I turned 29 on Tue. Himani was very enthusiastic about it, got me some terrific gifts, things which, now that I have them, I realize I quite like, but would probably never have got for myself. And that's maybe the essence of a good gift: it has to be stuff that people like, but would never buy for themselves. In fact, that's one big grouse she has: I don't seem to need / want anything at all, so it's very difficult to get me a gift. Except maybe a book. And I quite agree - I am a difficult person to get a gift for. But she does an admirable job of buying me something useful very well, every time. She also managed a surprise party. Nothing big, just our whole family. But it was a very nice surprise. I quite enjoyed all the attention.
But after it got all over, late in the night, I was reflecting on what does it really mean to have a birthday. It means that the our planet is almost in the same position with respect to the Sun as it was when I was born. But w.r.t. the milky-way, it has moved about 20 billion km in its journey around the super-blackhole at the galactic core (a progress of about 0.0000125% in a journey which takes about 250 million years to complete), and has moved alongwith the whole galaxy, about 600 billion km in the direction of the constellation Hydra - a journey unabated since the birth of our galaxy. If you take the Virgo Supercluster as a frame of reference, the spaceship called Earth has moved a long way indeed.
Thinking forward in time, this journey will continue long after I die, long after the chemicals constituing my body are absorbed by the earth to be broken down into simpler hydrocarbons and oxides. This journey would continue till earth itself lasts: till our sun expands to become a red-giant and almost swallows our planet, some 4 billion years in the future, by which time our solar system will have gone around the galaxy sixteen times, and our galaxy would have merged with the Andromeda galaxy (which is coming towards us at 300 km/s) to form a much larger, irregular galaxy.
When the sun becomes a red-giant, it would maybe just stop short of engulfing the earth. To the unfortunately observer present on earth at that time, the Sun would appear huge, occupying 80% of the sky. It will have a hue of deep red, deeper than reddest sunset. The heat will be extreme. The atomsphere would have long evaporated. So would the oceans. Earth will be a hot rock, with a fierce red sun beating down on it. The extreme heat will break all the compounds which make our biosphere into the constituent atoms: mostly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The sun would eventually go nova, blasting out its outer layers to create a planetary nebula. None of the planets would survive this and would be blown to bits which would continue traveling outwards till the Sun's gravity pulls them back, eventually settling down to an orbit far outside the orbit of pluto today. The kickback of the explosion would compress the star, making it crush on itself to form a white dwarf star. Somewhere outside the orbit of Pluto, my body constituents would continue to revolve around this white dwarf, not able to escape its gravitational well.
Our sun, now a white dwarf, would not be able to carry out any further fusion - it's just not large enough to have a gravitational crunch strong enough to overcome the repulsion of positively charged helium nuclei. This white dwarf, made of degenerate matter and held together by the degenerency pressure, would continue to radiate heat for the next several billion years, warming the planetary nebula around it, becoming dimmer and dimmer till it becomes a black dwarf. We do not know today what will happen then to our sun then. Our universe, at a ripe 14 billion years, is not old enough to have black dwarfs.
What may happen after that is dependent on the fate of the Universe, which we don't know today. The possibilities are based on the geometry of the Universe, whether it is open or closed:
1. The Big Crunch: The human-mind loves beauty. Central to beauty is the idea of symmetry. The symmetrical opposite of the Big Bang is the Big Crunch. If the Universe is closed, i.e. it has a geometry of a four-dimensional sphere, and if the average density of the universe is large enough, the expansion caused by the Big Bang may get arrested and a contraction may begin. This contraction, slow at first would get faster and faster as matter collapses on itself forming a larger gravitational mass to pull even harder. The obvious extrapolation is that the all matter, energy, space and time would collapse into a dimensionless singularity. All our laws of physics and maths cease to have a meaning here. The oscillatory universe theory says that this singularity would result in another Big Bang. In fact if that happens, it does not make sense to talk about Big Crunch or Big Bang. There are just repeating singularities between contraction and expansion. The human love for symmetry has great affection for such a view. Most religions of the world subsribe to such a view too. At least Hinduism and Christianity do - the notion of "Pralaya" and "Armageddon". So do, I suspect, Islam and Sikhism. But we don't know whether this will happen. If this happens, my elemental constituents of my body would become one with that singularity.
2. The Big Freeze: If the Universe is open, and has a flat geometry, that of a four-dimensional plane, it would die a heat-death, i.e. it would run down to a state of no free energy. Here, entropy or disorder has reached it maximum value. My body constituents would forever be suspended at zero K.
3. The Big Rip: If the Universe is open, and has the geometry of a hyperbola, a kind of four-dimensional saddle, the general theory of relativity predicts that the rate of expansion would keep on increasing. Everything would keep on getting farther away from everything else ever faster. This is already happening with galaxies getting away from each other. The geometry of the Universe would eventually start stretching the gaseous nebulae apart. Then galaxies would get ripped, losing their structure, as stars get further away from each other. Moons would be pulled away from the planets. Planets would be pulled away from the stars. Planets themselves will be ripped, streteched by the hyperbolic geometry. Stars would not be spared either. Even a star will be ripped. So would be a backhole. Everything would be ripped apart, stretching on the 4-D hyperbolic geometry of the Universe. The matter would keep getting stretched further and further apart. Even atoms would be stretched apart, breaking into nucleii and electrons. And even these will be stretched apart by the geometry into elementary particles. The universe would become an ever expanding very thin gas of photons and leptons, getting thinner. My body constituents would keep getting farther apart, ever faster, forever in eternity.
Right now we don't even know whether the Universe is closed or not. The Universe is so large that the four dimensional curvature is not obvious. Measuring the density is another matter altogether (pun-unintended). Apparently 96% of the mass of the Universe is dark matter - something which only manifests itself thru its gravitational effect, and does not interact with ordinary matter at all. Then there is the issue of dark energy: the energy of the vacuum. Lots of unanswered questions.
But while my material-self may or may not last, what about my consciousness?
The Law of accelerating returns, proposed by Ray Kurzweil, predicts a technological singularity before the end of the 21st century. What it means is this: our ability to compute is going to accelerate faster and faster, going beyond the ICs to future forms of computation. Everytime a technology approaches a barrier, a new technology will be invented to cross that barrier. BTW, the essay was written in 2001. As of today, we are looking at a barrier in increasing the silicon density, which is leading to the compromise called multi-core. Nano-technology and Quantum computing are two promising technologies which can help cross this barrier. Anyway, coming back to the law, such paradigm shifts would happen faster and faster. "Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."
John Von Neumann visualized this technological singularity as a "prediction wall" in which humans would be a part of a complex social structure of which no one understands, but a small part. This then is but a step removed from the noosphere - the sphere of human thought - proposed by Vladimir Vernadsky. Just the way the biosphere is composed of all organisms on earth, the noosphere is composed of all minds on the earth. The big question is whether the noosphere will integrate further to evolve into a collective consciousness? The theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin likes to think so, and predicts its culmination in what is called the Omega Point - the ultimate maximum level of complexity-consciousness. The mathematical physicist Frank J Tipler lend credence to this view in his book "The Physics of Immortality." In this book he proposed that the human-race will evolve into a singular consciousness and will eventually gain control over even the largest structures in the Universe. He equates the Omega point with God. But of course the theory is based on a number of assumptions, and most physicists agree with the theory only in parts.
In another of his book (co-authored with physicist John D. Barrow), Tipler proposes the Final Anthropic Principle: "Intelligent information-processing (of which life is but a form), must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out." In conclusion, "We see that if life evolves in all of the many universes in a quantum cosmology, and if life continues to exist in all of these universes, then all of these universes, which include all possible histories among them, will approach the Omega Point. At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end."
Crtics of the FAP dismiss it as being metaphyics made to sound plausible by using flawed phyics. Same for the Omega point. Do I believe it? I wish I could, but it is too fantastic to be believable. It certainly sounds attractive: the idea of evolving into a Universe-pervading, all powerful collective force of consciousness. This is the stuff one read about in all science fiction stories. In fact, when I read this for the first time, I was immediately reminded of the Issac Asimov short story titled, "The Last Question," which in my mind is the best piece of science fiction I have ever read, bringing together religion, philosophy and science, all together in a beautifully written climax. It is supposed to be Asimov's own favorite too, and I am hardly surprised. Check out the e-text available at http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm. You will find out too.
So this is all that I thought yesterday night before falling off to sleep around 5 am, thinking of Asimov and all his other stories, and the way he brought together the Foundation Series, the Robot Series and the Galactic Empire series in that final novel: "Foundation and Earth," where R Daneel Oliwav, the positronic robot who discovers the fourth law of Robotics, is getting a choice made on the future of humanity, and the Human Lightning Rod choose Collective Consciousness.
It was fun, but also humbling, thinking all this thru. On this vast a scale, one realizes that our lives are nothing in the eye of the Universe - one blink and you miss the entire Human History. I fell asleep thinking all this. And now I have spent this night recounting all this. Its almost 5:30 in the morning. Time to retire to bed!
