Our Useless Universe

[Myriad]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Michael Mozina]

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

Ah, but who knows how many other species of life might find these same areas "useful" for life?

[MG1962]

But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

See your problem is you are approaching this from a human-centric point of view. What if it us that is irrelevant and useless, and the universe is humming along doing its own thing.......we just dont get it

[portlandatheist]

99.7% useless is being extremely generous.

[Floyt]

The universe exports starlight and big numbers. It is a rather extensively farmed crop though.

[Myriad]

99.7% useless is being extremely generous.


Well, that's only looking at our own galaxy, and only if we did indeed reach a million stars, and only if I make a silly calculation error and write 99.7% when it should have been 99.9997%.

To achieve a uselessness rate as low as 99.7% we'd have to reach a billion stars.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Hokulele]

Anyone who believes that uselessness is pointless probably does housecleaning on a gorgeous Saturday morning.

[Robster, FCD]

That is assuming aesthetics has no value.

[athon]

As tongue-in-cheek as this thread is, I am surprised by how many people really do find it so necessary for everything to have some intended purpose. I realise it arises from brains that evolved to be essentially teleological, but for me, it's also kind of sad.

I enjoy my existentialism. I like the fact things just are. Adding a purpose just complicates things.

Athon

[!Kaggen]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

Excellent question.
Yes, our theory's which we use to come up with the "useless conclusion" are useless;)

[skullerello]

Wow, Myrid, that's a perspective that makes me weep. It's so depressing to contemplate; granted we are probably alone here in our tiny corner of The Milky Way, but, I'd like to think that there are others out there, miserable, and isolated, searching and hoping. Drake's Equation, with-standing, maybe all the more reason to celebrate our unique position in this vacuum.
Turn this race of Human Kind around. "We're here, we're self-aware, and we may be all alone, but we are the Human race of a place that we call Earth."
We need to abandon our petty superstitions that hold us back, embrace the rest of the Infinite, and let our natural propensity for curiosity lead us.
Let us "seek out new life, and new civilizations", and if we don't find them, let us boldly go where no other life-form has gone before!

[shadron]

Grand, ain't it?


Lots to do.

[plumjam]

Meh.
What proportion of space which makes up 'stuff' (molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc..) actually contains anything? 0.00...... something % ?
Does that render 'stuff' (matter) useless?
Does that make the space between any 'stuff' useless?
If there was no space between the stuff the stuff couldn't work properly.

Would matter be more useful if it were much more dense?
Even church roofers find oxygen and water more useful than lead, for the most part.

What proportion of space is taken up by physical laws? My guess would be 0%
Does that make physical laws useless?

I've never understood this view that spatial proportions have anything at all to do with utility, value, meaning and the like.

A 600 pound guy is generally rather less than four times more useful around the house than a 150 pound guy. (For the pedants, yes they are of the same density in this example)

[!Kaggen]

Meh.
What proportion of space which makes up 'stuff' (molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc..) actually contains anything? 0.00...... something % ?
Does that render 'stuff' (matter) useless?
Does that make the space between any 'stuff' useless?
If there was no space between the stuff the stuff couldn't work properly.

Would matter be more useful if it were much more dense?
Even church roofers find oxygen and water more useful than lead, for the most part.

What proportion of space is taken up by physical laws? My guess would be 0%
Does that make physical laws useless?

I've never understood this view that spatial proportions have anything at all to do with utility, value, meaning and the like.

A 600 pound guy is generally rather less than four times more useful around the house than a 150 pound guy. (For the pedants, yes they are of the same density in this example)

My point exactly.

Utility/purpose/value/meaning are next to useless:D predicates within the scientific method.
In fact the history of science shows 100's of years were wasted in interpreting anatomical features of animals, because of the emphasis on utility. Many anatomical features simply do not serve any purpose as they are remnants of evolutionary pasts.

The question of the OP about the utility of the universe is the same as piggy's "scientific question" about utility/purpose/value/meaning of beauty.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=149607

Its not something that the scientific method deals with.... so stop asking these questions in the science forum.

[shawmutt]

so...

If the universe is pointless, what does that make internet forums?

[rdaneel]

This makes me think of a story I read a while back that said "Dark Matter" may actually be the "real" Universe and what we're part of is simply a waste by-product of it's creation.

[CaveDave]

so...

If the universe is pointless, what does that make internet forums?

An entertaining time waster?

D.

[Soapy Sam]

Who cares?

[Lothian]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy............ Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

[Toke]

Interresting OP, but I prefer to belive that the barrier of speed of light will some day be broken and the galaxy colonised.

And you can´t stop me.:D

[Apathia]

The Uselessness of African Wildlife

Circa 1962:
It's a Sunday evening and we're watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on the TV.
My grandmother declares that she doesn't understand why God created these creatures that are no good to eat.

[Myriad]

What proportion of space is taken up by physical laws? My guess would be 0%
Does that make physical laws useless?

I've never understood this view that spatial proportions have anything at all to do with utility, value, meaning and the like.

A 600 pound guy is generally rather less than four times more useful around the house than a 150 pound guy. (For the pedants, yes they are of the same density in this example)


Spatial proportions are irrelevant. But positions and distances matter.

Or would you say a 150-pound guy who's in the house is no more useful around the house than a different 150-pound guy who's 200 million light years away?

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Monketey Ghost]

Maybe no theory explains why there's so much "waste". If you define "waste" as anything far out of reach we couldn't ever use anyways...

Many of them will forever be lights in the sky and then we are all gone.

[Personal Grudge]

Uselessness must surely be a point of view. Were the universe to look at us, I'm sure it would consider us far more useless than we consider it. Yes, I know the universe is not conscious, but...

Well, as Dr. Manhattan states in "Watchmen":

"In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon."

The universe may be largely useless to US... but in the scheme of things, life on our planet may be far more useless than the rest of the universe.

[sol invictus]

But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

If the universe were smaller, we wouldn't be able to see back in time as far, which means we wouldn't be able to learn as much about the distant past. But times near the big bang are an excellent testing ground for the laws of physics (since the conditions then were so extreme), and we might learn something very very useful from studying them.

So all that "useless" space is a powerful - and potentially very useful - microscope.

[Apathia]

Hui Tzu said to Chuang, "I have a big tree, the kind they call a "stinktree." The trunk is so distorted, so full of knots, no one can get a straight plank out of it. The branches are so crooked you cannot cut them up in any way that makes sense."
"There it stands beside the road. No carpenter will even look at it. Such is your teaching - big and useless."

Chuang Tzu replied, "Have you ever watched the wildcat crouching, watching his prey. The prey leaps this way, and that way, high and low, and at last lands in the trap. And have you seen the Yak? Great as a thundercloud, he stands in his might. Big? Sure, but he can't catch mice!"

"So for your big tree, no use? Then plant it in the wasteland, in emptiness. Walk idly around it, rest under its shadow. No axe or bill prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down."

"Useless? You should worry!"

Chang Tzu

[blue sock monkey]

:)Spatial proportions are irrelevant. But positions and distances matter.

Or would you say a 150-pound guy who's in the house is no more useful around the house than a different 150-pound guy who's 200 million light years away?

Since neither of them will take out the trash or pick up his dirty clothes, I'd call them equivalent. :)

[PopeTom]

The universe is useful in that it is currently the only known place one can find pretty girls. :)

[Skamandros]

3 is usefull.
Earth moon sun and
three great galaxes and
neuron proton electon and
dark mater dark enegry dark sky and
3 neutrinos and
the three forces and
the three energys
all that univers is usefull because pwoer of 3 in ervywere in all 3 places and all 3 trimes
thank you for understanding this

[Monketey Ghost]

Ah, yes, the power of three.

Check out the power of my three:

*zip*

*thud!* *donk!*





...*donk!*

[Myriad]

Of course some portions of the universe are useful. I'm talking about the vast majority of it that, as far as we know, does not contain any pretty girls (or even if it did, they're too far away even to ogle), or even guys who will take out the trash.

The number 3 does indeed seem to be very useful (for instance, preventing The Count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_von_Count) from always getting stuck at 2), but that doesn't make anything that happens to have the quantity 3 useful. For instance, there is no detectable difference in usefulness between 3 DecorEggers (http://www.flickr.com/photos/32637333@N00/3412863193/) and 4 DecorEggers.

As for aliens finding other parts of the universe useful, that's all well and good -- but if all the aliens can manage to do is mutilate the occasional steer then they might turn out to be pretty useless themselves. (The whole abduction-and-anal-probing thing has some potential usefulness, but never seems to happen to the right people.)

I'm not sure if "revealing the characteristics of the universe" qualifies as being a useful characteristic of said universe. By that same logic, are Decoreggers useful because they teach us about how badly Decoreggers suck? There seems to be some circular (or possibly egg-shaped) reasoning there.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Monketey Ghost]

You might as well start a thread called "Our Useless Oceans". We tend to use maybe the top twenty or thirty feet off the surface and no more... and the vast, vast majority of our oceans are unexplored and unused. And, my guess is, will largely remain unseen.

[Piggy]

Our universe is an enormous farm for beings who find stars crunchy and tasty with ketchup.

[blue sock monkey]

Our universe is an enormous farm for beings who find stars crunchy and tasty with ketchup.

Evidence? :boggled:

[Monketey Ghost]

Don't try to tell me a blue sock monkey hasn't tried deep-fried stars with ketchup.

Maybe you like catsup, however.

[leafman91]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

Well, before we start running abroad to distant galaxies, perhaps we should clean up home base.The ecosystem's in a bad state, which we need to sort out before we go running into other potential ecosystems. Maybe then the laws of physics will 'mutate' to allow speeds greater than the speed of light.

Put simply, I am suggesting a reason that we can't manage past the speed of light, and that's because some higher authority wants us to prove we won't just go blundering in to other ecosystems and destroying them. Admittedly, it's a bit far fetched.

My other, more likely line of reasoning is that we aren't supposed to go to other planets, because it isn't what nature had in mind.

Whatever the case may be, I am given the impression that the sheer difficulty of getting someone off of this planet alive has been done on purpose. Probably an error in my logic, mind.

[blue sock monkey]

Don't try to tell me a blue sock monkey hasn't tried deep-fried stars with ketchup.

Maybe you like catsup, however.

Worcestershire sauce puts me in a more philosophical mood than tomato catsup, I think. But I haven't taste-tested the concept yet.

[ServiceSoon]

Based on my limited knowledge, the current condition of the solar system is fragile. Move one planet, star, black hole, etc and everything could be different. If you subscribe to the belief that humans evolved from microorganisms, then any changes from the current, past or future order could wreak havoc for our very existence. Girls are cool too.

[blue sock monkey]

Based on my limited knowledge, the current condition of the solar system is fragile. Move one planet, star, black hole, etc and everything could be different. If you subscribe to the belief that humans evolved from microorganisms, then any changes from the current, past or future order could wreak havoc for our very existence. Girls are cool too.

This is a very good hypothesis indeed. If a star flaps its wings in the Whirlpool Galaxy....

[Toke]

If we had been supposed to take showers our armpits would not have been downwards.

[I Ratant]

so...

If the universe is pointless, what does that make internet forums?
.
A valid excuse to not do any housework on a gorgeous morning.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

If we had been supposed to take showers our armpits would not have been downwards.

Yes. But then you would not have been able to scratch your . . .. And would die of the itch but smelling really nice. :covereyes

[Pixel42]

We don't know what the odds are against intelligent life evolving, as we only have one example to look at. It may turn out that the odds against it are so great that it would take as many chances as a universe this size offers for it happen even once. In which case the rest of the universe is not useless; it needs to be there for that one in a googleplex chance to come up at least once. :)

[Myriad]

You might as well start a thread called "Our Useless Oceans". We tend to use maybe the top twenty or thirty feet off the surface and no more... and the vast, vast majority of our oceans are unexplored and unused. And, my guess is, will largely remain unseen.


But the oceans are not useless. Like just about everything on earth, they are surprisingly useful. They moderate the climate and atmospheric gases especially water vapor, produce food, facilitated evolution, help the U.S. hide deterrent weapons, might plausibly provide fuel for fusion energy, all kinds of useful things. While some portions might be as yet unexplored, the oceans are accessible for exploration whenever we happen to get around to it. If the oceans disappeared we'd not only miss them, our very survival would be doubtful.

By contrast, if every galaxy but our own were to disappear, we'd hardly notice (apart from being very concerned about the cause of the disappearance, but that's not the point). A hundred years ago no one knew they existed in the first place, and no one was going around saying, "I sure wish the universe was 8 bajillion times larger than we think it is."

I suspect that leafman's argument from design will not be well received here, but the observations behind it are sound. The alternate title of the thread would not be "Our Useless Oceans" or any other "Our Useless ____" but rather "Our Incredibly Useful Earth." It's that contrast that makes the rest of the universe so useless by comparison. When we find a succession of energy sources (wood, coal, oil, fission, solar?) of increasing utility and increasing difficulty of extracting, when even such things as insect venoms, deadly disease organisms, and obscure beetle species turn out to have medical uses, it's tempting to think that these things were provided to us for a purpose, like the objects and levels in a video game. Following that pattern, since there's all that space out there to travel into, there must also be a fast and efficient method for such travel that we'll discover in due course...

But if in fact there's no design and no pattern, as the prevailing evidence seems to indicate, then all that space might just be useless instead.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Cayvmann]

Channeling Douglas Adams today?

[godless dave]

The centipedes living in my basement probably think the roof on my house is useless.

[sol invictus]

But the oceans are not useless. Like just about everything on earth, they are surprisingly useful.

Your argument seems to boil down to "things near us affect us more than things far away from us". That's obviously true, and it's because physics is local and causal and limited by the speed of light.

Nevertheless, if we can learn something from things far from us, because they are far from us, and what we learn allows us to build or learn something useful (that was my example, which you don't see to have understood), then having a large universe could turn out to be very useful indeed.

[sol invictus]

I suspect that leafman's argument from design will not be well received here, but the observations behind it are sound. The alternate title of the thread would not be "Our Useless Oceans" or any other "Our Useless ____" but rather "Our Incredibly Useful Earth." It's that contrast that makes the rest of the universe so useless by comparison. When we find a succession of energy sources (wood, coal, oil, fission, solar?) of increasing utility and increasing difficulty of extracting, when even such things as insect venoms, deadly disease organisms, and obscure beetle species turn out to have medical uses, it's tempting to think that these things were provided to us for a purpose, like the objects and levels in a video game.

It's much more tempting to think that you have that totally ass-backwards. Things near us are "useful" because they are near us and we can reach them, and because we evolved in or near them. Part of it is tautological, and part of it is due to the fact that we are evolved in and adapted to our immediate environment, and part of it (probably) to the fact that intelligent life capable of having this conversation can only evolve in certain environments (that's presumably why we don't live in intergalactic space, which after all makes up the vast majority of the space in the universe).

"Design" is a completely unnecessary and decidedly un-tempting hypothesis.

[Hokulele]

Having all the other stars very far away helps me sleep at night.

[sphenisc]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within .... its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

It gives us a scale to measure Darat against?





[ See you after my suspension. ] :)

[blue sock monkey]

The centipedes living in my basement probably think the roof on my house is useless.

"Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck! Boil! Boil! Boil!"

[BenBurch]

Myriad,

Use assumes conscious intention of a user. That potential users have arisen within it does not negate the fact that no user existed at the beginning, and so purpose or usefulness did not then apply.

-Ben

[Myriad]

The centipedes living in my basement probably think the roof on my house is useless.


I'm not sure the point of this metaphor, perhaps because I'm unfamiliar with centipedes' environmental preferences.

If centipedes prefer dry basements, then they would not think the roof on your house is useless, unless their knowledge is too limited to understand the existence of rain, snow, etc. and the efficacy of the roof in keeping it out of the basement.

So, is your point that we are just too dim to understand how useful the vast majority of the universe actually is?

On the other hands, if centipedes are indifferent to the presence or absence of rain in the basement, then they are correct in considering it useless to them. Their only rationale for thinking it useful would be if they were aware of its usefulness to the humans who created and occupy the house.

So, is your point that the universe was created and is occupied by beings comparably superior in understanding and instrumentality to ourselves as we are to centipedes, for whom the existence of vast distant regions of the universe is useful?

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Myriad]

Myriad,

Use assumes conscious intention of a user. That potential users have arisen within it does not negate the fact that no user existed at the beginning, and so purpose or usefulness did not then apply.

-Ben


Does the absence of any users in any way invalidate describing something as useless? I would argue quite the contrary.

But in any case, past uselessness is not relevant to my point. I'm quite content to limit my claims to present uselessness.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[Corsair 115]

...The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source.


Clearly, the problem here is the speed of light—it's simply far too slow given the size of the universe. If the speed of light was, say, a million times faster than it is currently, that'd open up some possibilities. Instead of light taking about 85,000 years to cross our galaxy, it'd only take 31 days. Instead of it taking 2 million years for light to get here from the Andromeda galaxy, it'd only take two years.

So, all that need be done is have scientists figure out a way to raise the speed of light. Hey, they managed it in Futurama! :D

[Psi Baba]

There are <snip> But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?
But wait, you are using the entire universe as the foundation for this discussion!

[Roboramma]

As Sol said, the farther reaches of the universe are useful to us because by studying them we learn things that we can apply here. One of the most obvious is that we can learn about the origins of here, and that knowledge is useful in itself, in so much as people find it to be of value (otherwise they wouldn't, for instance, spend money on the answer).

Perhaps more useful is the fact that we can learn some thing about the underlying physical laws. And that knowledge may allow us to put it to useful application - it certainly has in the past.

Regarding the idea that we will never make more direct use of the rest of the galaxy, let alone other galaxies, I think its far too premature to say. I don't see any reason why we can't send self-replicating robots to other stars, which on arrival make use of the energy and materials there. The use we could get from that is access to that energy (for, for instance, computation, the informational products of which could be sent back to us, or for either the energy or even matter to be directly sent back to us). They could make secondary use of those same resources to move to another star and do the same thing there. Over the course of a few million years, the galaxy is "colonized", though we've never left home. You may say "we will never need all that energy" or "it will never be worth it", which may be true, but may not be true, so an argument based on some idea to know one way or the other is flawed from the beginning.
Regarding other galaxies, who knows? Perhaps we will travel to them just as we may travel to other stars in our own galaxy. Perhaps we will make contact with other beings that moved through their galaxy just as we moved through ours. Maybe we won't. Perhaps we will learn thing about our own galaxy by studying others (as we have already), and will thus be more equipped to deal with challenges at home because of our access to them.

Regarding use: you said, in response to sol, that knowledge about the universe is not in itself useful. It is to me. It gives me a thrill, a feeling of awe, to know something about nature. To catch sight (if only glimpsed through fogged glass) of that beauty.
If that's not useful, then what is? It's useful toward the things I find to be of value.

[Singularitarian]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad


Ask yourself how costly things are at the expense of us? To get these conditions we see around us, how long had space and time been expanding? Is it such a waste, if everything uses the least amount of energy, and the life which manages to appear is but from such a controlled mix?

If we are consequently in a universe where there is so much matter, i'm affraid that is probably because it is needed. Our appearance was phenomenon of having just the right amount of time to evolve and prosper, among many other creatures that have walked terra firma.


And whether or not you find ice sculptures, and whatnot, fascinating or not, or a waste of space, is truely a relative thing, for it might not be deemed useless by someone else.

[makaya325]

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our own galaxy. A handful of these might turn out to be within range of heroic future human efforts to reach them, via centuries-long one-way colony ship voyages. However, any ongoing process of leaping from star to star across our galaxy appears unlikely to ever be both worthwhile and feasible, unless the voyages are primarily undertaken by, and for, AI's. Furthermore, the same technologies that would be needed to make such voyages possible would also make arbitrarily large habitats within our own solar system possible too, at enormously less cost per person.

But let's say that contrary to all reasonable expectations, humanity manages to eventually explore and occupy a vast empire of a million star systems. That still leaves 299,999 million stars in our galaxy that will never be visited by humans and thus, as far as I and the rest of my species for the rest of time are concerned, are useless. That's a 99.7% uselessness rate, and as we look farther out, that figure only goes up from there.

The observable universe contains over 80 billion other galaxies. All of those are completely inaccessible -- as far as present day science can determine, permanently so. Forget generation ships, forget hibernation, even the AI's would evaporate in the time it would take to travel between galaxies by means of any known energy source. Even communication with another galaxy is impossible on any humanly comprehensible time scale. So, we can confidently characterize another 50 sextillion stars as so useless that they'd make tits on a bull seem like 29-accessory Swiss Army Knives by comparison.

According to the current prevailing inflationary cosmology mode, the entire universe may be 23 orders of magnitude larger still. That amounts to at least another 5 million billion billion sextillion stars that, being permanently outside our light cone, reach a degree of uselessness that is almost beyond conception.

And all those useless stars, orbited by countless useless planets, comets, and asteroids, occupy (to a trivially tiny extent barely deserving of the word) an immensely vast volume of even more useless empty space. Of course, not all empty space is useless. A minute fraction of it is good for some things like storing your Oort cloud in and keeping your planet far enough away from your star for comfort. But the total amounts of it in our universe are absurdly excessive. Which means that almost all of it -- the excepted fraction being almost too small to imagine -- is useless.

Thus we must conclude that pretty much the entire universe is profoundly useless. Indeed, there is probably no way for the human mind to truly grasp the extent of its uselessness. While cosmologists might someday be able calculate the uselessness of the universe (formally defined as the integral over all of space and time of the reciprocal of usefulness), the resulting figure will be so far outside our human experience of ordinary uselessness (which evolved to help us survive in a familiar world of ice sculptures, conspiracy theories, Chia Pets, Infomercials, Left Behind novels, and weekly staff meetings) as to be incomprehensible.

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

I would advise you to look at Stanton Friedman's paper on propulsions systems

[Dr Adequate]

Clearly the universe is intended to be ornamental.

This means that if anyone ever notices what we've been up to, we're in big trouble.
"What are all these strip malls doing here? What is the purpose of Rush Limbaugh? Why is Seattle? Didn't there use to be dodos?"

I suggest that we at least tidy up a bit.

[rdaneel]

Clearly the universe is intended to be ornamental.

This means that if anyone ever notices what we've been up to, we're in big trouble.
"What are all these strip malls doing here? What is the purpose of Rush Limbaugh? Why is Seattle? Didn't there use to be dodos?"

I suggest that we at least tidy up a bit.
Ah, but that makes assumptions about priorities. What if it's the other way around?
"Why haven't they built more strip malls?" "Why do they keep wasting their time going outside when all the entertainment they need can be delivered right into their homes?" "Why haven't they jacked their brains into the internet yet?" "Why are all these animals still around?"

[fishbob]

Based on my limited knowledge, the current condition of the solar system is fragile. Move one planet, star, black hole, etc and everything could be different. If you subscribe to the belief that humans evolved from microorganisms, then any changes from the current, past or future order could wreak havoc for our very existence.

But remember that the universe, while useless, is more like it is now than it ever was before.

[DazzaD]

It isnt a question of waste... it is what it is.

The universe isnt a project to get the "most" out of the "least"... it just is.

[Asm]

There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Useless to us... But perhaps working perfectly when viewed from the outside, in all its multidimensional glory. I have been wondering this, do the laws of nature seem "efficient" in any way? Does quantum mechanics with its superpositions and weirdness look like a clever way to go about it if you were to create a universe?

I can't imagine why anyone would need a universe though. I am probably too three-dimensional in my thinking.

[Soapy Sam]

But remember that the universe, while useless, is more like it is now than it ever was before.

Nonsense! The Universe has always been like this.
The apparent expansion is caused by god creating fossils and implanting them all over the place to confound Darwinists. (Mostly foraminifera, for some reason).

[Monketey Ghost]

Clearly, the problem here is the speed of light—it's simply far too slow given the size of the universe. If the speed of light was, say, a million times faster than it is currently, that'd open up some possibilities. Instead of light taking about 85,000 years to cross our galaxy, it'd only take 31 days. Instead of it taking 2 million years for light to get here from the Andromeda galaxy, it'd only take two years.

So, all that need be done is have scientists figure out a way to raise the speed of light. Hey, they managed it in Futurama! :D

Given that there are other goodies besides visible light that travel at the same speed... I'm glad, and so is everyone, whether they know it or not, that the distances are enormous.

[Frankenstyle]

Of course some portions of the universe are useful. I'm talking about the vast majority of it that, as far as we know, does not contain any pretty girls


Actually, by taking the number of girls who shot me down in high school, and multiplying it by the number of divorces I've gone through in adulthood, I've come to the conclusion that over 98% of the "missing matter" in the universe is made up entirely of pretty girls.

[Prometheus]

<snip>

But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Respectfully,
Myriad

Useless? It inspired you to write this kickass OP, didn't it? ;)

[leafman91]

It's much more tempting to think that you have that totally ass-backwards. Things near us are "useful" because they are near us and we can reach them, and because we evolved in or near them. Part of it is tautological, and part of it is due to the fact that we are evolved in and adapted to our immediate environment, and part of it (probably) to the fact that intelligent life capable of having this conversation can only evolve in certain environments (that's presumably why we don't live in intergalactic space, which after all makes up the vast majority of the space in the universe).

"Design" is a completely unnecessary and decidedly un-tempting hypothesis.

I see it's time for a tidy up.
My actual point was that us humans (that's me and you) made such a big fudge up of our ecosystem, that it wouldn't surprise me if some other civilisation had simply sealed us off from the rest of the universe, by warping physics a little. Personally, I wouldn't blame them.

Yes we evolved to our environment and that we are actually doing terribly well in finding brilliant uses for the most mundane of things, but all our uses for things is tearing our environment to shreds, to the point that technology is beginning to replace evolution, because all of a sudden, our environment has changed, and whoever has the cleverest technology has the biggest chance of survival (wondering what the cold war was all about still?).

So, my little theory (I suppose that's what it is now) is that we probably do the rest of the universe good to stay here on this little rock until we can intergrate technology with the ecosystem (or what's left of it). That way, we don't go blundering into other peoples ecosystems on other planets and completely screwing them over. Furthermore, it wouldn't surprise me if some other civilisation had thought of this already, and had taken the appropriate measures to make sure we would never make extraterrestrial contact until they think we are 'safe' to do so.

A lot of people, including you perhaps, may not like this notion, in which case, I did say this theory was a bit far fetched. Others, however, may agree with me, in which case, let's start on intergrating our technology with what is left of our ecosystem.

To be quite honest, whether my theory is true or not, intergrating technology and nature in a positive way is still something that needs to be done, lest we risk the chance of killing our own planet, not now perhaps, but probably some time in the future (give it a few decades)


Now this is the part where people start to argue against my theory. In truth, I didn't make it that hard now,did I?

[!Kaggen]

Regarding the idea that we will never make more direct use of the rest of the galaxy, let alone other galaxies, I think its far too premature to say. I don't see any reason why we can't send self-replicating robots to other stars, which on arrival make use of the energy and materials there. The use we could get from that is access to that energy (for, for instance, computation, the informational products of which could be sent back to us, or for either the energy or even matter to be directly sent back to us). They could make secondary use of those same resources to move to another star and do the same thing there. Over the course of a few million years, the galaxy is "colonized", though we've never left home. You may say "we will never need all that energy" or "it will never be worth it", which may be true, but may not be true, so an argument based on some idea to know one way or the other is flawed from the beginning.

Sounds familiar

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/tipler.html

[popscythe]

I think we're the useless bi-product of the universe, rather than vice versa. The drops that condense on the outside of my long island don't complain that the long island is useless.

Edit: I just realized that droplets aren't nearly as snotty as we are, I think their culture is more relaxed. Probably due to it's proximity to liquor.

[cornsail]

You make the question sound more difficult than it is.


There are theories in cosmology and physics (and others in religion and philosophy) that attempt to explain various properties of the universe such as its size, its age, its curvature, and so forth. But is there any theory that can explain why it is so useless?

Assuming that it is, in fact, useless: Because it cannot be used (i.e. it fits the definition of "useless").

Why is a theory necessary to explain this?

[Tumblehome]

If it takes vast light years of space, a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred gazillion stars, and a whole universe full of energy just to create little ol' me--I personally don't find that useless.;)

[CriticalSock]

Yeah, but IF it is a god created artifact then all bets are off! All the usable real estate apart from earth is a billion light years away? no problem, use your god powered spaceship and get there in minutes! 50 million years down the line and Sol is going to explode? Not a problem, you have a whole universe to inhabit!

oops! I forgot that my original religio-indoctrination has mankind living eternally in this physical universe, as perfect but human beings. I guess that if all intelligent beings are going to end up either in heaven or in hell, then the universe is pretty damn useless, even for a believer!