- 4 hours ago
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00I want to try something. Close your eyes and think of nothing. No darkness, just
00:07nothing. Think of nothing as an object in your mind. Imagine a universe where all
00:16matter has completely decayed. Photons and leptons are too far apart to form any
00:23processes and the temperature is near absolute zero. There's nothing, or more
00:30accurately, nothing observable. All the stars have burned out. Black holes are now
00:37gone and disappeared. No change is occurring to make one moment
00:41distinguishable from the next and, perhaps, worst of all, there is no
00:46conscious being to witness this great nothingness. What I'm describing here is
00:52maximum entropy, the final stage of the heat death of the universe. The concept
00:58of maximum entropy is based on the second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms,
01:04this law of physics suggests that disorder increases over time in a closed system, a
01:11system where no energy leaves or enters. Energy will become more evenly
01:15distributed, moving from hot to cold areas to reach equilibrium. Heat itself is
01:21this transfer of energy. That's why your coffee gets cold when you leave it out
01:25too long, or why your house requires a heating system to work continuously to
01:29stay warm in the winter. This process is also irreversible. While you can reheat your
01:34coffee with more energy, you can't regain the energy that was dispersed when it was
01:39first heated up. That's just gone forever now. There's no capturing it out of the air. If you
01:46consider the universe as such a closed system, then we have a big problem. Because
01:52according to the second law of thermodynamics, eventually, entropy will
01:56increase until all energy is fully dispersed. And once this happens, no
02:00processes can form. All the lights go out and we enter a permanent state of
02:05nothingness. In a famous short story by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov,
02:10called The Last Question, he asks us to consider this lights-out scenario. And more importantly,
02:16he poses an important question. Can humanity prevent the state of maximum entropy, or are
02:23we and the universe doomed to a dark, cold fate? But before we can address the last question,
02:30we need to address several other big questions first. We have many entropy-related problems to
02:37solve before the very distant future arrives in some untold trillions of years.
02:44While the universe drifts towards chaos, quite the opposite is happening in your digital life.
02:50Every time you go online, your life is being organized, tracked, and catalogued. Dozens,
02:57sometimes hundreds of companies, are quietly collecting your data. Your name, your location,
03:02your browsing habits, even your search history. Piece by piece, they assemble it into a detailed
03:08profile of who you are. And those profiles don't just sit there. They're sold to the highest bidder
03:16to target you with ads, pull your attention in directions you didn't choose, and sometimes even
03:22end up in the hands of bad actors who use that information to try to scam you. Which is exactly
03:28why
03:29today's sponsor, Incogni exists. Incogni is a service that removes your personal information from the
03:35places you never even knew it was being stored. Data brokers, people search sites, and directories
03:41that treat your identity like a product. By law, these companies have to delete your data if you ask,
03:47but doing that yourself can take weeks, months, or even years. Incogni handles it automatically,
03:54continuously sending removal requests, and working in the background to keep your data out of reach.
04:00And they've just introduced a new feature called custom removals. If you find a site exposing your
04:06personal information, you can simply send the link to Incogni, and their team will work to get it taken
04:11down, even if it's outside their usual network. So if you want to reduce one of the biggest hidden sources
04:18of digital noise and take back control of your data, go to incogni.com slash aperturedeal and use the code
04:25aperturedeal to get 60% off an annual plan. Now back to our story. On a side note, I would
04:32like to
04:32recommend taking a moment to read the nine-page short story The Last Question after watching this video.
04:39It's by no means necessary to understand any of what we will be discussing today, but it would act as
04:46a very
04:46nice companion piece, and I'm sure you can find it online.
04:58To live what many would consider a full life, we have to resist entropy at every turn,
05:03and we do this by consuming energy. It keeps our metabolism running, which in turn keeps the human
05:09body in a state of low entropy. This is something we have in common with all life on earth, and
05:14potentially life elsewhere in the galaxy. Despite the proliferation of life, living has historically
05:20been a constant struggle. Before agriculture became a thing, food and water weren't always available.
05:27The intake of food from foraging and hunting would have been inconsistent. Even with the proliferation of
05:34agriculture, crops have failed due to weather conditions. Even today, countries still experience
05:40famines, though often as a result of political disorder as opposed to any kind of act of nature.
05:46Overall, though, we've managed to make low entropy a lot easier than when homo sapiens first evolved.
05:52To keep ourselves at this low entropy state, however, we have to cause more entropy in our environment.
05:58To keep ourselves warm enough to live during colder weather, we have to use energy from the environment.
06:04We might burn wood or use a gas-powered furnace. Baseboard heating draws electricity from local
06:10power plants which may use liquid natural gas or coal. Heat pumps are more efficient at using energy as
06:17our nuclear power plants. The power you can get from one pellet of nuclear fuel, for example, can power
06:23one home for several months. However, despite how efficient our technology can be, we're still causing
06:30some entropy. We're turning some energy into an unusable form to drive turbines. That energy disperses,
06:39and in the language of entropy, it's becoming disorganized. So does that mean our planet is doomed
06:46to its own heat death long before the universe's heat death? If the Earth is a closed environment,
06:53then this would entail that no matter how efficient we become, we'd still ultimately experience maximum
06:59entropy at some stage or other. In this closed environment, we would only control how long our
07:05planet will last as a life-sustaining habitat. Inevitably, our planet would run out of usable energy.
07:12But here's the fortunate thing for life on Earth. Our planet isn't a closed system. Energy enters from
07:19a source that we're all, I hope, very familiar with. The Sun. Our local star is our main source of
07:26energy,
07:26actually. It's what made life on Earth possible in the first place. It sends us energy, and we make
07:32tremendous use of it. That's why, when we consider how best to limit entropy with our power needs,
07:38capturing energy from the Sun may be our best option. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and coal,
07:46solar fuel is nearly limitless. The only limited energy it uses is in the tools to capture that energy.
07:52They, of course, require resources and are subject to decay themselves.
07:57The Sun's energy is critical for life, but it can be a curse in certain conditions. Greenhouse gases in
08:04the atmosphere absorb light, causing the bonds between atoms to vibrate. The energy and heat remain
08:09trapped rather than being released into space. Life on Earth requires a range of temperatures to maintain
08:15a low entropy state. As global temperatures rise, the planet becomes less hospitable to many life forms.
08:23Many plant species won't survive in these increasingly warm environments. The animals that require that fuel
08:30source will die off as well. Eventually, the Earth will become hostile to life, putting our ability to
08:36survive into question. Fortunately, thanks to our open system, we have a lot of control over the entropy at the
08:43planetary level. We just have to figure out the scientific and political solutions that
08:47harness the Sun rather than turning it against us. We currently have ways of capturing the Sun's energy.
08:54Solar panels are proliferating at a rate never seen before. They've become cheaper and more efficient than
09:00any other form of electrical generation. And while the influence of oil and gas companies is holding back
09:07some progress, the business case for solar may be too strong to be stopped. Solar holds a lot of promise
09:14for our immediate future. But the dreams of scientists imagine something far greater for
09:20capturing the energy of the Sun. After all, Earth only receives 1361 watts per square meter of irradiance from
09:29the Sun, while the star itself actually outputs 380 billion quadrillion watts per second. The energy Earth
09:38receives is still substantial though. Eight hours of it could power our planet for the entire year. However,
09:46it may not be enough for our future ambitions. This limitation has led scientists to dream up concepts
09:52such as the Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical megastructure that surrounds the star and captures all of its
09:59radiant energy. When scientists search the stars for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence,
10:05they often look for signs of a Dyson Sphere. The thinking is that an intelligent species with enough
10:11time would try to capture all of its Sun's energy. On the Kardashev scale, this would be a Type 2
10:16civilization. A Type 1 is a civilization that is able to utilize all the available energy sources on a
10:23single planet. Humanity is currently at 0.7449, just in case you were wondering. As long as our Sun
10:32continues to shine, humanity has the opportunity to sustain a low level of entropy. But that introduces
10:39another important question that is addressed in the opening of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.
10:44What I say is that a Sun won't last forever. We're safe for 10 billion years, but then what?
10:53This is a question the character Lupau poses in the year 2061. In the world of Asimov's The Last Question,
11:00humanity has stopped using coal and uranium and instead has captured the Sun's energy from a
11:06station that circles the planet. They have enough power to send ships to Pluto and back as many times
11:11as they please. But when the Sun goes out, well, that's it for life on Earth. They'd have to travel
11:17to
11:17other habitable planets to escape extinction. We still have billions of years left of the Sun's energy
11:24before it all turns into a red giant and swallows us all, but that isn't forever.
11:36With technology that harnesses the full power of the Sun, we could potentially capture enough energy
11:42to make traveling to a new habitable planet a very real possibility. But of course, there are many
11:49technological hurdles that would need to be passed. Perhaps the most obvious challenge is that the
11:54closest hospitable planet will be several light years away. Currently, we are nowhere near being
12:00able to travel at the speed of light. One of the strongest candidates so far for speedy space travel
12:06is a light-driven nano spacecraft. The breakthrough Starshot can theoretically reach 15 to 20 percent
12:13of the speed of light. The concept involves a fleet of about 1,000 spacecraft the size of a centimeter,
12:20propelled by ground-based lasers. The spacecraft would also deploy sails in a diameter of 5 meters to be
12:27propelled by light. If all goes according to plan, the starship would be able to reach the closest star
12:33system, Alpha Centauri, within 20 to 30 years. The ship would then take four years to send back
12:41information about the surface of a potentially habitable planet, Proxima Centauri b. Since we humans are not the
12:49size of ants, the breakthrough Starshot project will be completely unmanned if it ever takes off.
12:56However, it's quite possible the billionaire investors have lost interest in the project due to their
13:02notoriously fickle nature. So maybe don't hold your breath for any updates. But if we are to take humans
13:12to other planets, several issues need to be addressed. Even if a ship is able to move at a similar
13:19speed to
13:19the breakthrough Starshot, we do have another problem with entropy. Conscious humans only live so long
13:26before their bodies become too disorderly to continue functioning. The passengers on board such a ship
13:32would have to enter some kind of cryogenic stasis, otherwise they probably wouldn't live long enough to
13:37arrive at this new world. Currently, we don't yet have the ability to sustain life this way, or more
13:44accurately, we don't have a way to revive life. There are currently a few projects underway, however.
13:52One example comes from the startup Tomorrow.bio, which is operating the first cryonics lab in Europe.
13:59Patients interested in the possibility of prolonged life can pay roughly $200,000
14:05to be frozen immediately following their death. These patients aren't simply frozen,
14:12as that would irreversibly damage their tissue. The company first replaces all the water in the
14:18body with a cryoprotective agent. This solution consists of dimethyl sulfoxide and ethylene.
14:24The patients are then cooled quickly to negative 125 degrees Celsius. After that, they're slowly cooled
14:31from negative 125 to negative 196 degrees. Once they reach that temperature, they're stored in a
14:39facility in Switzerland, where they can wait as long as their temperature is maintained. The idea is to
14:45resurrect these stored individuals once there's a cure for the conditions leading to their death,
14:50and after we've figured out how to bring someone back from cryostasis. However, no one has been
14:56successfully brought back to life thus far. And it may simply be impossible to avoid resurrected
15:03patients suffering from severe brain damage. That is ultimately to say that there's no clear way to
15:09suspend life just yet. An alternative to cryostasis is the idea that travelers on board could also be a
15:16part of an intergenerational trip with no realistic plans to see new planets for themselves. Such a project
15:23is currently underway, aiming to make interstellar travel possible by 2100. It's called the 100-year
15:30Starship, a collaboration from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and NASA. The
15:37teams involved need to address one primary challenge. Speed. Our current fastest moving object in space is the
15:45Parker Solar Probe clocked at 430,000 mph. At that speed, we wouldn't reach Proxima Centauri for 6,617 years.
15:59For comparison's sake, we don't have any known human texts that date back 6,000 years. But there are some
16:07promising solutions for speeding up a human-carrying starship. You essentially have two options. Burn
16:15more fuel or develop new technology. The former would require an impractical amount of fuel or
16:22access to solar energy, which would be less accessible the farther away you are from the star.
16:28Fortunately, there have been big advancements in thrust technology. Nuclear fusion converts energy
16:33more efficiently and produces less radiation than existing nuclear power. Recent studies suggest that a
16:40fusion-powered spaceship could reach speeds greater than 62 million miles per hour. That would reduce
16:47the travel time to Proxima Centauri B to 45 years. With that speed, crew members would be capable of living
16:54through the entire voyage. But of course, there are yet more potential hazards. The hull of the ship would
17:02have to be strong enough to withstand micrometeoroids struck at high speeds. Keep in mind that a grain of
17:09sand traveling at 90% of the speed of light would contain enough kinetic energy to match a small nuclear
17:17bomb. There's also the fact that lying around all day with limited movement is very bad for the body.
17:25You would be at much greater risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and possibly even death. Passengers
17:32would need the ship to provide artificial gravity and room to move around to avoid serious health
17:37problems. Scientists will also have to contend with the radiation out in space. All of our space missions
17:43thus far have been protected by the Earth's magnetosphere. You've probably heard of space madness in
17:49film and television. Well, it isn't real per se, but studies have shown that several hundred days of
17:57isolation with a small crew can cause real strain on relationships. Many of them become antagonistic,
18:04which is a serious concern given that these trips will likely take decades. We also have to consider
18:10the ethical concerns associated with interstellar travel. What if one or many of the passengers want
18:16to return to Earth in the middle of the journey? Would the plan allow them to return, or would it
18:21require them to follow through? That would be an extraordinarily painful circumstance for all
18:27involved. It could even turn violent, leading to a mutiny. The trip would certainly be long enough for
18:33passengers to change their minds from a sense of longing and anguish. If the trip spans several
18:39generations, you also face another ethical scenario. It's one thing for people to choose to live their entire
18:46life aboard a spaceship. It's another for people to be born on that ship and then forced into that
18:51life. They of course wouldn't be able to choose one way or the other. But having said that, aren't we
18:59all in a similar circumstance? None of us chose to be stuck on planet Earth with our population of over
19:06seven billion people and our endless conflicts. Perhaps the circumstance is only so different. One other
19:14potential solution is straight from science fiction, which in turn was based on scientific theory. I'm
19:20referring to the concept of the warp drive. If you've ever watched Star Trek, you're probably somewhat
19:26familiar with the concept. Instead of trying to travel through space in a linear fashion, the warp drive
19:33would theoretically bend space-time around your ship. It would contract the space-time in front while
19:39expanding it behind. This would allow the ship to travel at the speed of light without breaking the
19:46laws of physics. As it stands, however, the power required for such a ship would require nearly infinite
19:53energy. Unless some breakthrough in our understanding of dark energy comes along and changes everything,
20:02warp drives may have to stay on the USS Enterprise along with the best episodes of Star Trek.
20:13In our attempts to escape the entropy of Earth and our sun, perhaps we're overlooking the greatest
20:20opportunity to avoid disorder—our own flesh and blood. What is aging but the body's entropy bringing
20:27us to an end? It's the orderliness and disorderliness of our living systems. The human body, if left alone,
20:35would become disorderly very quickly. It requires energy to operate life systems that slow down this
20:41process. And what we're talking about is food, of course. Eventually, despite all of our best efforts,
20:48we lose the ability to maintain a low entropy state. This condition is commonly known as death.
20:57Entropy also increases when the body is in a diseased state. Orderliness decreases at the cellular
21:03level. As we age, we show external signs of entropy. The elasticity of our skin decreases,
21:10leading to wrinkles that we desperately try to hide. We typically become less able to contribute energy
21:15to work as we get older. This is why most of us will retire at some point, I hope. It's
21:21possible that
21:21our pathologizing of old age stems from this concern about being less useful for work, similar to how energy
21:29dispersed is no longer usable. The less useful we are for work, the less productive we are for the whole.
21:35It's not hard to see this shaping our attitude towards the elderly and our own signs of aging.
21:40Aside from our efforts to prevent and cure diseases, we don't put a lot of serious effort into prolonging
21:46human life and usefulness. Meanwhile, clues in nature suggest the possibility of immortality and
21:52constant renewal. This may surprise you to hear, but there are several species of jellyfish that
21:57basically live forever. When the immortal jellyfish dies in its medusa stage of life,
22:03it sinks to the ocean floor and begins to decay. This is where things start to get interesting.
22:09Its cells re-aggregate, but not in its medusa form. It re-emerges into a previous stage of life,
22:16the polyp. From there, it blooms into a baby jellyfish, floating along in the ocean.
22:21What's amazing about this process is that the jellyfish not only avoids death, but returns in a
22:27lower state of entropy. It gets to thrive again instead of simply decomposing at the bottom of the
22:33sea floor. We currently have no way to borrow genes from the immortal jellyfish, but by studying them,
22:41we may learn ways to slow our own entropy. Or, hey, we might just gain an appreciation for a creature
22:48who's
22:48managed to achieve eternal life. But even if we were able to crack the code of immortality this way,
22:54we'd still be vulnerable to physical annihilation. Given enough time, we'd all die of some spectre of
23:01physical violence, whether it's intentional or not. Perhaps then, we need to think beyond the flesh and
23:07consider a disembodied life. Well, we'd be able to travel a lot lighter after all.
23:13Before we continue, I want to share something we've been working on. On this channel, we make
23:18a lot of heavy videos, from physics to philosophy, psychology to quantum mechanics. And while researching
23:26them, we end up reading a ton of incredibly interesting books, most of which get condensed
23:32into these relatively short videos. But those books are full of insights that we've always wanted to share
23:40more deeply. Especially now, in an age where AI gives us instant answers and fewer people are
23:48taking the time to really sit down and read. We want to encourage something different. Slowing down.
23:54Taking in ideas more gradually. Actually diving into these books in a way that our videos don't allow.
24:02So we're launching something new. The Aperture Book Club. In this video series,
24:07I'll be reading these books aloud and sharing my thoughts with you in real time.
24:11And you can share yours with me in the comments. It's going to be a more
24:15long-form, reflective style. The first episode will be on the live tab here on YouTube.
24:21We're starting with a compilation of Seneca's letters, one of the most influential Stoics of
24:27ancient Rome and someone Marcus Aurelius learned a lot from. If that sounds interesting,
24:31I'll leave a link so you can set a notification and join me when it goes live. See you there.
24:42For interstellar travel, the body might be our biggest bottleneck. A weight that will tether us
24:47forever to our solar system and the fate of its star. But what if we could separate the mind from
24:53the body? What if we were as light as code that could hitch a ride on the breakthrough Starshot or
24:59its government-funded alternative? But that does beg a pretty important question. How possible is the
25:06transfer of human consciousness into the machine? Mind uploading is the hypothetical process of
25:12transferring a person's mind into a computer. That's everything from your sensory experiences,
25:17your memories, your emotional responses, and your cognitive abilities. This isn't just meant to be
25:24a copy. It's intended to capture your subjective experience. You would be immortal in the digital
25:30world, provided no one accidentally unplugs the computer. I would assume that there's a robust
25:35backup power system in place in case of outages too. This whole concept relies on the assumption that
25:41consciousness arises entirely from the physical processes of the brain. And if that turns out to be
25:47true, then a very sophisticated computer would be able to replicate all of the brain's functions,
25:52including consciousness. Whenever I read about mind uploading, I always have one big question that I
25:58haven't seen convincingly answered. Would my conscious experience actually continue into the machine,
26:06or would it simply be a copy? One response is to suggest the continuity of consciousness is an illusion to
26:14begin with. Our awareness is actually just fragmented moments held together by the brain's internal
26:20mechanisms, including memory. This is very similar to the Buddha's original teachings. He described the
26:25feeling of the continuous I, or self, as simply the succession of mental states, with one state
26:33conditioning the next. A good defense of this position can be found in the Ship of Theseus thought
26:39experiment that goes something like this. Imagine Theseus's ship is preserved by replacing every plank
26:46one by one. Eventually, no original part of the ship remains. The paradox is, with no remaining part from
26:55the original, is it still Theseus's ship? When we apply this paradox to consciousness, something interesting
27:02happens. Much like the planks, our neuronal processes are constantly being updated, and yet we still
27:09experience ourselves as a continuum of the same self. Thus, is it reasonable to suggest that if you
27:17replaced every part of your brain with a computational equivalent, bit by bit, your conscious experience
27:24would continue. And once the pieces were entirely replaced, could consciousness not be sent over to another
27:31capable machine. Well, the potential issue with this line of reasoning is that it rests on a pretty
27:39big assumption. That you can reduce consciousness to physical processes. That consciousness is simply
27:45a byproduct of physical observable brain activity. The physical description of the brain leaves out the
27:51lived aspect of experience. By reducing consciousness to the physical observations, you're just sidelining
27:59consciousness. You're not explaining it. That's what's known as the hard problem of consciousness. The
28:07physical explanation of the brain leaves out what it's like to exist and to experience. There remains
28:13an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and consciousness. How then would we ever know whether our
28:19continuity of consciousness, even if it is just illusory, could successfully transfer over to a machine if we
28:26couldn't verify the subjective experience. If you were able to transfer the mind to a machine and then
28:33back again, you could ask a person what it was like, whether they believe it was the same conscious
28:39experience that entered or not. But you could still never trust their testimony as they would have the
28:45same memories of being a person, then a machine, and then a person again. They would not be able to
28:51tell
28:51whether they were the same continuum of consciousness. I'm not suggesting that there's necessarily something
28:58more to consciousness than what we could physically account for. Just that we can't be certain that
29:05we've managed to account for the entire mind, as we'll never have access to the lived experience from
29:11the external physicality. However, if our consciousness ends and a new one begins, that's
29:18still a very human continuum, even if it's not the original person being carried over.
29:24It may be more like an act of creation that could aid our struggle against maximum entropy.
29:35Humanity may one day be able to colonize another planet. Perhaps we send digitized human consciousness
29:41in small robot bodies at high speeds, sailing on beams of light. And then these highly intelligent
29:49machines use the resources of the new planet to build bigger bodies that can construct a more
29:54hospitable environment. Humans then arrive on the spacecraft powered by nuclear fusion to a new home
30:00that is well set up for their survival. Over millions of years, their population expands and then extends to
30:07more planets across the galaxy. Millions more years pass as humans spread across the galaxy and perhaps
30:14find ways to inhabit distant galaxies via technologies that we can't even begin to comprehend now. We likely
30:22have to leave our bodies behind at this point and instead use lightweight avatars that are so efficient
30:27they require next to no energy. As billions of years pass, stars burn out one by one and only digital
30:35versions of ourselves are able to exist. We're nearing the point now of maximum entropy which leads
30:42humanity to confront the last question. Can we prevent the heat death of the universe? The end of
30:49ourselves and all processes in the universe? Is it possible that all things must necessarily end,
30:56no matter how great our prowess in science? Well, the good news is that there's hope. Maximum entropy is not
31:03a guarantee, and has actually been suspect ever since we noticed that the universe is constantly
31:09expanding. Maximum entropy occurs in a closed environment, but if the universe is always expanding,
31:16it technically isn't closed off. Order can continue to increase indefinitely. Life itself is a complex form
31:24of order, and it is uniquely able to produce more complex order. The continual expansion of the universe
31:31affords life the opportunity to continue creating more and more complexity. In this condition, there's no
31:38limit to the generation of order. But the story doesn't end there. There's a popular new theory that
31:44suggests the universe's expansion may begin to slow. And if that's true, well, we may be back to the heat
31:53death hypothesis. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we still don't know whether the universe will end or
32:00continue forever. But in the absence of an answer, there's no good reason not to commit to bold acts
32:07of ingenuity and creation. So don't stop. Let there be light. Although humanity may never be able to stop
32:14the heat death of the universe, a sufficiently advanced alien civilization might be able to.
32:20Click the video showing on screen right now to learn all about the highest levels of civilization in the universe.
32:30elizabeth Aah
32:42elizabeth
32:43elizabeth
Comments