What If....

Quote: rxwine

What if...

in the future we develop new technology that enables us to create an enormous lens in space made of energy, not material which will enable us to view many exoplanets as if they were as close as the Moon?

A lens is merely an object that bends light, thus focusing it if properly shaped. Many materials can do this, but glass is the easiest to work with and to shape with high precision.

Energy can bend light, too. But it takes a lot of energy. Gravity bends light, for example, and gravitational lenses are a well-known astronomical phenomenon. But as yet, the only way to create gravity is to gather lots of mass in a small space. You could conceivably use a black hole or a neutron star as a lens, but three's no known way of handling such things.

Mass and energy are equivalent, though. Therefore a great deal of energy concentrated in one small place would generate gravity and bend light. But you need a really large amount of energy to obtain a small amount of mass-equivalent gravity. Since you get energy from material masses, the math doesn't work out.

Mass isn't all. Space matters. A black hole is a tad less massive than the star that collapsed into it, but has all that mass concentrated in a literal point. You could conceivably cram lots of energy into a space the size of a big atomic nucleus, say.

Now guess what can keep massive amounts of energy in a small space? Gravity.

Sorry.

I was watching a video on YouTube about how the universe will change in the next few trillion years. Nothing I hand't heard before, but it had good graphics.

One thing sparked a thought: at some point in the future, only a small portion of the universe will be visible from the Solar System (by then, Earth won't be a habitable planet), or indeed from the local group of galaxies bound together by gravity. Sentient beings who develop then, if any, would think the universe to be limited. This is an oversimplification, as I've no idea what trace evidence of the rest of the universe may remain, or what the cosmic background radiation will be like.

But here's the thing, what if we think the Big Bang is the "beginning" of the universe only because that's as far as we can see (by see here I mean sense in every way with every instrument now known)? What if there was a great deal more before, or farther, but we can't see it?

And if so, what else might have been there in the universe? And is there a way to find it again?

Quote: Nareed

But here's the thing, what if we think the Big Bang is the "beginning" of the universe only because that's as far as we can see (by see here I mean sense in every way with every instrument now known)? What if there was a great deal more before, or farther, but we can't see it?

Imagine if you had to describe an entire car from how it looks to how it operates and what it's made of from inside the glove box. And you didn't know the first thing about cars.

It'd be a tough job.

I'm having alot of fun imagining my very corpulent self fitting inside a glove box.

What if anti-matter particles have negative inertial mass?

What if aliens visited the solar System, but several billion years ago?

If they left anything behind, would any traces survive and/or be recognizable as such?

Forget cramming a machine full of data which is often part of AI development..

Can you produce "self-awareness" without data? This is like the empty mind, similar to a newborn baby I would imagine.