6. If humanity is done in by entropy it will be a long time from now, we've got great big gaudy stars sitting around still, we're smart enough to get by on the trickles of energy from red dwarf stars for trillions of years, and then we'll have some time before we reach the "how can we locally reduce entropy again" type of problems. Heat death isn't a billion year problem, it's a trillion year problem at the low end.

*Stephen Baxter, part of the Manifold series, Space is goddamn depressing, Time is confusing as shit but magnificent in scope, Origin is weirdly touching with some super bummer moments but it isn't as bad as Space--though what is, I'm not even sure watching a baby elephant trying to wake up it's dead mother is as soul-crushing as the ending of Space--and they're a huge mood switch from the Xeelee Sequence.

[sjm9876]

As far as I understand it, entropy is not certain to go up, it's that the likelihood of it going up is vastly more probable than it going down. It's quite plausible that sometime in the next 10 billion years someone might actually stumble on the design of an "anti-entropy engine" (some particularly unlikely arrangement of matter and energy) that can basically sustain a civilization even in a heat death scenario.

From memory, that's not quite it either. The entropy of a closed system can only go up. However, the only truly closed system is (probably) the universe. In an open system, which is pretty much anything, then yes, the likelihood of it increasing is more but not absolute.

That means that whilst we can decrease the entropy in a localised area, that comes at the cost of increased entropy elsewhere, and eventually that reservoir entropy will build enough to overcome the reduction.

Still, if you want an anti-entropy engine, congratulations - you are one

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Y'all motherfuckers need to keep up with my lore here, we're talking about local entropy on a stranded driftfleet in Trappist not the heat death of the universe, and the AI is helping them in its own rampant way by reviving you to be the Messiah.

[Starver]

But you're not. You're just a very naughty boy!

[Max™]

But seriously, I can't help but feel you would appreciate the Manifold series, MSH.

[wierd]

You people sure have a thing for watching emaciated transhuman descendant children with damaged cybernetics looking up at you with their weird too-wide but still pathetic eyes as they ask why you, the Ancestral Savior promised to them by their silicon god can do nothing to ease the burden of their chronic algae feed shortage or stop the downward spiral of entropy that will soon claim the last degenerate remnant of the human race.

By that stage, they are essentially virtual beings living in a virtual world anyway.  Put them on a robotic colony seed ship to the Trappist system, or one of the other systems with good candidates that has a type M star.

M type stars have longevity that would rival the beginnings of the heat death of the universe.  If they cannot find a way to harness dark energy in the 60 billion or so estimated years such a star can burn reliably, then they deserve to have the universe eat them.

(I suggest dark energy, because not only is the expansion of the universe not slowing down, but it appears to be increasing. Spacetime itself is not a null-energy system, which is why things like vacuum fluctuations occur. We know next to nothing about dark energy, aside from the fact that it is driving absurd expansion of the whole universe, and that it is increasing. Should a way be found to exploit dark energy, it is possible that future transhumans could have "cold, desolate" parts of the universe that they dump waste entropy into, while exploiting the dark energy to create localized areas of low entropy suitable for life to continue. Should dark energy be an inexhuastible source of energy, this would lead to a new era of the universe in which isolated parts remain low entropy, but are forever cut off from each other due to run-away expansion between them at far greater than light speed rates of expansion.)

[TheDarkStar]

So I have a question about harnessing dark energy/the expansion of the universe:

If things are slowly being pushed apart, does that mean that at a galactic scale the gravitational potential energy is increasing and that by properly moving things (stars, etc) into eccentric orbits around galaxies you could harness that energy? Failing that, could you make a gigantic spring (or something else that gains potential energy from being lengthened), with the length presumably measured in lightyears, attached to two points that are drifting apart and periodically release it to liberate some of the gained energy?

[Max™]

On the scales where you could try that, objects are moving apart at or above c.

[Putnam]

On the scales where you could try that, objects are moving apart at or above c.

Note that scales you could try that are way beyond galactic, like, over a hundred thousand times the size.

[Max™]

Yeah, not to say that it isn't a neat sound idea, but the guy who wrote the physics code didn't take a positive view on fun stuff like that.

[TheBiggerFish]

Yeah, not to say that it isn't a neat sound idea, but the guy who wrote the physics code didn't take a positive view on fun stuff like that.

Heh.

[PTTG??]

There's a serious hoax going around under the name Brilliant Light Power, which is basically this guy who is selling a free-energy device that electrolizes water, disposes of the oxygen, and does... something... to the hydrogen. He says it reduces the electron below the ground state, creating what he calls a "hydrino."

An example of this guy selling the idea.

He's spent 20 years being about 9 months away from selling it.

Among other psuedoscientific problems, they claim that the "reactor" works fine, but they are having trouble turning the heat output from it into usable energy. They want to use concentrated solar cells, but if it's putting out that much energy, a thermal engine would work just fine.