Before I was going to start worrying about the extinction of absolutely everything in some inconceivably distant epoch, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to a few leading cosmologists. Just how certain were they that the cosmos was undergoing a disastrous runaway expansion? Was intelligent life really doomed to perish as a result? How could they, as scientists, talk about the ultimate future of "civilization" and "consciousness" with a straight face?
This guy is good. He covers a lot of fun cosmology in a very short essay, and he manates to talk with some great physicists. I really enjoyed this, and his prior essays are fun to. I was particularly struck by a phrase in his Christmas essay:
...You can believe, as I do, that the universe is presided over by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective (which explains pretty much everything)He's got a good point there. I'd tended to assume a disinterested deity, or trillions of short-lived deities with very odd interestes, but malevolence and ineffectiveness has a certain symmetry with human affairs.
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