![]() ![]() So it is neat to realize that those of us who are consciously practicing foresight for ourselves and our organizations are doing what life, in its most universal sense, is driven to do. At the technical level, information is anything that allows us to reduce our uncertainty, and thus make better predictions, about systems whose futures we do not already know. ![]() In Why Think About the Future? in Chapter 1, we said that the most universal way to understand foresightis that it is the production of useful information, which is the opposite of entropy. The negentropic growth of mind is clearly happening on Earth, and there may be millions or billions of other Earthlike planets, in our galaxy or in our universe, where intelligence, mind, feelings, and consciousness are also growing, in a predictable developmentalprocess. Here is a lovely quote by Schrodinger on the nature of the mind, and how it seems intrinsically holistic, relational, and different from “granular” physicalreality. Locally, we are creating adaptive order, intelligence, or “ negentropy” to use physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s lovely term, at ever faster rates. We’re a long way from being able to say anything definitive, but we can guess, and we will do so here.įortunately, while our universe’s energy potential is running down at an accelerating rate, its information potential we also know that it is exponentially “running up” at the same time. We’ll briefly speculate on where that somewhere else might be when we discuss the transcension hypothesis and the multiverselater in this chapter. ![]() Given the eventual arrival of heat death, and the possible even faster arrival of the Big Rip, we know that if universal intelligence is to survive, it must eventually go somewhere else. Whether the Big Rip turns out to be true or not, since the end of the 20th century, our cosmic future has grown even shorter than we thought it was. In that account, which I find particularly intuitive and evo devo, we have already seen between a third and half of our universe’s total lifespan (figure right). In that model, dark energy acceleration gets increasingly strong with time, and in a few billion years from now, even matter itself gets ripped apart and recycled. One particularly accelerative model for end of our universe is the Big Rip. So the end of our universe is not only obviously ahead, we now know that this ending is an accelerative process. For the last few billion years, our universe has begun to take itself apart at an accelerating rate, making ever more space for its heat to “dump” into. Since the discovery of dark energy in 1998, we’ve also known that our universe’s creation of entropy is accelerating. Unfortunately, everything must eventually die, inside our universe. Many scientists consider it the most fundamental law in physical theory. This insight is called the second law of thermodynamics, and the “second law” is one of the best-tested laws in all of science. It was a big bummer for us at the time to learn that our universe is inevitably heading toward “ heat death,” the loss of sources of useful energy, via a process of ever-increasing entropy. We’ve known since William Thompson in 1852 that our universe is running down in its energy potential. Image Credit: Jeremy Teaford, Vanderbilt University The Big Rip Model of the Fate of Our Universe. ![]()
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