Sean Carroll

As I've said many times before, so I'm not going to rehearse now, but real living beings are quasi-stable systems that take in free energy from the environment and use that free energy to survive, to persist, to self-repair. We do metabolism. We eat and we excrete and we get on with lives and we're constantly increasing the entropy of the universe.

You can't turn us on and off like you can turn on and off a computer in quite the same way. We have built-in instructions from billions of years of natural selection that lead us to want to survive and to eat and things like that. were much more self-sufficient than the typical AI system would be. None of these are complete obstacles, right?

You can't turn us on and off like you can turn on and off a computer in quite the same way. We have built-in instructions from billions of years of natural selection that lead us to want to survive and to eat and things like that. were much more self-sufficient than the typical AI system would be. None of these are complete obstacles, right?

None of these are things that you couldn't build into an artificial system, which is why I think that that's completely possible. It's just not where we're putting most of our effort right now, right? If you want to optimize for

None of these are things that you couldn't build into an artificial system, which is why I think that that's completely possible. It's just not where we're putting most of our effort right now, right? If you want to optimize for

a machine that will create human-sounding sentences and paragraphs on topics that you ask it questions about, then there are much easier ways to do that than to build a full-blown artificial living being. And that's exactly what people are doing. OK, I'm going to group together two questions. One is from Matthew Cushman, who says, a question from my son Aaron in high school.

a machine that will create human-sounding sentences and paragraphs on topics that you ask it questions about, then there are much easier ways to do that than to build a full-blown artificial living being. And that's exactly what people are doing. OK, I'm going to group together two questions. One is from Matthew Cushman, who says, a question from my son Aaron in high school.

Suppose there were a small toy universe a few meters in diameter. Alternatively, it could be a region of our universe encased in a reflective impermeable barrier. The only thing in this universe is an apple. Otherwise, it's static. What would the long-term fate of the universe be?

Suppose there were a small toy universe a few meters in diameter. Alternatively, it could be a region of our universe encased in a reflective impermeable barrier. The only thing in this universe is an apple. Otherwise, it's static. What would the long-term fate of the universe be?

Aaron's theory is that it must eventually end up as photons bouncing around at high temperature due to conservation of energy. And Claudio says, imagine a device, let's say a sphere in which the interior is isolated from the rest of the universe in an absolute way. No radiation or matter of any kind can penetrate. It's even isolated from the CMB, the cosmic microwave background.

Aaron's theory is that it must eventually end up as photons bouncing around at high temperature due to conservation of energy. And Claudio says, imagine a device, let's say a sphere in which the interior is isolated from the rest of the universe in an absolute way. No radiation or matter of any kind can penetrate. It's even isolated from the CMB, the cosmic microwave background.

Could such a device, if feasible, be used to study the cosmological constant and questions such as the heat depth of the universe? It's always interesting to me when... In one month, in one particular AMA session, questions that had never come up before but are closely related to each other just pop into existence.

Could such a device, if feasible, be used to study the cosmological constant and questions such as the heat depth of the universe? It's always interesting to me when... In one month, in one particular AMA session, questions that had never come up before but are closely related to each other just pop into existence.

So here we have two people asking about tiny little universes or tiny little – tiny little compared to the size of the universe, our actual universe, I suppose. Tiny little regions of the universe that are isolated from everything else. What happens inside? So for Matthew slash Aaron's question, let's just –

So here we have two people asking about tiny little universes or tiny little – tiny little compared to the size of the universe, our actual universe, I suppose. Tiny little regions of the universe that are isolated from everything else. What happens inside? So for Matthew slash Aaron's question, let's just –

get one thing on the table very quickly, which is the slight unrealisticness of the question. So there's two different versions, if you remember Aaron's question, either a small toy universe a few meters in diameter or a region of our universe encased in reflective impermeable barrier.

get one thing on the table very quickly, which is the slight unrealisticness of the question. So there's two different versions, if you remember Aaron's question, either a small toy universe a few meters in diameter or a region of our universe encased in reflective impermeable barrier.

So there aren't really any reflective impermeable barriers, at least not ones that would last literally forever, right? Because they're made of matter. Just like for the previous question about the matter-antimatter asymmetry, there are questions about physics at super early times and super high energies we don't know the answer to.

So there aren't really any reflective impermeable barriers, at least not ones that would last literally forever, right? Because they're made of matter. Just like for the previous question about the matter-antimatter asymmetry, there are questions about physics at super early times and super high energies we don't know the answer to.

There's also questions about physics at super long times and low energies. We don't know the answer to. Both of them involve, among other things, is baryon number conserved, which is a way of saying, are protons stable, right? Maybe they are. We think that they're not. Most physicists think that they're not, but we've never seen one decay.