MAPS: Life/Universe/Everything: "All Bets Are Off"

["Jon Frederick, Ph.D." <smiile@xxxxxxxxxx>]

THE UNIVERSE MIGHT LAST FOREVER, ASTRONOMERS SAY, BUT LIFE MIGHT NOT
from The New York Times

In the decades that astronomers have debated the fate of the expanding
universe - whether it will all end one day in a big crunch, or whether the
galaxies will sail apart forever - aficionados of eternal expansion have
always been braced by its seemingly endless possibilities for development
and evolution. As the Yale cosmologist Dr. Beatrice Tinsley once wrote, "I
think I am tied to the idea of expanding forever."

Life and intelligence could sustain themselves indefinitely in such a
universe, even as the stars winked out and the galaxies were all swallowed
by black holes, Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for
Advanced Study, argued in a landmark paper in 1979. "If my view of the
future is correct," he wrote, "it means that the world of physics and
astronomy is also inexhaustible; no matter how far we go into the future,
there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new
worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness,
and memory."

Now, however, even Dr. Dyson admits that all bets are off. If recent
astronomical observations are correct, the future of life and the universe
will be far bleaker.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/01/science/01END.html>


-------------------------
Jon Frederick, Ph.D., Ctr. Comp. Biomed. UTexas Houston HSC

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