The Life Expectancy of the Universe

I still don’t understand exactly what a Boson is, so talking about the Higgs Boson is a little bit like somebody who has never tasted ice cream speak of the relative  merits of vanilla  and pecan.  It sure does seem, though, that since they discovered the little booger, they’ve been  finding out a lot more about it.  Like, there are probably lots of different Bosons out there.  And, in about 50 billion years, give or take 20 billion years or so, our universe will be eaten by a younger, hungrier universe.

One Century at a Time

How  they  figured that  out from a particle nobody can  even see, I don’t know. That part just seems like magic to me.

Anyway, in the comments section I wrote something along the lines of “I hope by the time our universe is eaten  we will have figured out how to get  ourselves into another universe.”  One of the replies was “We should concentrate on just surviving the next 100 years first.”

Now, at first I just filed this with all of the “We need to spend that money on problems here on Earth” ignorance, which is off base  for several reasons.

1. The amount spent on space is really not that much.

2. The rewards, up to now, have been enormous and they promise to be even greater in the future.

3. The problem with solving the problems of Earth is not a lack of money, there’s tons of money, there are people who have absolutely literal truckloads of money.  The problem with solving all of the problems of Earth is that not everybody wants those problems solved.

4. Even those decent folk who would like to see the problems solved don’t always agree on how, so most of the money gets spent trying to override other people who are also spending money trying to beat your side down.

5.  Space is cool.

6. We really will, eventually, have to find another planet to live on.

But that wasn’t exactly what he said.  Survive, he said.  The next hundred years.  And suddenly, I didn’t see any  contradiction in our opinions.

If we can survive the next hundred years, we will live in a world blessed with Google Glasses, Levitating Trains and a small Martian colony, set up by a Dutch group from a TV reality show.  The world will quite probably be polluted beyond redemption, but scientists will be working on that.

If we can just survive the next 200 years, by not starting any nuclear wars, and not getting hit by a comet, we will have started to clean up the worst of the  mess, we will have robo-cars, unlimited power through a massive array of space baced solar panels, and a meteor defense system built into the mining and manufacturing operation going on throughout the asteroid belt (because otherwise  we might not survive 200 years.)

If we can just survive the next 300 years, by not unleashing any epidemics, or being slaughtered by some evil interstellar  warlord society, we will be sending self-sustaining, multi-generational starships off to other planets (some of which we  have contacted).

So, I think it’s entirely possible that within the next 4.5 billion years we will have found a new solar system to live in.  Within the next 50  billion years (or so) we’ll be able to make that leap between universes.  Just as long as we survive the next 100 years.