"Joe E. Dees" <jdees0@students.uwf.edu> writes:
> You'd better hope for an eternally expanding universe, even with the
> attendant dangers of a Pynchonian Callistoish entropic demise (I
> prefer the frenetic complex energy of the lease-breaking party,
> myself). The mail alternative, an eternally cycling Big Bang / Big
> Crunch cosmic heartbeat (punctuated by the eternal recurrence of
> the Mother of all Singularities) does not permit pattern, the sine qua
> non of consciousness, to pass its superhot/supergravity Stygian
> microuniformchaosoup gate. Joe
Nice prose. But as far as I know the eternal cycle model has no support other than aesthetics; it is unclear if inflation or weird quantumgravity effects can reverse the contraction. The problem is also that you cannot avoid an Eternal Return in the cycling model since the amount of information that can be brought through the near-singularities is finite.
However, we can at our present technological level not do much about the expansion/contraction of spacetime (just you wait until I and Mitch get our hands on the Higgs-fields, topology change and inflation! :-), so we can just analyse possible strategies in the different scenarios. Which is an useful exercise to study the limits to intelligent systems anyway.
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