Conference Presentation, Fireside Chat
Roger Penrose: Infinite Cycles of the Universe Punctuated by Big Bang Singularities
- The universe is expected to undergo exponential expansion driven by the cosmological constant, resulting in a future state described as increasingly uniform and devoid of dynamic activity.
- Over an unspecified, immense timescale, black holes will consume entire galaxy clusters, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, before eventually evaporating via Hawking radiation and vanishing into cold photons.
- Photons in this remote future will traverse infinity without experiencing time, where infinity acts as a physical location rather than a boundary, and the universe will retain its conformal geometric structure despite lacking scale or mass.
- The extreme heat and density of the Big Bang are projected to be conformally equivalent to the cold, rarefied end-state of a previous aeon, allowing photons and gravitational waves from black hole collisions to potentially propagate across aeons.
- Intelligent civilizations may theoretically communicate across aeons by surviving long-term challenges, such as global warming, and transmitting signals that traverse singularities, though the specific mechanisms for such detection remain unknown.
- The absence of currently detected signals from extraterrestrial civilizations is attributed to a lack of established methods for observing signals originating from previous aeons, keeping the existence of such successful civilizations within the realm of speculation.