Off the Launch Pad, Day 6

On the final day of the Launch Pad workshop we straggled into the lecture hall later than usual and took our seats for Dr. Schmidt's account of What Not To Do in science fiction stories, based on his years in the editor's chair at Analog. He discussed the difference between obviously made-up science and just plain wrong science in fiction.

Dr. Schmidt kept his presentation short because he (and the rest of us) wanted to spend some time visiting the University of Wyoming's small but excellent geology museum. It's tucked in one wing of the Geology Building, but it boasts a rich harvest of Wyoming fossils and minerals. There's a whole mounted Apatosaurus (that's Brontosaurus to the older set), the famous Allosaurus specimen called "Big Al," as well as ceratopsian and pachycephalosaur skulls, a small Mosasaur, a giant prehistoric gar, and fluorescent minerals.

We finished the workshop with Dr. Brotherton's lecture on cosmology. In the other lectures he did an admirable job of explaining very complicated physical principles descriptively, without heavy mathematics. But cosmology is one of those subjects which is impossible to simplify.

He discussed the expansion of the universe, and current theories about its ultimate fate. Along the way we touched on the topics of dark matter, dark energy (which is entirely different), and the shape of the universe.

These are heavy-duty topics, and they don't encourage optimism. At present, the most favorable outcome is that the galaxies will gradually disperse until they are all red-shifted out of sight and interaction with each other. The stars of the galaxy will gutter and die out, and the frozen planets will drift in the darkness forever.

That's the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that long before that the increasing force of dark energy will tear all matter apart and the universe will end as a thinning haze of subatomic particles.

I don't know why this should be upsetting, but it is. At some point billions of years from now, the universe will disintegrate, or it will go on forever as a cold darkness. Either way, the Earth will long since have been reduced to a cinder, and even the most remote descendants of humanity will be extinct. Why should we care? And yet we do. Each of us still wants to be immortal.

All things must end, and so must the Launch Pad workshop. We held a final discussion, in which we praised the good and complained about the less good. There was cake. And then darkness.

Comments

[JP]

Bleak.