Wrong, the horizon is not eternally expanding! As you asymptotically approach de Sitter space, the horizon becomes purely a function of the cosmological constant (because it's a function of the curvature, which is determined by the cosmological constant in de Sitter space). You can see the equation, and some even tighter bounds in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/00...

Proton decay is a really minor point, because it doesn't affect any of the more fundamental barriers (tunneling, quantum fluctuations, the Bekenstein bound). If all baryons decayed, and that was the only problem, life could potentially still exist in some other form, until larger timescales when the other problems take over.

By the way, even if protons don't decay in the usual manner, there are alternate ways in which protons might eventually be destroyed, involving virtual black holes and other processes. A number of these are noted in section "IV.F. Higher order proton decay" in http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/...

Wow, a post that actually deserves to be moderated Funny.

I was so disturbed by having ended up rummaging through yet another medium.com slashvertisement thread that I wondered about the provenance of these lyrics and searched for them, without noticing the title of your post until just now, after I've been listening to the album online for the past ten minutes.

Poincaré recurrence probably applies to our universe**, so the sequence of Boltzmann brains is not going to be infinite. On a more subjective note, I think that (at least the perception of) continuity is a central aspect of conscious existence, so Boltzmann brains highly dispersed throughout eternity lacks appeal.

**See chosen answer at http://physics.stackexchange.c...

So much for proof-reading. I didn't intend to quote the full post, just the subsequent selections.

Correct.

You jumped the gun!

The 'big rip' is a very specific model of accelerating expansion, one where the rate of acceleration itself is increasing, and the rip occurs at a finite time in the future. That model relies on dark energy being not the cosmological constant, but something known as phantom energy. There is no evidence whatsoever that the accelerating expansion we're observing corresponds to a type that will lead to a big rip. The more likely scenario is that gravitationally bound concentrations of matter such as the local cluster of galaxies will remain so including at the timescales where black holes would have all evaporated, baryons would have decayed, and quantum tunneling would have smeared out the structure of matter. In this case, the real issue becomes growing entropy within the Hubble volume.

The point your post should have made is that the solution proposed by Freeman Dyson and discussed in TFA — that of slowing down life/thinking processes at a rate slightly higher than the loss of available energy differential usable for driving these life/thinking processes — has two fatal flaws, which were pointed out almost immediately after Dyson came out with his proposal (but TFA, sadly, omits).

The first one is that, as time tends to infinity, the probability tends to certainty that a quantum fluctuation will cause any possible timing mechanism used to control the life/thinking processes to fail. Eventually, the expected tick will never come, and that will be it.

The second one is something much more severe than just failing to allow for life/intelligence to exist indefinitely. Since our Hubble volume will contain finite amount of matter-energy forever, the Bekenstein bound applies and thus the Hubble volume can only contain a finite number of distinguishable quantum states. After some point, all possible thoughts in that Hubble volume would have been thought, and any new ones will be repeats of ones that previously occurred. Even if you could be alive in this situation, would you want to?

PS I do agree that this blog is overrepresented on /., by a wide margin.

Except, clearly, not seriously enough to have a proper and mandatory for employment certification as a Professional Engineer, the way the other, real engineering disciplines, do.

Cue in the false flag operations.

I see his citation and raise you these:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

By the way, implying 1% rabies infection rate is not a concern is ludicrous, as it's plenty to prevent eradication of a infection with human mortality rates, when undiscovered before symptoms, only rivaled by prion disease.

As soon as I saw the summary, I wondered how they're able to do decent dead reckoning using the mediocre quality cell phone accelerometers; in the general case, the integration would give drift pretty quickly. We're not dealing with ICBM-quality accelerometers here. So the interesting bit is how they're able to make use of information that specializes the problem (the location of subway stations) together with machine learning to do much better than the general case. The paper is worth a read.

Sure, they can be cute; however, in terms of human health, bats are reservoirs for rabies and various coronaviruses that affect humans. For example, a recent paper in Nature showed that SARS can go from some bats to humans without an intermediate host, and the same likely applies to MERS. Worse, ebola-infected bats have also been found. Then, there's this quote from wiki: "Bats harbor more viruses than rodents and are capable of spreading disease over a wider geographic area owing to their ability to fly and their migration and roosting patterns."
My question for the armchair epidemiologists here is to what extent this is outweighed by bats' feeding on mosquitoes (in the areas which this story concerns).

Lest anyone think of investing in parent poster's father's company, consider that methylene blue is neurotoxic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
A few choice quotes from this research:

And what's the researchers' conclusion?

Thanks, but no thanks. Parent poster, go peddle your pharmascam elsewhere.

If it was blind hatred, Windows wouldn't be my primary desktop and Visual Studio wouldn't be my primary development environment. GGP's post was funny nonetheless. By your age, you ought to have learned to be able not to take yourself too seriously.

You nailed it. I wish I had mod points...