Irrelevance Of A Meaningful Existence Due To Predicted Eventuality Of The Universe - Or Not?
Hi ABers,
Not been on for a while, been off reading and expanding my knowledge about my deepest troubles. And I return with a stonker for you, which I hope even the most hardened experimental science buffs will have a crack at, despite it's proximity to being a philosophical question. So... lengthy title that demands further explanation.
I'm an incredibly deep thinker and I use my cognitive abilities to tackle The question... The meaning life, the universe and everything (as Douglas put it.) I've thus exposed my mind to the unimaginable durations of time yet to come and the fate of humanity in it's wake.
IF we assume mankind never manages to colonise any other planetary body outside our own solar system, then come 5 billions years or so, our star will exhaust it's supply of nuclear fuel and enter it's death phases, swallowing up Earth along the way.
Otherwise, IF we assume mankind has managed to colonise and breed successful generations on a world around another star in our galaxy, therefore avoiding the destruction of Earth, and can repeat this process from star to star, mankind will inevitably suffer the ultimate fate of the rest of the matter in our galaxy and fall victim to the gravity of the super massive black hole in it's centre.
Further more, IF we assume humans have sufficient research and technology to allow them to travel to another galaxy and repeat this process, we can prolong mankind's existence exponentially and conclude they might thrive until the end of the last shining star, hundreds of billions of years from now...
However... scientist are grouped (mainly) in to two camps for the theory of how the universe evolves and ends. One argument is for the 'big crunch', where the Universe stops expanding and under the force of gravity retracts, becoming smaller and smaller until it reaches it's starting point. A singularity. (This theory necessarily condemns Humanity to a squashed end and erasure from existence.) The other camp argues the universe will keep expanding, ever after increasing the distances between the galaxies, making each galaxy an island of matter in the void. Once all the hydrogen is burned up by star formation and death, heavier elements ejected by super nova will eventually be swallowed up by the galactic black hole which (it is believed) the only way it will lose mass and dissipate is by slowly radiating energy , x-rays and such like.
VERY long winded I do apologise but here's my point... If the fate of the universe is either of those two theorised conclusions, man kind will be destroyed, even if the survive to see the last sun bun out. All of human history gone, genetic information from parent to child gone, all of mankind's great research and achievements, inventions and constructions will be gone...
If you, as I have, expose your mind to the vast time frame involved and contemplate our believed fate of our species, doesn't it strike you as pointless to do anything useful with life? Might not it be more logical to be minimal instead of maximum? Do you believe your life will have ANY meaning of relevance to a universe that's seen humanity wiped from it's space?
If I were to be a great orator and progressive politician or I was a Heroin addict living on the streets, once human memory of me or written record of me is lost/deleted/corrupted or damaged beyond salvation, my life and it's achievements would amount to ZERO, especially when mankind ceases to exist and all matter in the universe is either squashed or swallowed up and evaporated into pure energy....
Very sorry for long question, if you've laboured your way through that block of words, might I encourage you to add your own thought below?
IHI