Where do you think the Earth and humanity would be in a billion years?

Some already do. Politicians, for example.

 

I'm reading a Stephen Hawking book and while I'm not finished it touched on these concepts and helped me understand the 'time does not exist' notion better, although I'll concede my understanding of physics is poor and I wasn't completely swayed by the notion. I'll type out some of the concepts I learned while they are fresh in my head..

From my understanding, we as well as all living and non-living systems are essentially tied to time due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy of systems increases with time. So for all pratical purposes, it seems silly to me to say 'time doesn't exist.'

Now I guess the 'time doesn't exist' notion comes from quantum mechanic equations which try to circumvent the problems run into with the laws of physics breaking down if the universe was created from a singularity. The quantum universe can use 'imaginary time' in other dimensions which I am guessing is like imaginary numbers to describe the existence of the universe and at a certain point space-time deteoriates, which results in a universe that never has a beginning or end. Even if this were accurate, I don't know how this affects us as 3 dimensional beings.

 

The concept of time certainly exists. Entropy always increases, and we can see how causality can serve to define the direction of time. Causes lead to effects (which may be the cause of another effect) but it doesn't work the other way around. As what time actually is, I'm not sure anyone knows.

Time = speed/distance or t=s/d thus measuring the distance traveled by an object moving at a constant and known (as a consequence) speed can be used to determine how much time has elapsed during it's travel. The movement of the earth around the sun is just this. The earth travels at a constant speed around the sun, completing one orbit every 365 days/1 year. We can measure the position of the earth in it's orbit around the sun through various means such as tracking the position of stars in the sky and knowing it's speed is a constant 1 revolution per year we can determine with each revolution traveled one year has elapsed. Notice that to define the terms of distance, and therefore speed we must already have a definition of time in the first place, but we need to know speed and distance to be able to define that. And those are are all defined by the same equation

Distance = Speed * time or d=s(t) so to determine distance we must know the speed of an object and and multiply by the time elapsed since we started measuring. Since we know it's speed is 1 revolution per year since that can infact be observed to occur we can reason that for each new year the earth had to have traveled one complete revolution. The time and speed issue now has to be dealt with since to reach a solution to the distance equation you must have units of time and speed defined already.

Speed = distance/time or s=d/t. We observe the completion of one sun revolution and put that over the interval which is one year and reason the speed of the earth around the sun is one revolution per year. This seems like circular reasoning (no pun intended) but it works because of the periodic nature of the events we are using to define these three terms. The equation might as well be expanded into infinity since all we start out with is undefined variables.

TL;DR:
You can see in the above quite easily that distance, time and speed seem to be different expressions of the same property(s). It is the same equation. Time IS distance and speed and it's hard to pick which part of the circle you want to begin working from. Time is a rate of change. Change does not however occur everywhere at the same rate. I don't think time travel is possible. At least not backwards, you can get a negative solution for time when you travel faster than the speed of light. Some times you get stuff like that in math but it doesn't always make sense in the real world. Does a negative speed make sense? No, that would imply going backwards but going backwards would still have a positive speed in a different direction. If you knew the area of a square you take the square root to get the side length and these numbers could be both negative numbers and still work but that doens't make much sense to have a negative length tho.

 

Hopefully very advanced and not extinct

 

I'm not sure but I'm sure someone could look at the rate which humans fuck shit up and apply it to a billion years. That'd be a lot of fucked-upness on any account. Maybe all of the trillions of poor people on welfare would be used to generate energy with their metabolism, and their brains used to mine bitcoins for the 500,000 or so rich investors that make up the rest of the population.

 

If we survive the near future and are not extincted by asteroid etc,or any other natural cataclysm including environmental catastrophe,I think there will be a drive towards trans-humanism.Technologies will be incorporated into the human organism,and possibly lead to an extension of life.A billion years is a long time.The world will become an unsafer place due to deterioration of environment,and may create dystopian future,but won't ultimately destroy humanity.I think even given a thousand years we will have colonised the solar system,but light speed or faster than light speed travel,or some other trick of physics that will allow us to gain true interstellar deep space travel may be a very long way off.Even in an infinite universe some things are just infinitely impossible.First we have to ensure we don't blow the planet up with nukes,which requires some serious and continued diplomacy,and then we have to figure out a way,with many back up plans,to destroy or shift any potential dangers from space…Asteroids,comets etc.THAT will ultimately be the defining and allied goal of humanity,when that time arrives.I don't see measures to halt environmental degradation coming to the fore much,so humanity will probably have to go through some of that.Things will get better for some people and worse for others.I would love to help,but there is very little I can do,and everyone feels the same.I guess it'll be organised chaos as per usual.

 

I think eventually we will have to leave this planet, or at least some of us when there are too many of us. We need to learn to tap into the sustainable energy nature gives us, instead of relying on the instant gratification of burning fossil fuels. I mean nature gave us fossil fuels too to use, and we wouldn't be where we are without them, but fossil fuels like oil and natural gas are much more important as a raw material for making all sorts of chemical products, all of our pharmaceuticals require precursors derived from petrochemicals so it doesn't seem very wise to just them up for some cheap quick energy when there are other sources of energy available to you but you're too greedy to spend money on the research or implementation. Once the oil is gone it's gonna be tough to manufacture plastics, cosmetics, medicines and all sorts of things I can't think of because we use them everyday without even thinking about what is actually required to make it.

 

Thanks for explanations in post 43 AceK

Isn't there a certain point if trans-human comes to fruition where individuals would no longer be considered humans? Or would you feel they fall under the homo genus or something that makes them human?

 

Humanity or the spirits inhabiting the body ?

On another level of the spiral.

 

Time is movement, enabling observable change/s. Without movement manifesting-everything would be static. Like a monumental rendering. That would have been boring.

But to answer the question--dust in the solar wind from whence we came and will at some point return.

 

Yes, we all will be in oblivion! Piece at last

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dra6y5agWM"]Black Sabbath-Master Of Reality-Into The Void - YouTube

 

I figure I will be a billion years old..I am going to grow a beard to about my belt line just for fun..probably at least a 100 times. lol