Technological Immortality

[James Redford]

Hi, LostLocke. Some have suggested that the current acceleration of the universe's expansion due to the positive cosmological constant would appear to obviate the Omega Point. However, Profs. Krauss and Turner point out that "there is no set of cosmological observations we can perform that will unambiguously allow us to determine what the ultimate destiny of the Universe will be." (See Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner, "Geometry and Destiny", General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [Oct. 1999], pp. 1453-1459.) While cosmological observations cannot tell us what the ultimate fate of the universe will be, the known laws of physics themselves can, as the universe is forced to end in finite proper time in order for unitarity to remain unviolated.

No one claims we can know for absolute certainty what the ultimate fate of the universe will be. However, current observations, including the laws of physics, indicate the universe will end in or through its continued expansion, not from a collapse.
And PS, the universe isn't 'forced' to do anything. It does what it does and it's our job to figure out what that is. It's not our 'right' to tell the universe what we expect it to do.

Hi, LostLocke. The field of physics does involve mathematical proofs of physical theories, i.e., physical theorems, such as the Penrose-Hawking-Geroch Singularity Theorems which proved that the Big Bang initial singularity necessarily exists per General Relativity and given attractive gravity. Likewise, the Omega Point/Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity theory is a mathematical theorem if General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have been confirmed by every experiment to date, and so the only way to avoid the Omega Point theory of quantum gravity is to reject empirical science. As Prof. Stephen Hawking wrote, "one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem." (From p. 67 of Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time [New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1996; 1st ed., 1988].)

Further, due to Liouville's Theorem in complex analysis, it doesn't matter what form of physics one resorts to, as any physically-realistic cosmology (e.g., one capable of incorporating Quantum Mechanics, since the complex number field is intrinsic to the mathematical formulations of Quantum Mechanics) must begin at an initial singularity and end at a final singularity. (As Barrow and Tipler wrote, "Initial and final cosmological curvature singularities are required to avoid a universal action singularity." See John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, "Action principles in nature", Nature, Vol. 331, No. 6151 [Jan. 7, 1988], pp. 31-34; see also Frank J. Tipler, "The Structure of the Classical Cosmological Singularity", in Origin and Early History of the Universe: Proceedings of the 26th Liège International Astrophyscial Colloquium, July 1-4, 1986 [Cointe-Ougree, Belgium: Universite de Liege, Institut d'Astrophysique, 1987], pp. 339-359; "Discussion", pp. 360-361.)