How will the universe end? Katie Mack is among a growing number of scientists looking to the accelerating rate of expansion as a factor for knowing the fate of the universe. The universe “began” at a time of very high temperature and high density. The meaning of the term density here is that matter is close together. A lot remains unknown because 80% of the universe doesn’t emit observable light or energy. This 80% is known as dark matter.
The accelerating rate of expansion of the universe seems to rule out a fate known as the Big Crunch. In the Big Crunch the universe would reverse its expansion and another Big Bang would happen. However this theory may overestimate the power of gravity which many think is getting weaker as the universe expands.
The crux of the problem for this theory has to do with the accelerating speed of expansion of the universe. While a rapid expansion happened after the Big Bang, for a Big Crunch to happen, we would have to assume that this expansion would reverse. If the Big Bang was the height of the rate of expansion we would be going in the right direction so to speak, even if we weren’t. Accelerating at a slower or even constant rate could indicate that gravity might turn us back.
This is a sort of nice idea. The universe would continually repeat cycles of expansion and collapse forever potentially. A more likely future is heat death of the universe. It is not exactly freezing to death as we may imagine it. The key to this theory is not a temperature that must be reached for all matter to cease to exist but it rather requires a lack of difference of temperature between matter. While the universe is getting colder and less dense the precise issue we have here is that no more “work” may be done. When all temperature is the same, no work can be done between matter.
Now what is work? Physics can teach us a lot about the term in our present society. In our capitalist society we are taught that work is the means to survive and also we are fed propaganda that work fulfills a more existential meaning or purpose. Ironically the function of work in capitalist society is purely a destructive one. While it may provide temporary survival the basic gambit of work is that people are given money to exploit natural resources in one way or another.
For each exchange in the global economy the rich take a share of the trade, for they own the means of production. But the problem is far more dire than simply controlling the means of production. Production itself in our industrial society is an act of violence upon the earth and with or without climate change we are merely running out the clock on our available resources. Each act of work then is not only is a way to steal labor but a way to turn a finite resource into money, which can then be used to buy another resource, with eventually all resources running out.
The purpose then of what we have come to know as work is not even to give the worker a way to survive. This is its own sort of trade. The worker does a task and this is the reason the worker is not killed out right. This is the reason capitalism in its own way is a substitution for violence while at the same time performing the ultimate violence in which there is no return from. Indeed, modern ideology presents the possibility, even if not the likelihood for the “good life”, one totally alienated from one’s natural resources, in which we can be whoever we want to be (in theory), we just can’t be who we are.
In other words we are promised a token to buy what we are destroying only if we agree to destroy it. The earth is converted to something that expresses an idea. A television comes from the earth and tells us many things. It does not tell us where it came from or what will happen to us because we use it. The message of the modern material is totally exterior.
You are somebody because you engage in destruction. The question for capitalism is not if, but how. The very way of life, embedded in increasingly entropic propaganda, is individualized. We are given a million chances to discover who we truly are when this “who we truly are” is a black hole.
If we were to truly discover who we truly are, in some sort of imaginary independence where we don’t rely on the natural world to exist we would simply collapse under our own weight as a black hole does. We should not be aiming to discover who we are. Who we are is bound to the Other. Without the Other there is no difference, without difference there is only death. Horrid, horrid heat death.
Capitalist work doesn’t understand difference. If anything it has aimed for a predictable uniform principle of efficiency. The observation that this alienated the individual worker is correct, but again it may not go far enough. What is the worker, the consumer, the poor person left without the ability to do one or both, really alienated from? It is not their true self, but rather the individual is alienated from their difference in relation to the Other. The Other is not just other humans but all other matter.
We are invited to find our true selves under capitalism. We never will, but we are invited to be this “ambitious”. We are alienated from the results of this fruitless search but we always will be. This is why Slavoj Zizek imagines the problem for communist utopia being envy because all false notions of the self will be stripped away, the rules will be fair and we will be exactly who we are.
However we are nothing in and of ourselves. We are a relation to the Other. Jacques Lacan saw that we are the Other through the eyes of the Other. There is no self except for how one sees themselves being seen. It is in this way capitalism is completely missing the point. It is asking us how we see ourselves. Do we love ourselves enough? Do we want success bad enough?
It’s an impossible quandary. Just as Stephen Hawking has said finding an edge to the universe is the wrong question, finding ourselves is the wrong question. For Hawking, before the universe there was nothing, and now the universe is everything. So finding an edge to such a universe is like asking what’s more North than the North Pole for Hawking. In the same way the Other is everything and the idea of the self before, after, or outside the Other is itself alienating.
Capitalism aims to erase difference. While some on the anti-woke left would take this opportunity to deride diversity as a way to make us all the same I find the problem is precisely the opposite. What is going on in architecture, for example, in capitalism? We are seeing the death of art and rise of the uniform profitable building that only has the function of making money, or at the very least being predictable enough for rich people to plan “future” money on it. Now this is a real opposition to difference. There is no real work being done here. Build the building, it may be a job, but it is not work unless there is difference. Without difference we have the heat death.
There is a more acute problem here too. As soon as difference is lost and replaced with individualism we not only get a more divided society we end up with no “jobs” to do. If work can simply be replaced by technology, if the only skill necessary is to make money for the boss, then potentially there is no need for humans at all, just bosses and robots. What is to stop the same thing from happening to say friendship?
Imagine the comfort of modernity, ignorant of the increasing entropy, the horrific destruction, an exterior annihilation hidden by an inner self. Just imagine: my friends are the same as me, we are very happy and we have nothing to talk about. In physics, work is not about making money. Work is about energy being transferred to or from an object. Capitalism extracts, work exchanges. Physics work is what capitalism promised it would be. The work of physics will end capitalism one day. Will it end our world first?
This state where no more work can be done, not even the difference in temperature necessary for the interaction of more basic matter, is also known as maximum entropy. Indeed as Hawking pointed out earlier, finding these sorts of limits on the universe is the wrong question for something that is everything. Mack explains that when entropy can no longer increase, this may be what we think of as the end of time because entropy increases over time.
The second law of thermodynamics states that over time entropy does not decrease within a closed system. This is not the same as what entropy is causally talked about as indicating more chaos over time. Entropy measures the amount of something’s energy available for doing work. The idea that increasing entropy increases chaos isn’t necessarily wrong but there is a paradox we need to address in the idea of a system where no work is being done being the maximum entropy.
If I understand it correctly the theory of increased entropy over time translating to increased chaos implies that an object is at a certain temperature and has a potential for change based upon an interaction. Over time, the chances of no changes in temperature (or anything I suppose) decrease. Something can stay the same for a day, but every day the chance of it being the same decreases. In other words every day the chance of not doing work has a chance of being broken by doing work.
Entropy can have an interaction where work is balanced within a closed system and the amount of energy available for work doesn’t decrease. However there is no chance of this amount of work increasing according to the second law. So over time entropy will increase, even if slowly, and therefore the chances of randomness or chaos will. We should be careful not to see this increase of entropy as a problem of finite work. The universe seems to have a far more sustainable method of work than we do.
Indeed, the above assumption contradicts the first law of thermodynamics (the conservation of energy). Energy can be changed but not created or destroyed. The “end” of the universe won’t really be the end. It will be energy without work. Life without change. Time without a narrative.
So in the Big Chill are we really entering a universe of more chaos? More possibilities, more randomness, all lead to the same end. By not working, by refusing to engage in scenarios, we resist the coming of the ordering of all life that ends interaction. This is the closing point, the dilemma the modern subject faces.
We are told to chase the new technology, the new fad, the new job, when all of this indicates a system of increasing entropy in collapse. We have so little control of our environment that we have done violent work upon that increasingly we have to make new machines to mold it. To combat real unpredictable life, animal, human and mineral, we have to domesticate, imprison and control, through force, propaganda, and everything in between.
And yet the tighter the grip by the ruling class, the more contradictions are exposed. The increasing need to incarcerate people in the United States, on borders, through jails, camps, endless states of war, gig jobs that don’t allow unions. The deeper we dig into new technologies for energy. The new water and food supplies for business ventures, new animal habitats for resources, the more we do all of this the more we find that we really aren’t controlling any of this at all. If we had control we would make a plan for our world that works, not find new jobs that provide nothing but the right to work.
The ability to survive becomes the enemy of the need to “thrive”. The propaganda of becoming the best self endangers the survival of the material self as the very product that makes us better consumers, makes us useful workers, destroys our humanity, in a metaphorical and scientific sense. Civilization is only a politically correct way to say genocide.
On the one hand, chaos does appear to be increasing but only as the justification for more “law and order”. What is really going on is an antagonism between profit and planet, profit and people, profit and peace. As capitalism grows, we cannot follow the first law of thermodynamics. We aren’t conserving, we are destroying.
The universe has a fate that may be just as chaotic, but it at least has laws. There is a so-called closed system. The universe may not have a limit of time or space we can conceptualize but that is what holds it accountable. It is a representative democracy.
The first law, when things interact, no energy is lost. Do not be afraid of the Other. The universe as a whole, never wins, never loses, so why does it matter if we win, for another loses, if we lose, for another wins. The second law, as time increases, so will the amount of things that can happen, we all contain multitudes, and we express them through interaction, but never be so eager, never be in a hurry, for once we interact enough, it will be over. Chaos ends in order. Revolution ends in peace.
Fortunately the universe does not have the laws of capitalism. When the universe ends, things won’t be over, they’ll just all be the same. When capitalism ends, it will be when we make work follow the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
The first law being we will not destroy, we will conserve, each other, and our earth, both vital for our survival. The second law being that over time, as we truly get to know our world and each other, we will find that each of us is more different than we expected, and this is the beginning of a dynamic chaos, one that listens to our natural world, to our marginalized people, and honors the way it will transform us.
The end will be peace, the end will be equal, the end will be nothing. The ego, the very concept of existence won’t matter. We will look to our neighbor and they will be us and we will be them. None of it will matter because we all will matter. None of it will matter, because we’re all just matter, at one with the universe.
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Nick Pemberton | Radio Free (2021-01-08T07:44:21+00:00) The Fate of the Universe. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/08/the-fate-of-the-universe/
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