Up All Night

[mistersleepless]

Think about something tonight. Go out under the stars, and think about this

Comments

[fairestcat]

Oh, that's lovely. Definately one to remember.

[po822000]

That's depressingly optimistic.

[envoy]

And you know what? It doesn't matter what went wrong in your life today. Because up there, in the dark, somewhere past the limits of your vision --

-- you got it right.

But what if I got it right here? Did I just doom some other self to failure?

Re: And, while I really like the post, the physicist in me has to spin it the other way

[mistersleepless]

There's never been any such thing as morality.

You miserable bugger.

but where's my flying car?

[jwz]

There was some (not-very-good) book I read ages ago about time travellers stopping the Germans from winning WW2 or somesuch; at the end it turns out that they're not actually time-travellers at all, but dimension-hoppers, since travelling back in time really just pops you into a different one of infinitely many branching timelines.

But they decide that "if we can save just one child, won't it all have been worth it?" and spend their whole time continually going "back" and fighting Nazis.

It seemed like a pretty lousy and futile way to spend eternity to me.

Are there actually models of the universe that assume it has infinite mass? I thought the trend was the belief that space was finite but unbounded. The infinite mass model sounds a lot like the guy who "proved" that we're living in the Matrix.

Re: but where's my flying car?

[mistersleepless]

Are there actually models of the universe that assume it has infinite mass? I thought the trend was the belief that space was finite but unbounded. The infinite mass model sounds a lot like the guy who "proved" that we're living in the Matrix.

I was quoting stuff from memory -- the SciAm article may have it, I remember articles by Martin Rees that have cited such, or at the very least that the universe is so fucking big and full that it may as well be infinite. The Simulation Argument, or permutations thereof, seems to be popping up a lot in high-level cosmology...

[dreamwraith]

Thank you.