[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
> [...] a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. [...]
The math is the same as calculating the probability that the glass you just broke will spontaneously jump back onto the table and reassemble itself. Which is a standard introductory example in thermodynamics... but you add self-awareness and suddenly this rather mundane thing is spooky and amazing.
You should be far more interested in what's happening when you boil a pot of water and convection rolls spontaneously form.
Serious question: why?
By 10^(10^50) years that'll be long over.
You mean like... life?
And yet you live.
Permutation City is the only recent hard science fiction books that I can fully embrace. It has novel and genuinely new thinking, it is realistic, and it's thoroughly entertaining.
Most modern sci-fi fails at one or more of those tasks. Indeed, most modern sci-fi fail's at not being mere fiction.
Maybe it just bugs me a little extra because it's the apex of a weird pattern also in Permutation City and the short story Crystal Nights (which is a fun read!): the story's cool tech, the thing you came to the story for, is pushed by an unlikable character, and everyone else despises the character and everything they stand for including the tech. There's a lack of likable characters that sympathize with the reader in how cool the technology could be; it's harder to sympathize with the protagonists who seem too unimaginative to see how cool the tech could be. I get that the author is probably trying to make a point that technology can be abused by bad people and that most people aren't going to see the possibilities of new tech ... but I think he's getting worse at making that point, or the point is just getting grating being re-executed in the same way several times over.
And the other thing that drives me crazy about Zendegi is the time it spends with the lazy caricatures[0] of real people. It's a little personal given that Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of my favorite authors, but that's only part of it. The caricatures are lazy. Egan might as well have made each of the characters boast of having a small dick. And the bad caricatures aren't just a few unflattering introductions, but form a whole subplot that mostly doesn't affect the main plot or the protagonists at all; it exists just to take shots. And then the caricatures are mainly ridiculed for dreaming big (in ways the story cheaply makes out to be dumb or selfish), especially about AI. I come to Egan books to dream big. Egan's previous books were likely part of what taught many people to dream big in this!
I'm sure some of the things I call problems could be done well and aren't automatic disqualifiers, but the sum of all of them in one book with the execution they had just left a surprisingly terrible taste in my mouth.
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/03/egans-zendegi.html
Try Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in thermal noise versus the likelihood of many similar brain states spontaneously arising in thermal noise, the probability that a given person is going to continue living beyond the current moment seems very low, assuming a finite age for the universe.
Hopefully there's some better, lower-entropy mechanism out there for generating brain states. Maybe it's even an objective physical reality and human evolution producing physical brains. :)
(I loved Permutation City, by the way. I don't think any other novel has made me think so much.)
Agreed mostly, though personally I think Permutation City was dancing around trying to imply something one step further than that: maybe you don't even need that single brain state to exist in some objective reality for it to have a coherent stream of consciousness. In other words, the Mathematical universe hypothesis[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
(+10^10^59 years) "Ah, good, awake again, shame the universe has gone dark, I wond-"
(+10^10^122 years) "er what the other copies are thinking. After all, there isn't really-"
(+10^10^185 years) "anyway to tell how much time is passing, I wish I still had stars and eyes to see them."
The most interesting part is the related Boltzmann brain paradox: we are far more likely to be isolated brains randomly popping out of chaos and imagining a universe, than actually living in a real universe.
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Given that the question asks about 'current' universe arising spontaneously from vacuum the probability is 1 because that has already happened.
The more interesting question, what is the probability of a new universe similar to our own arising. To the best of our knowledge (which for this type of extrapolation is admittedly flimsy) this is also 1, this just takes a very long time. The expected time it would take (10^10^10^56) is specified on the last row on the "Future of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe" table.
Well, we don't know that. Whatever 'came before' (if that even makes sense) probably wasn't a vacuum with the same rules as we see now.
Only if you meant "could have happened, but did not, and now for some reason can no longer happen."
"All events that could have happened, but did not" would reasonably encompass every event with 1 > P > 0, wouldn't it?
Actually, no. That would be the existence of my own consciousness. Just mine. Not yours. That's it.
I believe it's well-established that elementary particles can spontaneously generate through quantum fluctuation. Assuming that this process is uniformly distributed, the probability per unit time of any given structure self-generating is nonzero (if fantastically small). Over a long enough timescale, the probability of any possible event occurring approaches one. If time is infinite, the probability is one.
What am I missing?
"Around this vast timeframe, quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the vacuum could generate, via inflation, new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes [...] this is also the time required for a quantum-tunnelled and quantum fluctuation-generated Big Bang to produce a new universe identical to our own, assuming that every new universe contained at least the same number of subatomic particles and obeyed laws of physics within the range predicted by string theory."