 | Re: help me out...to read this |
| Posted By: Steve Levinson | Date: 4/7/04 11:36 a.m. |
| In Response To: Re: help me out...to read this (Forrest of B.org)
: Balance is natural. All natural systems tend to balance themselves out, and
: those that don't are destroyed. Unfortunately it looks like the universe
: itself may be inherantly unbalanced if there is no universal
: counterprocess to entropy, and if that is so then unfortunately the
: universe itself is inevitably doomed.
My point exactly. And yes, by just about every theory, the universe will not go on forever, whether it is through closure (a big crunch), gradual evaporation or the currently popular sudden expansion, thanks to the cosmologic constant not being quite so finely balanced as we'd like. The bottom line is that the apparent balance we see in the universe exists only because were there any imbalance, we wouldn't be here to observe it. Balance is not guaranteed, but there are certain physical properties that make it possible within regions of space. Within our particular locality, physical properties are such that water freezes at 0 Celcius and boils at 100, providing a natural equilibrium for a planet at the right distance from a stable sun. Life evolved thanks to that equilibrium, but this is probably a rarity in the universe. Not that there aren't others, but satient life is probably not nearly so common as one would believe from watching Star Trek or playing Marathon.
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