Could Humans Survive the Heat Death of the Universe

It's long been assumed that no matter what happens to our species or planet, there's no way for us to survive the heat death of the universe. But maybe that assumption is wrong? Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek has come up with an idea for a "time crystal" that won't just be able to power a computer when the temperature of the universe hits absolute zero, but will actually do better as heat death approaches.

That opens up a lot of possibilities.... sort of.

Wilczek came up with this bizarre idea while studying solid crystals, three-dimensional structures in which the atoms are arranged in regular, repeating patterns. These patterns arise because they cost atoms the least energy to maintain, and so are most comfortable. If you add more energy, the crystal might disappear - ice crystals will melt to liquid water, for instance. Eventually, though, the heat will dissipate and the ice will refreeze in the same pattern.

Thanks to Einstein's special theory of relativity, physicists are used to thinking of time as a dimension, a simple extension to the three dimensions of space. So if you can have crystals in three dimensions, Wilczek wondered, why not in four? ...

In a time crystal, electrons will have to flow in a loop not a line as they do in an ordinary superconductor. What's more, they will have to bunch up rather than flowing as a smooth stream. This is to ensure that the charge repeats periodically over time, echoing the way that atoms repeat in space in an ordinary crystal.

At the recent State of the Universe symposium convened in Cambridge, UK, to mark Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday, Wilczek showed mathematically that a lump of looping charge can zip around forever in its lowest energy state. "It is perpetual motion, but not in the forbidden sense," he says.

Source: New Scientist, 21 January 2012

How hard would it be to build such a thing? No one knows -- all we have right now are mathematical models created by Frank Wilczek. Even if those models prove to be perfect, we'd be a long way from creating anything like this in reality. Fortunately, we appear to have a lot of time to work on it.

But what would we do with it if we could build it? Run a screensaver "forever" (assuming time can have any meaning at that point)? Well, we could store information about the universe that just died. Whether that would ever prove useful is questionable.

We could also, in theory, store ourselves (not you and me -- we'll be long gone by then). If we can ever reach the point of being able to transfer a human mind to a computer, then we could maintain a human mind past the heat death of the universe with a time crystal.

But then what? There's nothing to interact with on the outside, so there will be no new inputs of experiences. At best people would live in some sort of simulation for all eternity. Or just go into suspension, saved for... for what? Sounds an awful lot like what Christians describe heaven to be like: nothing new, nothing matters, just the same "bliss" for eternity.

Unless there is some prospect for the time crystal device to be transferred to a new, hot universe, I'm not sure it would worth it.