• squaresinger@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    One of the leading theories of the universe says everything will end in “heat death”. So, with knowledge of this, do you just decide to give up since “everything is meaningless”?

    Tbh, that argument doesn’t really hold. Human lives are short and our experienced history is also incredibly short. “The past” as in the part of the past that we can actually experience as human beings is less than 100 years. We can’t fathom how freaking long 1000 years is, even though it’s just 40 generations, let alone something that might happen in 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years (that’s 106 zeroes).

    Climate change related disasters are happening right now and will intensify a lot during the next 50-100 years. I likely live long enough to watch the climate keeling over, and my kids and my grandkids will live right through the worst of it. That’s something entirely different than saying that the universe will suffer the heat death in a time frame so long that we can’t even understand the number in any relevant context.