Infinite Universe?
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Assuming the Universe is infinite then the number of stars in said Universe must also be infinite and therefore the number of planets orbiting said stars, that can support human-like life, is infinite and therefore the chance of there being at least one other human-like civilisation is infinitely close to 1. Therefore, do you think they would all have developed a Windows 10 O/S?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
There ARE bridges too far to cross. They may have avoided Windows 10 but likely are hung up on Doors 21.
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raddevus wrote:
So, science cannot deal with infinite.
Indeed. One of the reasons the number zero was not adopted by many cultures and banned by various religions is that the number zero leads to the problem of infinity, and only God can be infinite. That said, on theological grounds, since God is infinite, and infinite God could only exist in a finite universe, so I retract my statement that the universe is not infinite. ;) Marc
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raddevus wrote:
So, science cannot deal with infinite.
Indeed. One of the reasons the number zero was not adopted by many cultures and banned by various religions is that the number zero leads to the problem of infinity, and only God can be infinite. That said, on theological grounds, since God is infinite, and infinite God could only exist in a finite universe, so I retract my statement that the universe is not infinite. ;) Marc
Latest Article - Create a Dockerized Python Fiddle Web App Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Google it and you'll find the "proof" (as in mathematical proof) that shows how the number was derived.
Richard Deeming had a link and I was being facetious and snarky. :-D Pretty cool math.
#SupportHeForShe Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Assuming the Universe is infinite then the number of stars in said Universe must also be infinite and therefore the number of planets orbiting said stars, that can support human-like life, is infinite and therefore the chance of there being at least one other human-like civilisation is infinitely close to 1. Therefore, do you think they would all have developed a Windows 10 O/S?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
There was one like this that I loved... On any planet in which intelligent life is found, the probability that they will explain their existence on a God is 1... To the original post, even if infinite, it may be the case that intelligence is only on one planet at a time! And I can't wait for Earths turn!
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raddevus wrote:
The Universe cannot be infinite
Then where does it end and what's on the other side?
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Assuming that you're not trolling :)... Just because something is not infinite does not mean that it isn't endless. A loop is not infinite (inasmuchas it has a measurable size) but doesn't have an end either. The Cosmos (and others) talked about this rather nicely with the 2D version of reality called Flatland. A Flatlander's reality could be mapped into our 3D reality by visualising it as inhabiting the surface of a sphere. The Flatlander walks and walks and soon finds themselves where they started. Seems infinite, but in fact is not. If you map our 3D space into a higher dimensional reality (which would be difficult for us to imagine and really requires pure mathematics to explore) then we could travel in any direction and end up where we started, the implications of which would be very hard for our puny 3D brains to comprehend. The Universe seems intuitively infinite because otherwise we assume that there must be an "edge" but there probably isn't.
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Assuming the Universe is infinite then the number of stars in said Universe must also be infinite and therefore the number of planets orbiting said stars, that can support human-like life, is infinite and therefore the chance of there being at least one other human-like civilisation is infinitely close to 1. Therefore, do you think they would all have developed a Windows 10 O/S?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
Flipping a coin on a flat surface almost always results in heads or tails. But there is a very small possibility that the coin will come to rest on its edge. However, given a infinite number of flips, the coin will come to rest on its edge an infinite number of times. I believe infinity is best thought of as a convenient mathematical construct.
73
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Flipping a coin on a flat surface almost always results in heads or tails. But there is a very small possibility that the coin will come to rest on its edge. However, given a infinite number of flips, the coin will come to rest on its edge an infinite number of times. I believe infinity is best thought of as a convenient mathematical construct.
73
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Assuming that you're not trolling :)... Just because something is not infinite does not mean that it isn't endless. A loop is not infinite (inasmuchas it has a measurable size) but doesn't have an end either. The Cosmos (and others) talked about this rather nicely with the 2D version of reality called Flatland. A Flatlander's reality could be mapped into our 3D reality by visualising it as inhabiting the surface of a sphere. The Flatlander walks and walks and soon finds themselves where they started. Seems infinite, but in fact is not. If you map our 3D space into a higher dimensional reality (which would be difficult for us to imagine and really requires pure mathematics to explore) then we could travel in any direction and end up where we started, the implications of which would be very hard for our puny 3D brains to comprehend. The Universe seems intuitively infinite because otherwise we assume that there must be an "edge" but there probably isn't.
Ralph Little wrote:
Assuming that you're not trolling
What is wrong with people on the internet. As soon as someone disagrees with you they must be trolling? :doh:
Ralph Little wrote:
A loop is not infinite (inasmuchas it has a measurable size) but doesn't have an end either.
I disagree. If you pick a point on the loop and call it the starting point, you can quickly see that there is also an endpoint.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Ralph Little wrote:
Assuming that you're not trolling
What is wrong with people on the internet. As soon as someone disagrees with you they must be trolling? :doh:
Ralph Little wrote:
A loop is not infinite (inasmuchas it has a measurable size) but doesn't have an end either.
I disagree. If you pick a point on the loop and call it the starting point, you can quickly see that there is also an endpoint.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
> What is wrong with people on the internet. As soon as someone disagrees with you they must be trolling? That was actually a joke. Don't take me too seriously. ;) > I disagree. If you pick a point on the loop and call it the starting point, you can quickly see that there is also an endpoint. In that case, you could arbitrarily call anything an "endpoint". I think what most people intuitively call an "end" in the context of this discussion, is somewhere you cannot go beyond, a point beyond which nothing exists. At least that's how I would interpret it. Interestingly though, although people can conceive of an end of a universe as a concept, I don't know if they could actually describe what it would be like. Perhaps it would a big wall. Perhaps it would be just a void-like nothingness, but surely that would be just space with nothing in it and therefore not and end at all? Sometimes trying to describe something precisely betrays our ignorance of what we actually mean.
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> What is wrong with people on the internet. As soon as someone disagrees with you they must be trolling? That was actually a joke. Don't take me too seriously. ;) > I disagree. If you pick a point on the loop and call it the starting point, you can quickly see that there is also an endpoint. In that case, you could arbitrarily call anything an "endpoint". I think what most people intuitively call an "end" in the context of this discussion, is somewhere you cannot go beyond, a point beyond which nothing exists. At least that's how I would interpret it. Interestingly though, although people can conceive of an end of a universe as a concept, I don't know if they could actually describe what it would be like. Perhaps it would a big wall. Perhaps it would be just a void-like nothingness, but surely that would be just space with nothing in it and therefore not and end at all? Sometimes trying to describe something precisely betrays our ignorance of what we actually mean.
Ralph Little wrote:
you could arbitrarily call anything an "endpoint".
Yes. Because if you also pick an arbitrary starting point and then follow around the loop you'll end up at points you have already visited, thus you must have passed the end point.
Ralph Little wrote:
but surely that would be just space with nothing in it and therefore not and end at all?
Precisely. Our brains cannot conceive, IMO, an end to space.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Ralph Little wrote:
you could arbitrarily call anything an "endpoint".
Yes. Because if you also pick an arbitrary starting point and then follow around the loop you'll end up at points you have already visited, thus you must have passed the end point.
Ralph Little wrote:
but surely that would be just space with nothing in it and therefore not and end at all?
Precisely. Our brains cannot conceive, IMO, an end to space.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
>Yes. Because if you also pick an arbitrary starting point and then follow around the loop you'll end up at points you have already visited, thus you must have passed the end point. Sounds like we're only disagreeing on what the word "end" means then and whether or not you can go beyond it. If, in travelling in any direction, you arrive where you started after some fixed time interval, then the Universe must be finite because you could measure the distance that you travelled and therefore determine the Universe's "size". It could be that there are physical reasons why this is impossible to do in practice analogous to moving faster than c. We do have good reasons for thinking that the Universe is expanding so measuring the size of the Universe might be difficult. It might also be difficult to come up with a measurement unit to describe the size of the Universe since all measurements of anything are relative. My 3 dimensional head hurts.
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>Yes. Because if you also pick an arbitrary starting point and then follow around the loop you'll end up at points you have already visited, thus you must have passed the end point. Sounds like we're only disagreeing on what the word "end" means then and whether or not you can go beyond it. If, in travelling in any direction, you arrive where you started after some fixed time interval, then the Universe must be finite because you could measure the distance that you travelled and therefore determine the Universe's "size". It could be that there are physical reasons why this is impossible to do in practice analogous to moving faster than c. We do have good reasons for thinking that the Universe is expanding so measuring the size of the Universe might be difficult. It might also be difficult to come up with a measurement unit to describe the size of the Universe since all measurements of anything are relative. My 3 dimensional head hurts.
Ralph Little wrote:
so measuring the size of the Universe might be difficult.
Might be. ;)
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Ralph Little wrote:
so measuring the size of the Universe might be difficult.
Might be. ;)
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
You know I was just reading my last reply and it occurred to me that since there are no fixed points in space, how could you possibly determine when you had returned to your original position? Blah.
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Termi Nater wrote:
clear cut conclusions
I believe that is a mythical beast you are speaking of. :)
You presume that the universe is rational.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Assuming the Universe is infinite then the number of stars in said Universe must also be infinite and therefore the number of planets orbiting said stars, that can support human-like life, is infinite and therefore the chance of there being at least one other human-like civilisation is infinitely close to 1. Therefore, do you think they would all have developed a Windows 10 O/S?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
What is the 'end' of the universe? Is it the most distant star, mote of dust, particle? Of course not, because we can always ask the question, how much nothingness comes after that? That is a question we can grasp. Does the universe expand outwardly until the very fabric of spacetime dissipates into nothingness, where no energy can exist? Does spacetime just loop back in on itself in a 4D sphere, or saddle? All this means is that we cannot travel, see or measure anything where there is no spacetime. So in what context does spacetime exist? By what mechanism does spacetime have any meaning? Or is spacetime synonymous with existence? Is there nothing else at all to explain? This discussion always leads me to the conclusion that the fact that there is anything; matter, spacetime, anything at all, is purely absurd. Our whole existence seems fantastically mythical.
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You presume that the universe is rational.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
It is rational. Can you pray to turn plain water into wine? I am waiting with an empty glass.
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Assuming the Universe is infinite then the number of stars in said Universe must also be infinite and therefore the number of planets orbiting said stars, that can support human-like life, is infinite and therefore the chance of there being at least one other human-like civilisation is infinitely close to 1. Therefore, do you think they would all have developed a Windows 10 O/S?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.