Our Useless Universe

Toke said:
If we had been supposed to take showers our armpits would not have been downwards.
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Yes. But then you would not have been able to scratch your . . .. And would die of the itch but smelling really nice. :covereyes
 
We don't know what the odds are against intelligent life evolving, as we only have one example to look at. It may turn out that the odds against it are so great that it would take as many chances as a universe this size offers for it happen even once. In which case the rest of the universe is not useless; it needs to be there for that one in a googleplex chance to come up at least once. :)
 
Magnifico2.0 said:
You might as well start a thread called "Our Useless Oceans". We tend to use maybe the top twenty or thirty feet off the surface and no more... and the vast, vast majority of our oceans are unexplored and unused. And, my guess is, will largely remain unseen.
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But the oceans are not useless. Like just about everything on earth, they are surprisingly useful. They moderate the climate and atmospheric gases especially water vapor, produce food, facilitated evolution, help the U.S. hide deterrent weapons, might plausibly provide fuel for fusion energy, all kinds of useful things. While some portions might be as yet unexplored, the oceans are accessible for exploration whenever we happen to get around to it. If the oceans disappeared we'd not only miss them, our very survival would be doubtful.

By contrast, if every galaxy but our own were to disappear, we'd hardly notice (apart from being very concerned about the cause of the disappearance, but that's not the point). A hundred years ago no one knew they existed in the first place, and no one was going around saying, "I sure wish the universe was 8 bajillion times larger than we think it is."

I suspect that leafman's argument from design will not be well received here, but the observations behind it are sound. The alternate title of the thread would not be "Our Useless Oceans" or any other "Our Useless ____" but rather "Our Incredibly Useful Earth." It's that contrast that makes the rest of the universe so useless by comparison. When we find a succession of energy sources (wood, coal, oil, fission, solar?) of increasing utility and increasing difficulty of extracting, when even such things as insect venoms, deadly disease organisms, and obscure beetle species turn out to have medical uses, it's tempting to think that these things were provided to us for a purpose, like the objects and levels in a video game. Following that pattern, since there's all that space out there to travel into, there must also be a fast and efficient method for such travel that we'll discover in due course...

But if in fact there's no design and no pattern, as the prevailing evidence seems to indicate, then all that space might just be useless instead.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
The centipedes living in my basement probably think the roof on my house is useless.
 
Myriad said:
But the oceans are not useless. Like just about everything on earth, they are surprisingly useful.
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Your argument seems to boil down to "things near us affect us more than things far away from us". That's obviously true, and it's because physics is local and causal and limited by the speed of light.

Nevertheless, if we can learn something from things far from us, because they are far from us, and what we learn allows us to build or learn something useful (that was my example, which you don't see to have understood), then having a large universe could turn out to be very useful indeed.
 
Myriad said:
I suspect that leafman's argument from design will not be well received here, but the observations behind it are sound. The alternate title of the thread would not be "Our Useless Oceans" or any other "Our Useless ____" but rather "Our Incredibly Useful Earth." It's that contrast that makes the rest of the universe so useless by comparison. When we find a succession of energy sources (wood, coal, oil, fission, solar?) of increasing utility and increasing difficulty of extracting, when even such things as insect venoms, deadly disease organisms, and obscure beetle species turn out to have medical uses, it's tempting to think that these things were provided to us for a purpose, like the objects and levels in a video game.
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It's much more tempting to think that you have that totally ass-backwards. Things near us are "useful" because they are near us and we can reach them, and because we evolved in or near them. Part of it is tautological, and part of it is due to the fact that we are evolved in and adapted to our immediate environment, and part of it (probably) to the fact that intelligent life capable of having this conversation can only evolve in certain environments (that's presumably why we don't live in intergalactic space, which after all makes up the vast majority of the space in the universe).

"Design" is a completely unnecessary and decidedly un-tempting hypothesis.
 
Myriad said:
There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within .... its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad
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It gives us a scale to measure Darat against?





[ See you after my suspension. ] :)
 
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Myriad,

Use assumes conscious intention of a user. That potential users have arisen within it does not negate the fact that no user existed at the beginning, and so purpose or usefulness did not then apply.

-Ben
 
godless dave said:
The centipedes living in my basement probably think the roof on my house is useless.
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I'm not sure the point of this metaphor, perhaps because I'm unfamiliar with centipedes' environmental preferences.

If centipedes prefer dry basements, then they would not think the roof on your house is useless, unless their knowledge is too limited to understand the existence of rain, snow, etc. and the efficacy of the roof in keeping it out of the basement.

So, is your point that we are just too dim to understand how useful the vast majority of the universe actually is?

On the other hands, if centipedes are indifferent to the presence or absence of rain in the basement, then they are correct in considering it useless to them. Their only rationale for thinking it useful would be if they were aware of its usefulness to the humans who created and occupy the house.

So, is your point that the universe was created and is occupied by beings comparably superior in understanding and instrumentality to ourselves as we are to centipedes, for whom the existence of vast distant regions of the universe is useful?

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
BenBurch said:
Myriad,

Use assumes conscious intention of a user. That potential users have arisen within it does not negate the fact that no user existed at the beginning, and so purpose or usefulness did not then apply.

-Ben
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Does the absence of any users in any way invalidate describing something as useless? I would argue quite the contrary.

But in any case, past uselessness is not relevant to my point. I'm quite content to limit my claims to present uselessness.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Myriad said:
...The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source.
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Clearly, the problem here is the speed of light—it's simply far too slow given the size of the universe. If the speed of light was, say, a million times faster than it is currently, that'd open up some possibilities. Instead of light taking about 85,000 years to cross our galaxy, it'd only take 31 days. Instead of it taking 2 million years for light to get here from the Andromeda galaxy, it'd only take two years.

So, all that need be done is have scientists figure out a way to raise the speed of light. Hey, they managed it in Futurama! :D
 
As Sol said, the farther reaches of the universe are useful to us because by studying them we learn things that we can apply here. One of the most obvious is that we can learn about the origins of here, and that knowledge is useful in itself, in so much as people find it to be of value (otherwise they wouldn't, for instance, spend money on the answer).

Perhaps more useful is the fact that we can learn some thing about the underlying physical laws. And that knowledge may allow us to put it to useful application - it certainly has in the past.

Regarding the idea that we will never make more direct use of the rest of the galaxy, let alone other galaxies, I think its far too premature to say. I don't see any reason why we can't send self-replicating robots to other stars, which on arrival make use of the energy and materials there. The use we could get from that is access to that energy (for, for instance, computation, the informational products of which could be sent back to us, or for either the energy or even matter to be directly sent back to us). They could make secondary use of those same resources to move to another star and do the same thing there. Over the course of a few million years, the galaxy is "colonized", though we've never left home. You may say "we will never need all that energy" or "it will never be worth it", which may be true, but may not be true, so an argument based on some idea to know one way or the other is flawed from the beginning.
Regarding other galaxies, who knows? Perhaps we will travel to them just as we may travel to other stars in our own galaxy. Perhaps we will make contact with other beings that moved through their galaxy just as we moved through ours. Maybe we won't. Perhaps we will learn thing about our own galaxy by studying others (as we have already), and will thus be more equipped to deal with challenges at home because of our access to them.

Regarding use: you said, in response to sol, that knowledge about the universe is not in itself useful. It is to me. It gives me a thrill, a feeling of awe, to know something about nature. To catch sight (if only glimpsed through fogged glass) of that beauty.
If that's not useful, then what is? It's useful toward the things I find to be of value.
 
Myriad said:
There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad
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Ask yourself how costly things are at the expense of us? To get these conditions we see around us, how long had space and time been expanding? Is it such a waste, if everything uses the least amount of energy, and the life which manages to appear is but from such a controlled mix?

If we are consequently in a universe where there is so much matter, i'm affraid that is probably because it is needed. Our appearance was phenomenon of having just the right amount of time to evolve and prosper, among many other creatures that have walked terra firma.


And whether or not you find ice sculptures, and whatnot, fascinating or not, or a waste of space, is truely a relative thing, for it might not be deemed useless by someone else.
 
Myriad said:
There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad
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I would advise you to look at Stanton Friedman's paper on propulsions systems
 
Clearly the universe is intended to be ornamental.

This means that if anyone ever notices what we've been up to, we're in big trouble.
"What are all these strip malls doing here? What is the purpose of Rush Limbaugh? Why is Seattle? Didn't there use to be dodos?"

I suggest that we at least tidy up a bit.
 
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