How Big Is the Universe? Theories on the Cosmos with Martin Rees

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/08/02/Martin_Rees_Lifes_Future_in_the_Cosmos

Cambridge cosmologist Martin Rees explores theories of speculative science in astronomy and physics. Rees questions the size of the universe, alternate dimensions and the number of big bangs that may have occurred.

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President of the Royal Society, England's Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees brings a lifetime of cosmological inquiry to a crucial question: What if human success on Earth determines life's success in the universe?

He thinks that civilization's chances of getting out of this century intact are about 50-50. He is hopeful that extraterrestrial life already exists, but there's no sign of it yet. But even if we are now alone, he notes that we may not even be the halfway stage of evolution.

There is huge scope for post-human evolution, so that "it will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."

Appropriately, Rees's Long Now talk was at the Chabot Space and Science Center in the hills above Oakland, in the planetarium. - The Long Now Foundation

Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University.

After studying at the University of Cambridge, he held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years as director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. From 1992 to 2003 he was a Royal Society Research Professor.

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[AlteredActions]

@deanmullen10 Your alternative perspective. anything can seem to be ''2-D'' in a certain perspective. Basically our mind is so advanced yet so primitive, we cannot understand much right now simply because we cannot understand ourselves. We will continue to try to unravel that which is seemingly evident but as you know the perspective of things can be deceiving this is a life lesson to many, and a contradiction on the fabric of reality itself.

[dzpisx]

@bass109 I thank ya Lord!

[deanmullen10]

Based on an already developing idea that reality is not 3D but merely 2D information. I'd like to add to this potential truth that perhaps the human brain, the human itself, the world and everything is just 2D information but the information itself is in essence a description.

When one observes the ocean that is merely the 2D information describing the ocean yet the human brain has evolved to turn that description into a 3D world within the physiological mind itself, it can produced a 3D world

[bass109]

God Almighty expanding voice spoke the expanding universe into existance! Jesus is god!

[henf5671]

@TomFynn Even if you're right about this equilibrium state, the fact that life can exist at all is bizarre. Let's face it...humans are stupid!

[TomFynn]

@henf5671 That is not an assumption that is empirical evidence. All living creatures, especially concious creatures, are, in terms of thermodynamics, far-from-equilibrium systems. All dead things are not.

[henf5671]

@TomFynn I understand that however you're making an assertion. On the contrary, I'm not asserting anything. I'm simply throwing out wild ideas; i'm still skeptical of it just like you are. Equilibrium is simply a human concept. Knowledge of an afterlife comes from experience. In other words, you need to experience death yourself.

[TomFynn]

@henf5671 The thing you don't understand is that life is far-from-equilibrium state. Death is the relaxation into equilibrium. So even if energy is conserved there is no afterlife. Not even in this universe.

[henf5671]

@TomFynn The thing you don't understand is we are merely byproducts of the big bang. Energy creates us and everything around us. So even if consciousness was an illusion we would be constantly in a state of death so to speak. Electricity, atoms, chemicals, and advanced brain chemistry gives us life but yet these natural phenomena are constructed from the basic laws that govern the universe. In other words, "heaven" might really be the universe itself when we pass away.

[TomFynn]

@henf5671 The universe has been found out to be comprehensible to a high degree. Te universe itself is the universe. We are part of the universe. And in the course of its existence we came to be by pretty well damn understood physical process. Energy conversation odes not equal an afterlife, since life is a non-equilibrium state.