Singularity of Future Options

[Hey Hey]

Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

A human body contains greater than a million miles of DNA. Relevant? Irrelevant? Nevertheless interesting ....

[Joesus]

Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

I think Steve Martin said "It's impossible to put a Cadillac up your nose" (unless maybe it's a matchbox Caddy), so maybe I'll retract my last remark as a general statement and point to the idea that it may not be impossible to point out what exactly was filled in by the 'infinite' and what was acquired by the species.

[Hey Hey]

Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

I think Steve Martin said "It's impossible to put a Cadillac up your nose" (unless maybe it's a matchbox Caddy), so maybe I'll retract my last remark as a general statement and point to the idea that it may not be impossible to point out what exactly was filled in by the 'infinite' and what was acquired by the species.

But physically this (camel-needle) could be achieved. I'll pass on the task personally. (The strands of DNA, of single molecule thickness, were an attempt to illustrate the possibility when considering the molecular nature of beings, including camels.)

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..."It's impossible to put a Cadillac up your nose" ...

I've seen junkies do just that! And houses with swiming pools. All in one single sweep.

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If we do the thought experiment where we run the movie backwards, the big bang becomes the big singularity. As we get down to the first fractions of a second, the mass-energy density is very high. By Einsteins general theory, time slows down in very strong gravitational fields, so as the density increases still more (running the movie backwards), time goes still slower, so we never get there. The universe has always existed. There has always been something. Can I have my Nobel Prize now? I really need the money.

So, from what you just stated it can be said that:
- Space/time may be energy/mass dependent?
- Eternity/infinity may be trapped in the smallest possible fraction of time?
- There is an outside of the universe (via definition of singularity) where the laws of physics as we know them may/may not apply?

[Rick]

Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

A human body contains greater than a million miles of DNA. Relevant? Irrelevant? Nevertheless interesting ....

Can you show me the calculation by which you arrived at that number? It seems rather long to me, even considering that we have billions of cells.

[Anthu]

As we get down to the first fractions of a second, the mass-energy density is very high. By Einsteins general theory, time slows down in very strong gravitational fields, so as the density increases still more (running the movie backwards), time goes still slower, so we never get there. The universe has always existed. There has always been something. Can I have my Nobel Prize now? I really need the money.

...time goes still slower and vanishes into nothingness. Things are infinitely slow to reckon with. Too slow to exist spatiotemporally. There you are, something coming out of nothing. Nobel is for me.

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...time goes still slower and vanishes into nothingness. Things are infinitely slow to reckon with. Too slow to exist spatiotemporally. There you are, something coming out of nothing. Nobel is for me.

And then nothing coming out of something... As the universe races towards contraction.

[Anthu]

And then nothing coming out of something... As the universe races towards contraction.

Why not this way? ... something infinitely more beautiful arising till primordial nothingness is recognized as infinity. Something powerful enough to stop contraction or any other eventuality.

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And then nothing coming out of something... As the universe races towards contraction.

Why not this way? ... something infinitely more beautiful arising till primordial nothingness is recognized as infinity. Something powerful enough to stop contraction or any other eventuality.

I was merely being sarcastic. Of course you are right!

[Rick]

Conservation of mass-energy is the unchanging law of the universe, according to conventional physical theory. Squeeze it all you want, it's still the same amount of mass-energy.

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it's still the same amount of mass-energy.

So, there's a magic number out there he?! What I would give to find out which it is!

[Rick]

My favorite theory is that the universe is actually infinite. That is, the mass-energy (as well as the space) of the universe is unbounded. Infinite or not, the universe is so big that we will never see all of it.

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"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it"

William Arthur Ward

[Rick]

I'm going to have work on that, imagining that I can see all of an infinite universe.

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My favorite theory is that the universe is actually infinite. That is, the mass-energy (as well as the space) of the universe is unbounded. Infinite or not, the universe is so big that we will never see all of it.

You seem to be contradicting youself here. If the universe was infinitely small at some point, and if mass/energy is a constant, how can the universe be unbounded now; just because it's going throuth the time/space prism?

[Rick]

Not infinitely "small" but infinitely dense. You can never get outside the universe so it will always seem unbounded on the inside.

[Hey Hey]

Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

A human body contains greater than a million miles of DNA. Relevant? Irrelevant? Nevertheless interesting ....

Can you show me the calculation by which you arrived at that number? It seems rather long to me, even considering that we have billions of cells.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/StevenChen.shtml

The human genome comprises the information contained in one set of human chromosomes which themselves contain about 3 billion base pairs (bp) of DNA in 46 chromosomes (22 autosome pairs + 2 sex chromosomes). The total length of DNA present in one adult human is calculated by the multiplication of

(length of 1 bp)(number of bp per cell)(number of cells in the body)

(0.34 × 10e-9 m)(6 × 10e9)(10e13)

2.0 × 10e13 meters

[Hey Hey]

Not infinitely "small" but infinitely dense. You can never get outside the universe so it will always seem unbounded on the inside.

So what size was that infinitely dense universe?

[Rick]

Thanks for showing the calculation.

An infinitely dense universe of infinite mass-eneregy would occupy infinite volume. Use infinity or divide by zero and all logic goes out the windows. Nature abhors a singularity.

[Trip like I do]

.... the estimated size of the universe before inflation and before the big bang and the maximum amount of information it could contain would be a space containing 10^6 bits of information whereas today's universe requires at least 10^86 bits of information.... which invariably leads to the question 'where did all the information that we see today come from'?

[Trip like I do]

"It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event -- such a singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm."

Vernor Vinge -SciFi great

[Trip like I do]

The Singularity is an apocalyptic idea originally proposed by John von Neumann, one of the inventors of digital computation, and elucidated by figures such as Ray Kurzweil and scifi great Vernor Vinge.

"The Singularity" is seen by some as the end point of our current culture, when the ever-accelerating evolution of technology finally overtakes us and changes everything. It's been represented as everything from the end of all life to the beginning of a utopian age, which you might recognize as the endgames of most other religious beliefs.

While the definitions of the Singularity are as varied as people's fantasies of the future, with a very obvious reason, most agree that artificial intelligence will be the turning point. Once an AI is even the tiniest bit smarter than us, it'll be able to learn faster and we'll simply never be able to keep up. This will render us utterly obsolete in evolutionary terms.

Singularity books are now as common in a computer science department as Rapture images are in an evangelical bookstore, says computer scientist and visionary Jaron Lanier in his new manifesto. There are many versions of the fantasy of the Singularity. Here’s the one Marvin Minsky of MIT used to tell over the dinner table in the early 1980s:

"One day soon, maybe twenty or thirty years into the twenty- first century, computers and robots will be able to construct copies of themselves, and these copies will be a little better than the originals because of intelligent software. The second generation of robots will then make a third, but it will take less time, because of the improvements over the first generation.

"The process will repeat. Successive generations will be ever smarter and will appear ever faster. People might think they’re in control, until one fine day the rate of robot improvement ramps up so quickly that superintelligent robots will suddenly rule the Earth."

In some versions of the story Lanier writes in We Are Not Gadgets, the internet comes alive and rallies all the net- connected machines into an army to control the affairs of the planet. Humans might then enjoy immortality within virtual reality, "because the global brain would be so huge that it would be absolutely easy for it to host all our consciousnesses for eternity".

It might be true, Lanier adds, that on some vast cosmic basis, higher and higher forms of consciousness inevitably arise, until the whole universe becomes a brain, or something along those lines.

Even at much smaller scales of millions or even thousands of years, Lanier continues, "it is more exciting to imagine humanity evolving into a more wonderful state than we can presently articulate. The only alternatives would be extinction or stodgy stasis, which would be a little disappointing and sad, so let us hope for transcendence of the human condition, as we now understand it."

If you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans,Lanier concludes, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring. The Singularity, however, would involve people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious, or people simply being annihilated in an imperceptible instant before a new superconsciousness takes over the Earth. The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living.

[Anthu]

I wonder if these ideas aren't a hotch-potch of apocalypse, technological improvement and the ever-accelerating growth recorded since the big bang.

As rightly pointed out by Rick, no gadget has ever become conscious. Net is a wonderful tool for the conscious souls. But pretty little it can do on its own. No inch of performance without the feeding or the programming.

Wonders such as the Invisible or a parallel universe vibrating on a different frequency may either be made or discovered one day. We would certainly take them in our stride with the right explanation given for them. In any case, the explanation would be in continuation of the already known physics.

Modern physics has substantiated what some of our illumined ancestors had intuitively stated: for instance inter-connectedness of reality.

The hard questions to be posed are these:

Has human brain coped sufficiently well with the enormous power and utility offered by internet or not?

Who is better in synthesising and comprehending the universe, man or the machine?

Is it only electrical and light properties that are fast and powerful such as in representing billions of information available on the earth? How about human thought and their billions of nuances and variations?

Why on earth there are grades such as physical matter, biological matter and thinking matter?

Having seen the revolutions in physical engineering, biological engineering and computing engineering should we not ultimately look for thinking engineering?

I mean thinking with sufficient reasons and determination that the ultimate breakthrough will happen just on its own, without tools and gadgets but relying solely on the undeterred vision of the human being.