Theory Hub: Post Your Space Theories!

[sevenperforce]

16 hours ago, Apexazimuth said:

Interesting hypothesis. However I think the energy requirement for the nucleosynthesis of heavy radioactive elements is many orders of magnitude greater than a ~10 solar mass collapse can produce, so for sure any fusion of those elements would occur during the supernova itself, and the energy absorbed from that nucleosynthesis would hugely outweigh the output of the fission of those elements into less massive atoms. 

I'm just making a guess though, I'm no physicist. 

You're right. There is a stupidly high amount of gravitational potential energy bound up in the iron core that once it starts to collapse, it provides far, far more energy than is needed to synthesize heavy elements.

[wilsonwi15]

My Big Bang Theory #1

 

At one point in time, before the big bang. There were ancient planets that were slowly being consumed by a mega black hole. While black holes are consuming everything from matter to light, it converts everything into pure energy at the very center. After everything has been used up, the black hole collapses and the energy is too much to stay stable by itself. The pure energy is then expelled violently… the big bang.

 

Basing this on that idea, that would mean that all of the black holes that we have today, is slowly attempting to recreate the big bang, but there isn’t enough energy nor will there ever be. That is, until that moment a new mega black hole is formed and has enough pull to start the whole process again. Which I doubt.

 

My black hole Theory #2

 

Contradictory to my Big Bang Theory, I thing that at the very center of a black hole is anti-matter. Which is what’s consuming matter and light and when one anti-matter and matter or light is “negated”, it leaves black matter which in turn creates a boundry of push and a pull around the black hole. When it is close enough to the black hole, it consumes it. When it is far enough away, the black matter is painfully slowly pushing everything else away.

 

 

Space #1

 

What came before the big bang? What came before everything? Did everything before just became out of nothing? If something or someone that is, created everything, who or what made it or made that someone? Who or what made it as well? Is it just an infinite idea?  Is space truly infinite? And if it isn’t, what does everything past space look like? Is it endless? Is it white? Clear? Is it also black as our universe is? Why is space black? Could the blackness that we see be dark matter in the universe as a collective, even if you cannot see it by the naked eye?

Is the space that we know in the form of a sphere? If you could somehow reach beyond our universe, could you find others? Maybe much older universes that also had big bangs?

 

People say god made everything, but who or what made him or her? Him or her had to have had a beginning, so what was before? How was there a beginning in the first place? Would it someday return to the point in which there was a beginning again? Alternatively, to the point that a beginning could cease to exist? What would that be like? If nothing existed, could something that is said to not exist, still be considered to be something even if nothing that exist in the past, present, or future, can comprehend it, even if that something was the first and last quark?

 

If we were to think of our universe as a shape, what would surround our universe?

 

My idea is the bubble theory, but I want to add to it, as my own personal theory. Zero Matter.

I am not sure if the words Zero Matter is taken or not, but for now, that is what i am calling it, so bare with me.

 

Zero matter has no purpose, no substance, no shape or form, only empty material like a hard drive waiting for information.

Zero matter, I believe is the other missing half of what is supposed to be a whole. Dark matter could be what gives Zero matter a purpose, substance, its shape and form, its information. Matter that we see today is the by-product of the two halves coming together. Zero matter cannot exist within the bubbles that is our universes.

When dark matter is exposed to Zero matter, it forms matter. Which would make sense within the bubble theory.

Within the bubbles is dark matter, and within the empty space between the bubble universes is Zero Matter.

My idea of Zero Matter, it couldn’t be what came first (absolute) before everything, could it?

 

Edited June 3, 2016 by wilsonwi15
had to add in the point of unsurity for the words Zero Matter.

[VictorP]

I would like to propose a new explanation for Fermi's paradox, namely, if life is found elsewhere, it will be maximally exactly as complex as we are and thus has only just recently began looking beyond their home planet. This seems an unlikely solution, but if the constrains specified below hold true, this is a genuine possibility.

First, look at man’s position among other life here on Earth.

Before Darwin and the scientific method, man was seen as the center of creation; God’s chosen one, created in his image, other plants and animals were mere props in mankind’s play. Nowadays, mankind is viewed as merely one integral piece of the ecological machinery, slightly brighter perhaps, severely influential probably, but well within the Gaussian distribution of faunal attributes, in other words, nothing special.

I would like to rehabilitate our role as center of creation of sorts, since in a very fundamental way we really are the pinnacle of the animal kingdom and so does our evolution differ fundamentally from that of other beings. Namely, in terms of complexity, it is quite possible that the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. Although complexity is a mere conceptual concept and not quantifiable, the following facts lend credit to why this claim has so often been made: The human brain has around 100 billion nerve cells or neurons, more than the number of stars in the Milky Way. Between them they have about a 100 trillion nerve connections. If each neuron of a single human brain were laid end to end they could be wrapped around the Earth twice over.

It is this brain that has enabled us to dominate as a species, rising above nature’s inter- and intraspecies continuous squabble over limited resources onto a new playing field where we stand uncontested by other species. It is our complexity itself which enables us to evolve differently from other species, quite possibly our technology will continue man’s lead into ever more complex ‘beings’. Quite unlikely that we will ever be surpassed in complexity by any other being (no Planet of the Apes seems likely).

Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen.

Richard Dawkins wrote an interesting book on our ancestors, in as many chapters he traces 40 steps of evolutionary ancestors branching off. All steps seem to be an increase in complexity. In many steps these newly complex beings seem to have evolved into new playing fields, fresh niches, which were previously unexploited, e.g. when the first land animal evolved, or the first animal came to be that used oxygen, or the first mammal arose, whose warm-bloodedness and hair enabled it to live on a wider range of latitudes and its milk production enabled their offspring to develop more sophisticated brains.

 

Evolution is viewed as the natural selection of favorable traits, which depending on evolutionary pressure, might be to become larger or smaller, darker or lighter, faster or slower or more complex or simpler. But, what if for the most complex being, this leads to novel evolutionary possibilities, expanding there enables the most complex being to advance its lead, to build upon its winning complexity and accelerate it. Such a being would adhere to the Law of Accelerating returns (as per Ray Kurzweil).

Ray Kurzweil’s milestones

What’s more, such a being and all his ancestors would in any time in history have been the most complex being. This being is us.

After each breakthrough to a new playing field, a fan of newly evolved beings compete, interact and interbreed, before establishing one or more optima, e.g. with all species of Homo with which Homo Sapiens competed, or the Cambrian explosion, when first multi-cellular enabled much more complexity, or perhaps the existence of viruses, which according to one theory co-evolved with RNA.

The following schematic overview I have created illustrating this concept. Mankind’s path towards higher complexity is straight (on a log scale), others more random, like that of the horse with which we share a common ancestor a little over a hundred million years ago, or like that of Neanderthal man which branched of about 400,000 years ago and went extinct roughly 30,000 years ago at which time they displayed some cultural traits.

Schematic depiction of complexity growth of man’s evolution and that of some additional entities conceptually.

I have contemplated if there might be a rate with which this exponential rise in complexity might occur, something I describe in a different blog post. I do think this progress is robust, as robust as Moore’s law and events considered catastrophic such as the meteor that ‘wiped out’ the dinosaurs, other mass extinctions, the two World Wars and perhaps even the forming of planet Earth (meaning the exact time of it) were from the perspective of the evolution of complexity, in effect non-events.

Many facts of contemporary civilization point to such robustness, e.g. the fact that many technological advances were developed separately and independently such as in agriculture, in pyramid building (for an elaborate examination of this look at Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants), but also in the domestication of dogs and horses. These facts have been so wondrous to many, that they have been incorporated in elaborate conspiracy theories e.g. of alien ancestry, whilst this is solely an expression of the robustness with which mankind has been progressing.

In the universe the arrow of complexity is aligned with the arrow of time.

If complexity growth is both unperturbed by random events and governed by some universal constant, as I believe it is, we can then take this to its ultimate conclusion and provide for an alternative for Fermi’s paradox.

We can use the concept of Uniformitarianism which is the scientific observation that the same natural laws and processes that operate now have always been operational in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. So if the evolution of complexity was robust and continuously towards ever more complexity and is governed even by a certain constant, here, on planet Earth, it is logical to assume that this applies elsewhere in our galaxy as well. And that if our personal history started with the Big Bang followed by the creation of protons and neutrons and the creation of heavy elements, this would be a shared history in other places of the galaxy, and that if the formation of life followed logically from this, it would’ve followed logically from this elsewhere where a Goldilocks planet was available as well. Similarly, if life became more complex here continuously, uninfluenced by random events, like mass extinctions, it would do so elsewhere in the galaxy as well.

 

Into the future our path would be as follows, just like in the past more complex parts interlink to form ever more complexity, now, we are at the onset of the interlinking of the human brain with technology, the rising computing power and the internet are the first glimpse of this. Elsewhere in our Galaxy, other civilizations are doing the same. Ultimately, man will link with other civilizations in order to create even more complex entities, these complexities might even rival the Universe’s natural tendency to increase its entropy indefinitely.

 

I welcome any thoughts or comments.

https://humansrunderrated.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/an-alternative-solution-to-fermis-paradox/

[PB666]

Because the axis of the graph is on log scale the accuraccy of the conclusion is dependent on small shifts in slope of the first 10%. A small shift in slope at this point can cause a large shift in were lsentient life appears later on a nonlog plot. 

[VictorP]

@PB666

Well, that's true. As such the boundary condition needed would be a universal constant with which complexity grows exponentially. I believe such a constant exists.

[PB666]

BTW, I tend to think of bacteria as being part of me, for instance, the mitochondria, the chlorophyll in the plants that are food, and my microbial flora. The plants thatvI eat and the fish and other domesticants are along for the human ride. Humans have alot of interdependencies in the ecosystem. So before you go out drawing lines out, just remember that we are part of whole. The earth without us is still a pretty fine Earth, but without all the Earth that supports us its just another rocky planet. 

[VictorP]

To be the pinnacle of evolution says nothing about dependencies.

[TheSealBrigade]

21 minutes ago, VictorP said:

To be the pinnacle of evolution says nothing about dependencies.

Yes! For example, the Coelacanth and various reptiles like crocodiles haven't changed in millions of years. To but it simply, they are at the pinnacle of their evolutionary state; they do not need to evolve because they are "perfect" the way they are. Humans are the same way as far as we know. But the dependencies never change, because humans, crocodiles, and coelacanths all need a stable environment to live in. The only difference the humans have is being able to build and produce means of surviving.

[PB666]

25 minutes ago, VictorP said:

To be the pinnacle of evolution says nothing about dependencies.

Are we the pinnacle? 

[VictorP]

@TheSealBrigade Humans are changing ever faster, and have always done so at any stage in their evolution. Why do you say we need a stable environment? And what would you consider stable?

@PB666 Like I said in my post, in a very fundamental way, we can be seen as the pinnacle, namely in terms of complexity (although poorly quantifiable). This is evident in our domination as a species. Any future pinnacle of evolution will evolve from our species, I believe.

[TheSealBrigade]

@PB666, we can't say for sure. We need a larger timescale to measure than humans have existed. For example, crocodiles where crocodiles back then while humans where small marsupials. Crocodiles are at their pinnacle because they haven't changed, but we have. We can't say if we are at our pinnacle now, but maybe in a few million years we will find out!

5 minutes ago, VictorP said:

@TheSealBrigade Humans are changing ever faster, and have always done so at any stage in their evolution. Why do you say we need a stable environment? And what would you consider stable?

@PB666 Like I said in my post, in a very fundamental way, we can be seen as the pinnacle, namely in terms of complexity (although poorly quantifiable). This is evident in our domination as a species. Any future pinnacle of evolution will evolve from our species, I believe.

A stable environment? We are a fluke, because we can change the environment we live in. But crocodiles and coelacanths need the right conditions (like a warm temperature, but not scorching) to survive. They can not make Air Conditioning or space heaters, so if the environment changed too rapidly, the dependencies on the past environment would ultimately wipe out the species.

[vger]

A little thought about life on Europa and other worlds with similar conditions. Life forms that can 'feed' on radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

[TheSealBrigade]

Gamma radiation? What makes these spores tick? Menalin is useful, but does it have any repair mechanisms for DNA repair? And how common is it?

[VictorP]

12 minutes ago, TheSealBrigade said:

@PB666, we can't say for sure. We need a larger timescale to measure than humans have existed. For example, crocodiles where crocodiles back then while humans where small marsupials. Crocodiles are at their pinnacle because they haven't changed, but we have. We can't say if we are at our pinnacle now, but maybe in a few million years we will find out!

A stable environment? We are a fluke, because we can change the environment we live in. But crocodiles and coelacanths need the right conditions (like a warm temperature, but not scorching) to survive. They can not make Air Conditioning or space heaters, so if the environment changed too rapidly, the dependencies on the past environment would ultimately wipe out the species.

But since the climate changed so much, so rapidly in the previous 100 million years that crocodiles spend so leisurely unevolved, why the need to mention such an irrelevant boundary condition?

[TheSealBrigade]

The boundary is very vague, if not nonexistent, but we can get an idea of evolutionary dominance in human standards. I can not think of another dependency factor as of now. But well said @VictorP

[Nikolai]

On 2/17/2016 at 7:44 PM, Findthepin1 said:

You can convert matter into energy, correct? I assume you can also convert energy into matter. Take a whole lot of photons (which have no rest mass and travel at c) and make them into matter with a whole lot of precision. Done. I think if you do this right, you can have a proton or an electron or something that is traveling at some fraction of c. I also think I might be wrong because I'd have heard about this if I were right. Let me know

Well, part of the problem is that darned equals sign.  You know how a little bit of mass releases a whole lot of energy?  Since the equals sign works both ways, this also means that in order to make a little bit of mass, you need to gather a whole lot of energy.

So let's say you do gather a whole lot of energy, and then dump it into photons, and then you use the photons to create matter.  Fine.  But why wouldn't you just use that energy to, you know, accelerate existing matter?

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Nikolai said:

Well, part of the problem is that darned equals sign.  You know how a little bit of mass releases a whole lot of energy?  Since the equals sign works both ways, this also means that in order to make a little bit of mass, you need to gather a whole lot of energy.

So let's say you do gather a whole lot of energy, and then dump it into photons, and then you use the photons to create matter.  Fine.  But why wouldn't you just use that energy to, you know, accelerate existing matter?

Watch the necro. But I will tie your response into to current topic therefore turning it into a franken-response.

Well if you go by that logic, the pinnacle species is the species that maximizes the thermodynamic benefit. Any one of human cultivars would outpace humans. Maize, definitely captures more suns energy than any other species. Rice probably way up there, And then there is hay, lets not forget all that animal fodder. Ruminent likes cows are secondary consumers. A good pine species combines biomass trapping with the thermodynamics. And should we not forget the most pervasive marine algae species.

Simply stated humans are no even on the chart for E = hv = mc2. On this earth water traps most of the heat, stores the heat in increased water mass (and volume) as global warming has taught us. Then it releases the heat as radiant energy at night. On land you are probably talking about the most abundant grass species as way far behind.

[Findthepin1]

2 hours ago, Nikolai said:

But why wouldn't you just use that energy to, you know, accelerate existing matter?

It takes more energy to do so. This way, we can create matter that's already going fast, and it takes less energy than to accelerate matter that already has a mass and a speed. Photons are massless. They don't need energy to accelerate themselves. Mass does. Photons can, however, be pointed in a direction, like mass, so the capabilities of direction are the same. Choosing the speed is probably possible depending on the angle of the photons when they are converted into matter. 

Edited June 8, 2016 by Findthepin1

[Nikolai]

9 minutes ago, Findthepin1 said:

It takes more energy to do so.

I'm not sure that it does; you can't get something for nothing.  If you supply the energy needed to create an electron with a given kinetic energy, it should always sum to be more than the amount of energy you need to accelerate an electron you happen to have handy to that level of kinetic energy, because you don't need to worry in the latter case about supplying the energy to convert into mass in the first place.

47 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Well if you go by that logic, the pinnacle species is the species that maximizes the thermodynamic benefit.

What?  I'm not sure we were even discussing "pinnacle species" here... just a way to get things to move fast.  ("Pinnacle species" came up from other posters, as if there were such a thing, but I don't think this particular idea had anything to do with that.)

[VictorP]

44 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Watch the necro. But I will tie your response into to current topic therefore turning it into a franken-response.

Well if you go by that logic, the pinnacle species is the species that maximizes the thermodynamic benefit. Any one of human cultivars would outpace humans. Maize, definitely captures more suns energy than any other species. Rice probably way up there, And then there is hay, lets not forget all that animal fodder. Ruminent likes cows are secondary consumers. A good pine species combines biomass trapping with the thermodynamics. And should we not forget the most pervasive marine algae species.

Simply stated humans are no even on the chart for E = hv = mc2. On this earth water traps most of the heat, stores the heat in increased water mass (and volume) as global warming has taught us. Then it releases the heat as radiant energy at night. On land you are probably talking about the most abundant grass species as way far behind.

However, by another energy metric proposed as proxy for complexity, humans and their exponent societies do take home the bacon, namely energy rate density: 

[PB666]

3 hours ago, VictorP said:

However, by another energy metric proposed as proxy for complexity, humans and their exponent societies do take home the bacon, namely energy rate density: 

Thats until we run out of fossil fuels, or we cook ourselves in green house gases, unless fusion finally comes along and saves the world. Our potential energy density comes out of the ground and was largely made by plants, and where it lay was at higher energy density than us.

 

3 hours ago, Nikolai said:

I'm not sure that it does; you can't get something for nothing.  If you supply the energy needed to create an electron with a given kinetic energy, it should always sum to be more than the amount of energy you need to accelerate an electron you happen to have handy to that level of kinetic energy, because you don't need to worry in the latter case about supplying the energy to convert into mass in the first place.

What?  I'm not sure we were even discussing "pinnacle species" here... just a way to get things to move fast.  ("Pinnacle species" came up from other posters, as if there were such a thing, but I don't think this particular idea had anything to do with that.)

I just wanted to fix your necro problem.

 

[VictorP]

The energy rate density of fossil fuels in the ground is zero.

 

Our energy use predominantly is a function of knowledge, only secondarily, is this currently expressed as oil as our main energy source, whereas in the past it was coal, wood, wind or water. As our knowledge has been increasing, so has our energy production per capita been increasing, as long back as we can measure them. Soon other energy sources will be primary, such as gas, solar, fission or fusion. In theoretical sense, energy availability on Earth is close to infinity, e.g. fusing the deuterium available in the world's oceans alone would provide enough energy for the global economy for the coming 75 billion years. The only thing lacking is the knowledge to use it.

[DDE]

On ‎17‎.‎02‎.‎2016 at 11:09 PM, RA3236 said:

After seeing many topics about advanced alien civilisations, here's my thought: We are quite possibly the most advanced in the galaxy. Reason: four billion years ago, when the sun was born, most stars were too big to have a habitable zone. And plus, if life evolved to the extent of intelligence within two bya, it's a low chance they have floating spacecraft.

What you're better off referring to is metallicity. Not enough elements were around for formation of terrestrials.

But then it's kinda crushed by the 11-billion-year-old Kapteyn system and other extremely old worlds.

On ‎18‎.‎02‎.‎2016 at 8:51 AM, Findthepin1 said:

Okay I got another one that is unrelated to the last one I said. This one: If there is life on Titan that is capable of sight, it will be able to see in infrared. That way, it could see the celestial bodies in the sky. Useful to navigation if you can see the stars or the Sun or Saturn. Those that could see in IR would probably live longer (they can migrate) and be more successful leading to natural selection. 

Well, many species on Earth navigate by polarization of sunlight rather than actual astronomy. We didn't reach that in Physics classes, so I don't know how the atmosphere on Titan would affect this mechanism.

21 hours ago, TheSealBrigade said:

Gamma radiation? What makes these spores tick? Menalin is useful, but does it have any repair mechanisms for DNA repair? And how common is it?

Generally rare. I think that one was found in Chernobyl.

We have these nice examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermococcus_gammatolerans

Edited June 9, 2016 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

On 08.06.2016 at 3:31 PM, PB666 said:

The earth without us is still a pretty fine Earth, but without all the Earth that supports us its just another rocky planet. 

The Earth without us has no purpose. We're the best it've created.

Moreover, it has no more time to repeat this again.

[VictorP]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

The Earth without us has no purpose. We're the best it've created.

Moreover, it has no more time to repeat this again.

Couldn't agree more. Rare to find someone that thinks the same on this as I do.

As far as we know, the only thing standing between an ever more entropic universe and an eventual heat death of it is us. How's that for purpose!