Awesome story, though a bit of a downer ending, of course.
(Minor nitpick: The mere fact of entropy increase isn’t what dooms us, as such. If entropy kept increasing but max entropy was arbitrarily high so that it could still keep increasing forever without bound, then it might still have been possible to perform arbitrary amounts of computation)
If I understand them correctly, some theories of cosmology imply that the maximum possible entropy increases as the universe expands—and the rate of increase of the maximum possible entropy is actually greater than the rate of increase of actual entropy, so maximum entropy is never actually reached. (If I don’t understand them correctly, please correct me!)
Maybe I’m vastly over-simplifying it but the way I am interpreting that is to say that even if all of the universe has decayed to heat radiation, that radiation will continue to be further disbursed with the expansion of the universe. So the maximum amount of entropy (amount of dispersal) does always continue to increase. But I don’t think disbursed heat radiation could perform any computation.
Awesome story, though a bit of a downer ending, of course.
(Minor nitpick: The mere fact of entropy increase isn’t what dooms us, as such. If entropy kept increasing but max entropy was arbitrarily high so that it could still keep increasing forever without bound, then it might still have been possible to perform arbitrary amounts of computation)
If I understand them correctly, some theories of cosmology imply that the maximum possible entropy increases as the universe expands—and the rate of increase of the maximum possible entropy is actually greater than the rate of increase of actual entropy, so maximum entropy is never actually reached. (If I don’t understand them correctly, please correct me!)
The catch though would be issues like “what’s the maximum entropy of the largest region of space one could arrange to remain causally connected?”
Maybe I’m vastly over-simplifying it but the way I am interpreting that is to say that even if all of the universe has decayed to heat radiation, that radiation will continue to be further disbursed with the expansion of the universe. So the maximum amount of entropy (amount of dispersal) does always continue to increase. But I don’t think disbursed heat radiation could perform any computation.