“Completing” technology would be an an exponentially bigger task than completing science. Complete science is knowing everything about everything that actually exists. Complete technology would be knowing all the ways to arrange the things that exist into things that COULD exist. One is analogous to knowing all 52 cards in the deck, the other to knowing all 52! (8x10^67) ways to arrange the deck.
I just came here to make almost this exact comment! In fact, just in the realm of possible conventional (Von Neumann) computer programs, we already know that there are more possible computer programs than we could possibly explore.
Thinking that they reached the end of fundamental research is a bit of an idiosyncrasy of theoretical physicists (and Isaac is one at heart ), let's remember when, at the end of 1800s, they were sure their job was soon to be over, once a couple of pernicious problems got solved. Of course, the remaining issues were black body spectra and reconciliating Maxwell's electromagnetism with Newtonian mechanics, but clearly it was going to be some small work.
In the late 1800 it was known that Physics was a settled discipline and the only thing remaining was to refine a measure some things. Then some people like Einstein, Dirac and Fermi said " I have this idea... "
When those scientists had developed their research into modern urban development, we are enjoying rapid growth of globalization. Now we need more people to space to reach galactic civilization.
One barrier to the "completion" of science is the locality of data. Everything might be known, but it could never be known by *everyone* simultaneously, whether you are considering people or entire civilizations. As the near-infinite mountain of mixed junk and valid information grows, it may often be more efficient to independently re-discover something locally than to sort through it to learn what someone else previously discovered
I was going to comment something along those lines. I can easily imagine a future in which people take up science, even though there’s nothing new to be discovered, so that they can be reasonably certain in their knowledge and well-defended against nonsense. I have the germ of a good analogy in my head, but I just had an annoyingly busy evening at work and am frustrated and tired and drinking right now so I might come back to this thread later when my thoughts are in order.
What if in the future all knowledge is in some database or distributed on the internet and whenever your brain tries to think of a fact or thinks of something that might be relevant to a fact, a chip in the brain communicates with the database or queries the internet and the facts are recalled by the individual. Like an automatic google search directly to the brain.
@@princehamza890 it’s a hypothetical scenario millions of years in the future where pretty much all scientific knowledge is known. The question was assuming you have all knowledge, how do you get around the localization of that knowledge.
I remember when Civ 6 first came out "Social Media" was the pinnacle of science-- the end of progress. The goal of science. How depressing. After the patch giant death robots became the new future tech, which is better somehow.
Man thats grim "Future Science" was the end of Civ 1 - you just put points into that.. I just read your comment after making my own Civ 1 based one.. Social Media, dude.. I wasn't sure how it went in post Civ 1 games.. Dark shit. Whats the peak in 2. 3, 4, 5?
While figuring out all of the physical laws is possible, understanding something like chemistry or biology from them is like saying “now that we know the basic axioms, it shouldn’t be long until all of math is discovered”
Reminds me of how in vanilla Stellaris, eventually you just have repeatables and no new technologies. I wonder if the Fallen Empires fell because they are essentially in post-science states.
hmmmmm that might apply if the Universe actually was a computer game. But that seems more than merely unlikely. It's always good to remember that narratives created for entertainment mediums are just that ...... Entertainments. Not blueprints to any actual reality. (pls don't come back with crap about simulation hypothesis)
In the Foundation series, there was a self described "Archeologists" who found the concept of actual fieldwork crazy. His version was "Reading all the past and present papers and then publishing a paper on his opinion about them."
The "Gentleman Philosopher" and "Gentleman Scientist" was valid when there was more to discover and the barrier for discovery was lower, and likely will become more valid as we have more resources available for each person. When each person can do more or less whatever they want, it makes it much more likely that you will get people who dabble with jamming Theory X and Theory Y together to keep themselves busy and entertained.
@@SilverMKI I feel like that's where I fit. I'm not a scientist, I'm a science enthusiast. I might know some weird shit offhand, but my autistic knowledge is no match for modern scientific rigor.
I’m not certain if it was in “Foundation”, or possibly some other science fiction that I read (about 40 or more years ago)… But I recall something about someone “discovering” a wild and crazy “new” way of doing arithmetic. He developed a (never before seen) system, wherein you could write numbers on a piece of paper, then perform various functions (multiply, divide, add, subtract) to derive a solution to the problem. To the disbelief of all who he told about this…. He “claimed” that it would work every time. Of course, they all called him crazy…. Because everyone knows that the only reliable way to do arithmetic…. Is with a computer 😯
@@lightbearer313 … Thank you. I had a strong feeling it was something of Asimov’s, just not sure specifically. Probably high time to re-read some of the greats 😊
In this subject, I love the Panvirt in Orion’s Arm, most of whom have essentially withdrawn from real space to explore abstract mathematical spaces within vast matryoshka brains.
Sci-fi has talked about it, but every author has their own idea of what that might look like. I prefer body natural. Med tech allowing us to live long healthy lives. Tons of tech in clothing, glasses. Automation taking care of all our menial tasks.
As a modal realist I doubt this will ever be an issue. Even if some advanced future civilization does manage to discover every last secret of this reality there's likely an infinite number of alternative realities to be explored that operate on wildly different physical and metaphysical principles. And even if those alternative realities prove to be physically inaccessible from this reality they could still be explored both conceptually and experientially in virtual space. The beauty of existence is that there is literally no end of wonder for us to wander through.
I have watched each and every one of your videos at least 5 times some even more than that! Not only is your voice soothing but I love the knowledge I gain each time I watch the video I catch something I previously missed. Please don’t stop putting out videos I would be so incredibly sad if this channel stopped ❤
In theory, every PhD has contributed something to their field of study in order to get that PhD. Most people I know with PhDs have contributed a very real, but thin sliver of knowledge to their field. I can imagine PhD candidates continually measuring the speed of light to greater precision or examining the energy of the OH bond in some specific alcohol. Kepler discovered that planets have elliptical orbits when he was trying to support the circular orbits of Copernicus, which was a simplification of Ptolemaic orbits, using Tycho Brahe's astronomical data, which was better data than previous astronomers had made. Given that such monumental discoveries can be made by building on such incremental developments, I could only believe in the end of science if you first dried up the supply of PhD candidates.
@@donaldcarey114 That says more about who should be PhD candidates. Either they lack creativity or they are unwilling to settle for a topic that's not a huge impact, or alternatively they're interests are extremely narrow in a sub sub sub field where there isn't a whole lot happening very fast.
Great episode, love your work. My only commentary might be that you've perhaps understated the desire for infamy or legacy as a motivator to be the first to discover what every human will forever be taught going forward. Name recognition is as much a motivation for science as is suffering or existential crisis.
I think that's true but a desire for a good reputation or legacy would, I think, tend shift folks to whatever was showing popularity at the time and which also offers max return for minimum personal effort, science tends to require a lot of effort to get famous with.
Haven't been listening to your videos lately, just never find the right time to relax but still pay full attention, even watching this episode I was waiting for it to end the whole time with things I should be doing, but I still I couldn't pause it, I had to sit here doing "nothing" in order to finish the episode, that's how much I liked it, as I usually do. I look forward to the time I can catch up with all the episodes I missed past few months and it makes me happy there's so many for me to enjoy.
Was watching the impostors and doppelgängers episode and was thinking about how much you talk about how advanced civilizations will always steam roll less advanced ones. But history shows that that doesn’t always happen. You should make an episode on guerrilla warfare and the options weaker opponents have in space, both for aliens on a galactic scale and “small” civil conflicts in solar systems/dyson swarms. You did touch on this a bit recently in the alien refugees video it might be something interesting to talk about.
A more advanced civilization vs a less advanced civilization would be between Bambi and Godzilla. With humanity, even 100 years of progress we would absolutely decimate the humanity of 1922. Imagine the difference on galactic timescales of millions, or even billions of years.
@@harrisonb9911 You might be surprised how many times stone aged peoples defeated industrial societies. They don't usually win in the long run but they could come to negotiated settlements and sometimes could hold out long enough for other more advanced societies to come to their aid.
Thanks Issac, I wait for your content every week ❤ and I listen to your playlists while I sleep using my hands free bluetooth, thanks for helping me to brainwash myself into intelligence.
Hello from a fellow Ohioan! By far my favorite science related channel. You do such a great job of covering various topics, many times from angles I never thought of and the humorous bits are good too. Two thumbs up 👍👍
For many technologies, there's likely a "good enough" point. There's going to be a prodigious amount of engineering tweaks before we get there I'm betting.
I mean, the greek had that with slavery. (they considered the stomach engine as a toy who would be useless as a source of labor since slavery was just so convenient)
Dude i LOVE your videos. You are so under-rated and deserve so much more subs. The topics you talk about are not talked about ANYWHERE else i can find in the world.....and the topics are amazing. Techno Barbarians! amazing, lol. Looking to the future far beyond where anyone has looked before, it's amazing to think how civilisation might evolve.
I dunno, we still use luminous aether as a filter in gravitational equations. We just call it dark matter now. I don't think we know until we know, and even if that happens we are going to "know" several times before we slay that last luminous aether.
It's the vacuum energy. Nothingness is a concept like zero. Neither exist, meaning the nothingness must be something. A very simplistic way to think of it is the vacuum is space-time, or dimensionality itself. Gravity being it's localized energy density.
Luminous aether, if realistically used, would just be spacetime. Aether inolves biases to which the nearest equivalence would be gravity wells and gravitational/spacetime waves (eg LIGO detection. Saying these are equivalent is akin to saying Einstein's cosmological constant is the same as dark energy.
In vacuum space model, what's the gravitational equations between the luminous aether and moving aether? Plus, does luminous aether affected by hyperspace mess?
I haven't watched more than the first few minutes, and we'll see how this ages but honestly this is my solution to the concept: while we might run out of new questions to ask... it does not mean we will stop asking the old questions every time we go someplace new.
Edit: I just wanted to say one of my favorite things about all of your content is I can feel your love of puzzles and following your curiosity because I'm that exact same way. Thank you for the great content as always, I hope many other people are inspired to create the better futures you mention on here for humanity and the planets sake. As long as a species has individual members who seek use mind altering substances, there is always new things to discover. Epiphanies happen on drugs all the time, people have accidents that change our understanding of things, people think "I wonder if drinking/eating/smoking that will get me high" about random substances if they're bored enough, and I think we all know someone at some point who said "you what would be cool..." after ingesting some substances which could have led all sorts of ways from debate to experiments ending in medical discoveries or knowing our own limitations. I could see an end to science, but that would potentially be the most boring thing ever because then creativity is likely gone. And I too fear a Dystopia where causing suffering as a lifestyle or everyone being an addict as a potential problem of those types of post science civilizations just getting bored. I've always been an optimist with post scarcity civilizations and I'd like to believe many people would find new crafts or hobbies to learn to physically master if given free reign of their lives because their basic needs are all provided them. And yes you'd have people creating the same type, maybe even the same model of craftsmanship, but it bares the marks of that craftsman and it wouldn't ever be exactly identical especially with wood or stone work with different grains or knots making their own unique patterns.
Recreational drugs often leave people feeling they have had an insight. Rarely is it an insight that is empirically tested and found true, and insightful by others. I suspect a lot of this phenomena may involve the drugs making any old idea seem insightful. Imagine a definitive neurophycology paper, that told you, given any chemical, if it will get you high. There is a piece of software that calculates this from the chemical name. All the chemicals found in nature have already had this computed, and it is standard practice to compute it whenever synthesizing anything new. (Because you need a license to synthesize psychedelics, say) Suppose science is done. People still make art. People still design elaborate and somewhat pointless technological artifacts. A bunch of people put a lot of work into a machine that turned frozen bread into frozen toast without defrosting it. People still make all sorts of random "creative" techy things, like realistic robot centaurs. Some people are trying to make a computer out of pulies and string. You know, the sort of random stuff smart people go "wouldn't it be cool to..."
@@donaldhobson8873 you're possibly misunderstanding my point with recreational drugs, I'm not saying insight as just other ways of looking at problems that lead to questions or experiments.(maybe just different terms for the same concept) A question brings experiments to see what happens, which leads to experiments to see of its repeatable, which leads to further experiments. Also what I call "happy accidents" like discovering penicillin, or discovering targeted radiation can work as a treatment against cancer, someone just made a mistake but because something unexpected happened you see if you can replicate it. I get the need for tinkering, but if you're creating something unique that hasn't been done before then that's actually in a way a scientific discovery. It's curiosity leading to experimentation, leading to repeatable and verifiable results, or the scientific method in a nutshell. So if science is all figured out, then likely all creative things have been done too, so you're left with experiences.
@@cosmictreason2242 I don't disagree with that, but most of it could be achieved in a couple decades or at worst a few centuries and at that point we'd likely have moved onto near ageless types of existence. So you'd live forever, and likely wouldn't be having children at that point if no one ever dies, so you would eventually run out of everything to do at some point. Then what is the purpose of life? Helping other civilizations grow, prevent them from offing themselves with other filters? Maybe you set up civilizations and see what happens through experimentation, but we assumed science is all known so it seems cruel to have Guinea pigs...
@@jackl4laughs "So if science is all figured out, then likely all creative things have been done too, so you're left with experiences." Suppose a universe so vast that all possible paintings have been painted. You can still just go and paint something. So what if someone you have never interacted with painted something almost identical a billion lightyears away.
After a woefully long time at the sub 400K category, the subscriber count increase has been accelerating in the last year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the channel in the millions this time next year, after all the channel is increasingly getting referenced outside YT now.
That's a very Frank a snobbish thing to sa.........oh look, a bird. Seriously though, Isaac's channel is a pure gem amidst the prevalent and pedestrian muck on RUclips. There are some good content creators, but unfortunately, they're the exception and not the rule.
The only runner up for a post - science civilization, would be a Type 3 or Type 4 Kardeshev Civ. That reminds me Isac, did you ever read a short sci-fi novel from the early 1970's called "The Flying Sorcerers" by David Gerrold and Larry Niven? that touches upon the theme of this episode on science advancement. Good book.
Yes, it taught me the meaning of mauve in a fashion that I cannot forget. The characters were take-offs of various Science Fiction Writers of America members, including Purple-Gray (as a mauve).
Interesting. I always regret that I was born too late to explore the world, and too early to explore the stars. But maybe someone in the future will look back nostalgically at our time, when tech was still progressing, and science was full of unknowns.
I know a world building spec evo project where humanity advanced for 43 million years they hit a hard wall in advancment managed to create alcubierre warp bubbles but never schived ftl because in that universe their is no way to propell the bubbles but they still have space ships that go pretty fast 95% speed of light to be exact some members of that humanity is even dyson swarms at this point most are transhuman their is billions of species that branched of from homo sapiens
This thought has plagued my during all my 5 years of college. Not finding an answer, I was terribly worried that scientists are working at their demise, bringing forward their ultimate uselessness. Thanks to your channel, I have finally found all the answers I needed AND resumed pursuing becoming a scientist. Thank you!
I think that almost all Isaac Arthur videos are what a post-science civilization would look like. As we limit ourselves to what is possible within known science.
This was one aspect of the Utopia of The Culture that I found depressing. A universe where no new science can be found is like one where no new music can be heard.
After you solved all science - the final thing was to solve the message hidden deep within vibrations of dark matter, after we did this is the message that we discovered - congratulations, tutorial level finished. Moving on to the level 1.
I don't think science can be completed because there will always be something beyond the limits of our understanding. Questions like what lies beyond our Universe or is there some meaningful knowledge beyond Planck's units will probably take hundreds if not thousands of years to answer and it will just lead us to some completely new boundaries that we will have to surpass once again.
Even if we could determine that there is something beyond this universe, it being possible to run experiments (which would be just different rearranging of matter and energy in this universe) is another matter entirely. If you hit the limit of what you can run experiments on, then you've reached the limit of what you can ask falsifiable questions about, and thus reached the limit of science even if there are still things you know you don't know.
When you are using words like Trust and Believe you are talking religion, not science. Science doesn't beg for trust, it just proves its point and walks away.
I don't think science would ever end but 3 is what is likely in my head to happen, Judging by most other people I am not sure if they will understand that much new science. So if it happens if could turn into a niche hobby for few people.
I think my most likely prediction in regards to the end of science topic is that it eventually it would take as long as the Roman Empire has existed to make a breakthrough unlike today which can take decades at the longest Note: the Roman Empire lasted 1480 years That’s the equivalent of a making a breakthrough in field of research that was started in 542
Honestly our biggest barrier is the limits of our minds. Personally I think we hit that limit sometime in the 80s or 90s. Thankfully computers have stepped in and pushed us forward.
But also backwards. Lots of software is eating so much resources without needing to. See the memes/jokes about Chrome and RAM as an example. Optimisation has been thrown out the window for years now. Instead more power is thrown at the problem because it seems easier.
A post science civilization feels like what happened to the Q Conitnuum of Star Trek, where the Q have effectively experienced everything and done everything and experience and done everything so many times that they have grown bored of everything, of course for them it went beyond scientific knowledge and was all possible experiences. If we become immortal, the value is that things don't end you just move on to the next thing, but if we ever reach that point where everything has been done then things have ended. Complete immortality therefore would require a never-ending supply of new things to experience or learn or do. A very interesting topic, thorough in presentation, and thought provoking video as always. I am looking forward to your upcoming episodes, especially the Grabby Aliens (which I have seen a lot of people talk about lately). If you are ever looking for more topics to consider, some I would suggest are: * Returning to some old topics with a new spin or update, like life extension or anti-aging or brain-computer interfaces and VR, etc... * Looking at some of the new future tech that we may see in the short-term (a matter a just a few years or decades) * AI drug discovery and AI scientists and AI engineers and inventors/innovators * Robotic social and sexual relationships with humans or the non-human or semi-human descendants of today's humans
A temporary solution is to forget non-critical memories that is associated with entertainment, with it you can enjoy things repeatedly, although it might lead to some existential crisis lol, If humans are immortal now, it would actually be kinda alright, as human memories are like what i mention, not fully precise and permanent Of course the true solution is new creation, "they've grown bored of their finite multiverse, so they made it infinite" < paraphrased from downstreamers, To have an immortal is to be a civilization worthy of an immortal :3
I can image a state of affairs where the universe is fully understood, fundamentally -- but where you could still spend a very long time working to understand large-scale, complex dynamic systems. And -- related to the previous point -- I think advancements in engineering could go on long, long after a civilization is no longer making much progress in fundamental science. Science and engineering shouldn't be _too_ tightly coupled. In other words, 1 million-year-old *Civilization X* and 100 million-year-old *Civilization Y* might have the same level of fundamental scientific understanding, but I believe that *Civilization Y* could be wildly far ahead of *Civ X* in technological capability and achievement.
imagine an alchemical sort of science fiction story set during the time of isaac newton, in which light was just a particle and not a wave, gravity was a force, there was no quantum mechanics, no nuclear fusion, certain objects such as stars just emitted heat infinitely depending on their mass, and the speed of light was infinite. insanely simple totally mechanical universe with no mind bending nonsense going on. space ships operated on the principle of using vacuum balloons, which could float into space on the aether that surrounds everything in the spaces between the planets.
I don't think we'll ever run out of science. There seem to be an infinite number of patterns to discover just in the set of natural numbers. If you've been following Numberphile for the last decade you'll know exactly what I mean. Prime numbers, perfect numbers, triangle numbers, square numbers, Pythagorean triplets, the list goes on and on. And that's just the most basic math we can do.
And pray tell what will you do with proper research mathematicians once someone invents a generalized mathematical computer that can synthesize any and every optimal solution for every problem you can imagine? I'm not being facetious here either, it's the most probable "future tech" we are likely to invent, far before we get AGI or widespread safe fusion even, in the form of self-retraining quantum neural nets.
Another limit might be how much knowledge a human brain can process in a lifetime. On the other hand, an artilect that thinks a million times faster than a human might hit an 'insufficient data' state very quickly and have to wait while data gathering equipment is built and gathers sufficient data ... to overcome the 'insufficient data' hurdle. Once the artilect has learned everything that (currently) can be known, asking it a question might trigger the response: 'You lack the necessary capacity.'
It may be possible to run out of learnable information. Due to the expansion of the Universe, there are galaxies that recede so fast that, while we once could see them, we no longer can. Eventually, the information that has receded may be vital to decide questions previously askable. When the visible Universe has shrunk to the Local Group of galaxies, any questions larger than that will be undecideable.
Thank you SFIA! I remember at least discussing this in an old episode. Named something like "The Last Technology" or "Ascension Science" or similar. Such as the Ancients in Stargate. I have always been fascinated by the idea. (might have been Kyle Hill or Joe Scott episode, too, I forget)
@@MrNote-lz7lh More like degenerating. Populations are rising against its leaders around the world in growing numbers and being violently put down. What is counting as science is untested killing medicines that don't work as advertised and chemical castrations.
An interesting idea, but if the universe is infinite, then so is science! We are already at statement #3. Just look how much effort it took to find the Higgs boson. The particle collider that made the discovery took decades to build and cost hundreds of millions.
Try answering the collatz conjecture. And questions like that become physics questions when you can find or imagine a physical system that works like that. Try understanding everything, good luck with your quest.
tbh im optimistic that we would just make Clarktech look like child's play in the future if we discover tips and tricks on the road. i mean if we already theorized something like an Alcubierre drive or how to transform the human body in any shape the user of it wants to... then i guess it will be possible one day to just surpass these barriers if we put enough effort. after all, isn't the first rule of warfare the one that goes like: "if you're not puting enough power on something, you're not doing it right. There isn't Overkill"?! XD
What would that even mean? Just because someone understands it all, the rules anyway, does not mean that all human beings know the rules let alone the consequences of the rules. There was a book series by Micheal Moorcock called Dancers at the End of Time where humanity had gone so far in technology they were immortal and could change their own form and everything around them to whatever they wanted. They spent their time enjoying recreating the past, inacurately, and throwing parties. They used energy on a staggering level. No one was in conflict with anyone else.
One problem with the idea that you may run out of science is Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows there is always some rule which is true and no able to be proven within a axiomatic system. In this context on option 3 is permitted in the basis of axiomatic systems. Technically free will *is* an illusion caused by the sheer chaos of our universe and frankly our brains reactive processing and retroactive justification is naturally hidden by how we perceive our world. In the case of biology its currently undergoing major revolution due to molecular biology improvements which discounts the claim that its largely the same as when Einstein was around. We have even found entire organs that go missed in humans.
Science can spawn engineering, but engineering can also spawn new science. As we are designing new technological systems, they are getting increasingly more complex until they spawn new emergent properties or behaviors that in turn need to be researched, combining the systems to a new layer of functioning and complexity that in turn needs to be researched as well. Biological evolution is doing that for billions of years and we are faster and much less coincidence-based than evolution, but our technological evolution that consists of cycles of research, development and reflection will probably still last a while. Maybe we will reach a point where expanding in size makes no sense or at least yields no profit, and we will instead expand into the smaller scales, making everything smaller and more efficient, including ourselves, until we hit the hard Planck limits of the quantum resolution of the universe. That would be a new tree of exploration and development that could give us a few more millenia of progress and curiosity. Maybe that would make us smaller than an ant but at least as intelligent as today, in turn freeing up massive capacities to do new research in the larger or growing scale.
I am reminded of the 1900 belief that 'science was complete' with Newton's Laws, Maxwell's Laws, Thermodynamics, Chemistry, and Evolution all 'well understood' ... Only a combinatorial explosion of possible configurations remained to be explored.
The premise here reminds me of the director of the US patent office who recommended closing the department because everything had already been invented…in the mid-1800’s.
One thing, every 20 or so years, there is a whole group of people that have the whole body of science as something that is new. There is a whole effort to refine existing class of science to deeper levels of precision.
This is a really cool one. You can get into all kind of interesting philosophical rabbit holes about the concept of completeness. Ideas of demarcation, consillience and commensurability underdetermination for how future. societies may address these debates.
I agree I feel like after science there would still be scientists but they’d be like science artists or science artificers, making incredible things using science or to visually display some rule(s) of the universe, it’s gonna be great
Personally, I kinda suspect that, once we become intelligent enough to model the entirety of creation and predict everything, there will be nothing left to know/explore and hence the ultimate great filter.
The type of post science civilization I found the less likely, is the one that we collectively decide to not go further because this obviously dangerous. That because it has to be assumed we got one homogeneous civilization, sharing the same ideas and no entities competing with one another for whatever reason, even having passed post scarcity.(Or unlikely as long we are the same psychologically speaking.)
Heat death is inevitable; when death is certain, it is foolish to stagnate out of fear of the inevitable coming sooner. Pursue the heights of experience.
@@EgoEroTergum yea sure, but I was going for something of the line "nuclear annihilation" at galactic scale (or any equivalent to us), than anything philosophical.
I could see science becoming complete but engineering will go on forever. Figuring out how to build something will just become creative thinking using the developed science.
24:36 Most new solutions are an application of what we already know, combined into a form that allows something new to happen. True new discoveries are far between.
It's 1 thing to discover the laws of science, but that doesn't account for the potential applications of that science. Innovation often comes about after someone has an idea to apply 1 or more known things in ways that nobody else has before.
An end to discovery? How would you know that you know everything there is to know? There might be something left to discover. What happens if you find a new problem, or an unseen application? The emergence of existential apathy or ennui, however, on the presumption that there isn't anything more worth discovering could be a problem no one is trying to solve. Think of Arthur C. Clarke's "City at the Edge of Forever" for an example.
I imagine there's probably some threshold where if you go n number of years without a new discovery and every phenomenon you encounter in the universe is explainable by known science, even if from an objective viewpoint there was something we wouldn't discover for many generations or flat-out would not be capable of encountering for some reason, we would think we were post science and probably not without decent reason to think so. I like to imagine even at that point there would still be a faction devoted to doing endless replicaton studies, _just in case._
I am actually VERY worried about a near Slaneshi existence in the near-ish term as VR becomes more sophisticated. While I don't think it will bleed into real world, I think there may be serious addiction traps in that sort of thing. The impact that could have over the youth could be dramatic and catastrophic as well. If parents continue to relax moderation standards for children it could get pretty gnarly in VR space.
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“Completing” technology would be an an exponentially bigger task than completing science.
Complete science is knowing everything about everything that actually exists. Complete technology would be knowing all the ways to arrange the things that exist into things that COULD exist.
One is analogous to knowing all 52 cards in the deck, the other to knowing all 52! (8x10^67) ways to arrange the deck.
I just came here to make almost this exact comment! In fact, just in the realm of possible conventional (Von Neumann) computer programs, we already know that there are more possible computer programs than we could possibly explore.
There might be so much technology possible that universe might be too small to even hold all the information pertaining to technology.
I'm sure our Gender Scientists won't stop at 26 designations. You could say there are an infinite number of potential orientations to be discovered.
Thinking that they reached the end of fundamental research is a bit of an idiosyncrasy of theoretical physicists (and Isaac is one at heart ), let's remember when, at the end of 1800s, they were sure their job was soon to be over, once a couple of pernicious problems got solved.
Of course, the remaining issues were black body spectra and reconciliating Maxwell's electromagnetism with Newtonian mechanics, but clearly it was going to be some small work.
That's the thing. I am in the belief that we have all the science we need currently to look like earth in 25th c it just needs engineering properly
In the late 1800 it was known that Physics was a settled discipline and the only thing remaining was to refine a measure some things. Then some people like Einstein, Dirac and Fermi said " I have this idea... "
Yeah, there remained only tiny little details to solve like the UV catastrophy, which led to ... quantum physic.
When those scientists had developed their research into modern urban development, we are enjoying rapid growth of globalization.
Now we need more people to space to reach galactic civilization.
One barrier to the "completion" of science is the locality of data. Everything might be known, but it could never be known by *everyone* simultaneously, whether you are considering people or entire civilizations. As the near-infinite mountain of mixed junk and valid information grows, it may often be more efficient to independently re-discover something locally than to sort through it to learn what someone else previously discovered
I was going to comment something along those lines. I can easily imagine a future in which people take up science, even though there’s nothing new to be discovered, so that they can be reasonably certain in their knowledge and well-defended against nonsense. I have the germ of a good analogy in my head, but I just had an annoyingly busy evening at work and am frustrated and tired and drinking right now so I might come back to this thread later when my thoughts are in order.
What if in the future all
knowledge is in some database or distributed on the internet and whenever your brain tries to think of a fact or thinks of something that might be relevant to a fact, a chip in the brain communicates with the database or queries the internet and the facts are recalled by the individual. Like an automatic google search directly to the brain.
@@Gideonrex1 who will decide the validity?
@@Gideonrex1 who will decide the validity?
@@princehamza890 it’s a hypothetical scenario millions of years in the future where pretty much all scientific knowledge is known. The question was assuming you have all knowledge, how do you get around the localization of that knowledge.
I remember when Civ 6 first came out "Social Media" was the pinnacle of science-- the end of progress. The goal of science. How depressing. After the patch giant death robots became the new future tech, which is better somehow.
underrated comment
Having both Civ V and Civ VI I found I like Civ V better. Civ VI has too much busywork.
Man thats grim "Future Science" was the end of Civ 1 - you just put points into that.. I just read your comment after making my own Civ 1 based one.. Social Media, dude.. I wasn't sure how it went in post Civ 1 games.. Dark shit. Whats the peak in 2. 3, 4, 5?
I personally like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri end tech, "transcendent thought".
While figuring out all of the physical laws is possible, understanding something like chemistry or biology from them is like saying “now that we know the basic axioms, it shouldn’t be long until all of math is discovered”
Reminds me of how in vanilla Stellaris, eventually you just have repeatables and no new technologies. I wonder if the Fallen Empires fell because they are essentially in post-science states.
hmmmmm that might apply if the Universe actually was a computer game. But that seems more than merely unlikely.
It's always good to remember that narratives created for entertainment mediums are just that ...... Entertainments. Not blueprints to any actual reality.
(pls don't come back with crap about simulation hypothesis)
@@Blowfeld20k I'm not really referencing it as a real life example. I'm referencing it because Isaac plays Stellaris.
@@pll3827 KK m8 :D
It's interesting to find that the IRL tech tree has an end too.
And uses its music sometimes!
In the Foundation series, there was a self described "Archeologists" who found the concept of actual fieldwork crazy. His version was "Reading all the past and present papers and then publishing a paper on his opinion about them."
The "Gentleman Philosopher" and "Gentleman Scientist" was valid when there was more to discover and the barrier for discovery was lower, and likely will become more valid as we have more resources available for each person.
When each person can do more or less whatever they want, it makes it much more likely that you will get people who dabble with jamming Theory X and Theory Y together to keep themselves busy and entertained.
@@SilverMKI I feel like that's where I fit. I'm not a scientist, I'm a science enthusiast. I might know some weird shit offhand, but my autistic knowledge is no match for modern scientific rigor.
I’m not certain if it was in “Foundation”, or possibly some other science fiction that I read (about 40 or more years ago)…
But I recall something about someone “discovering” a wild and crazy “new” way of doing arithmetic.
He developed a (never before seen) system, wherein you could write numbers on a piece of paper, then perform various functions (multiply, divide, add, subtract) to derive a solution to the problem.
To the disbelief of all who he told about this…. He “claimed” that it would work every time.
Of course, they all called him crazy…. Because everyone knows that the only reliable way to do arithmetic…. Is with a computer 😯
@@bobinthewest8559 It was in a short story by Asimov, 'The Feeling of Power'.
@@lightbearer313 …
Thank you.
I had a strong feeling it was something of Asimov’s, just not sure specifically.
Probably high time to re-read some of the greats 😊
15:15 University of Mordor (Est. 2666)
Motto: "Simply Walk in"
In this subject, I love the Panvirt in Orion’s Arm, most of whom have essentially withdrawn from real space to explore abstract mathematical spaces within vast matryoshka brains.
"WE ARE EXPLORERS IN FAR REACHES OF EXPERIENCE." Comes to mind.
Look at the views to likes ratio, youtube is hiding the real results.
Today on No More Science Just Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Another successful Ar-Thursday post!
Also, happy birthday a couple days ago, Isaac. Thank you for the awesome content over the years.
Oh I have always wondered how would a highly technological society look like after discovering all the science , this is gonna be a good one .
Sci-fi has talked about it, but every author has their own idea of what that might look like.
I prefer body natural. Med tech allowing us to live long healthy lives. Tons of tech in clothing, glasses. Automation taking care of all our menial tasks.
they would be dead
Philosophers would make history's most unexpected comeback. ;)
As a modal realist I doubt this will ever be an issue. Even if some advanced future civilization does manage to discover every last secret of this reality there's likely an infinite number of alternative realities to be explored that operate on wildly different physical and metaphysical principles. And even if those alternative realities prove to be physically inaccessible from this reality they could still be explored both conceptually and experientially in virtual space. The beauty of existence is that there is literally no end of wonder for us to wander through.
I have watched each and every one of your videos at least 5 times some even more than that! Not only is your voice soothing but I love the knowledge I gain each time I watch the video I catch something I previously missed. Please don’t stop putting out videos I would be so incredibly sad if this channel stopped ❤
In theory, every PhD has contributed something to their field of study in order to get that PhD. Most people I know with PhDs have contributed a very real, but thin sliver of knowledge to their field. I can imagine PhD candidates continually measuring the speed of light to greater precision or examining the energy of the OH bond in some specific alcohol.
Kepler discovered that planets have elliptical orbits when he was trying to support the circular orbits of Copernicus, which was a simplification of Ptolemaic orbits, using Tycho Brahe's astronomical data, which was better data than previous astronomers had made. Given that such monumental discoveries can be made by building on such incremental developments, I could only believe in the end of science if you first dried up the supply of PhD candidates.
I've read stories of people who cannot find any new area/unknown mystery for them to research for their PhD.
@@donaldcarey114 That says more about who should be PhD candidates. Either they lack creativity or they are unwilling to settle for a topic that's not a huge impact, or alternatively they're interests are extremely narrow in a sub sub sub field where there isn't a whole lot happening very fast.
@@rickwrites2612 You learn more and more about less and less until you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.
Love it when folks mention A Canticle for Leibowitz. That was such a good book.
Great episode, love your work. My only commentary might be that you've perhaps understated the desire for infamy or legacy as a motivator to be the first to discover what every human will forever be taught going forward. Name recognition is as much a motivation for science as is suffering or existential crisis.
I think that's true but a desire for a good reputation or legacy would, I think, tend shift folks to whatever was showing popularity at the time and which also offers max return for minimum personal effort, science tends to require a lot of effort to get famous with.
Haven't been listening to your videos lately, just never find the right time to relax but still pay full attention, even watching this episode I was waiting for it to end the whole time with things I should be doing, but I still I couldn't pause it, I had to sit here doing "nothing" in order to finish the episode, that's how much I liked it, as I usually do.
I look forward to the time I can catch up with all the episodes I missed past few months and it makes me happy there's so many for me to enjoy.
Was watching the impostors and doppelgängers episode and was thinking about how much you talk about how advanced civilizations will always steam roll less advanced ones. But history shows that that doesn’t always happen. You should make an episode on guerrilla warfare and the options weaker opponents have in space, both for aliens on a galactic scale and “small” civil conflicts in solar systems/dyson swarms. You did touch on this a bit recently in the alien refugees video it might be something interesting to talk about.
A more advanced civilization vs a less advanced civilization would be between Bambi and Godzilla. With humanity, even 100 years of progress we would absolutely decimate the humanity of 1922. Imagine the difference on galactic timescales of millions, or even billions of years.
@@harrisonb9911 You might be surprised how many times stone aged peoples defeated industrial societies. They don't usually win in the long run but they could come to negotiated settlements and sometimes could hold out long enough for other more advanced societies to come to their aid.
I get the impression that not everyone understands the difference between scientific progress, and technological advancement.
Thanks Issac, I wait for your content every week ❤ and I listen to your playlists while I sleep using my hands free bluetooth, thanks for helping me to brainwash myself into intelligence.
What a time it will be when this channel becomes just, Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Another wonderful and informative episode Isaac.
Or, just “science with Isaac Arthur” because none of it’s future any more
Hello from a fellow Ohioan! By far my favorite science related channel. You do such a great job of covering various topics, many times from angles I never thought of and the humorous bits are good too. Two thumbs up 👍👍
For many technologies, there's likely a "good enough" point. There's going to be a prodigious amount of engineering tweaks before we get there I'm betting.
I mean, the greek had that with slavery. (they considered the stomach engine as a toy who would be useless as a source of labor since slavery was just so convenient)
Dude i LOVE your videos. You are so under-rated and deserve so much more subs. The topics you talk about are not talked about ANYWHERE else i can find in the world.....and the topics are amazing. Techno Barbarians! amazing, lol.
Looking to the future far beyond where anyone has looked before, it's amazing to think how civilisation might evolve.
I dunno, we still use luminous aether as a filter in gravitational equations. We just call it dark matter now. I don't think we know until we know, and even if that happens we are going to "know" several times before we slay that last luminous aether.
We haven't even scratched the surface.
It's the vacuum energy. Nothingness is a concept like zero. Neither exist, meaning the nothingness must be something.
A very simplistic way to think of it is the vacuum is space-time, or dimensionality itself. Gravity being it's localized energy density.
Dark Matter explains the available evidence
Luminous aether, if realistically used, would just be spacetime. Aether inolves biases to which the nearest equivalence would be gravity wells and gravitational/spacetime waves (eg LIGO detection. Saying these are equivalent is akin to saying Einstein's cosmological constant is the same as dark energy.
In vacuum space model, what's the gravitational equations between the luminous aether and moving aether?
Plus, does luminous aether affected by hyperspace mess?
I haven't watched more than the first few minutes, and we'll see how this ages but honestly this is my solution to the concept: while we might run out of new questions to ask... it does not mean we will stop asking the old questions every time we go someplace new.
We are already doing that today, and more science would only make this more common
Why? 😜
Grandpa?
Did NOT expect this to turn into a lesson about drukharii. I'm also NOT saying it's a bad thing.
Edit: I just wanted to say one of my favorite things about all of your content is I can feel your love of puzzles and following your curiosity because I'm that exact same way. Thank you for the great content as always, I hope many other people are inspired to create the better futures you mention on here for humanity and the planets sake.
As long as a species has individual members who seek use mind altering substances, there is always new things to discover. Epiphanies happen on drugs all the time, people have accidents that change our understanding of things, people think "I wonder if drinking/eating/smoking that will get me high" about random substances if they're bored enough, and I think we all know someone at some point who said "you what would be cool..." after ingesting some substances which could have led all sorts of ways from debate to experiments ending in medical discoveries or knowing our own limitations.
I could see an end to science, but that would potentially be the most boring thing ever because then creativity is likely gone. And I too fear a Dystopia where causing suffering as a lifestyle or everyone being an addict as a potential problem of those types of post science civilizations just getting bored. I've always been an optimist with post scarcity civilizations and I'd like to believe many people would find new crafts or hobbies to learn to physically master if given free reign of their lives because their basic needs are all provided them. And yes you'd have people creating the same type, maybe even the same model of craftsmanship, but it bares the marks of that craftsman and it wouldn't ever be exactly identical especially with wood or stone work with different grains or knots making their own unique patterns.
Recreational drugs often leave people feeling they have had an insight. Rarely is it an insight that is empirically tested and found true, and insightful by others. I suspect a lot of this phenomena may involve the drugs making any old idea seem insightful.
Imagine a definitive neurophycology paper, that told you, given any chemical, if it will get you high. There is a piece of software that calculates this from the chemical name. All the chemicals found in nature have already had this computed, and it is standard practice to compute it whenever synthesizing anything new. (Because you need a license to synthesize psychedelics, say)
Suppose science is done. People still make art. People still design elaborate and somewhat pointless technological artifacts. A bunch of people put a lot of work into a machine that turned frozen bread into frozen toast without defrosting it. People still make all sorts of random "creative" techy things, like realistic robot centaurs. Some people are trying to make a computer out of pulies and string. You know, the sort of random stuff smart people go "wouldn't it be cool to..."
Remember just because your civilization has done everything, doesn’t mean you have
@@donaldhobson8873 you're possibly misunderstanding my point with recreational drugs, I'm not saying insight as just other ways of looking at problems that lead to questions or experiments.(maybe just different terms for the same concept) A question brings experiments to see what happens, which leads to experiments to see of its repeatable, which leads to further experiments. Also what I call "happy accidents" like discovering penicillin, or discovering targeted radiation can work as a treatment against cancer, someone just made a mistake but because something unexpected happened you see if you can replicate it.
I get the need for tinkering, but if you're creating something unique that hasn't been done before then that's actually in a way a scientific discovery. It's curiosity leading to experimentation, leading to repeatable and verifiable results, or the scientific method in a nutshell. So if science is all figured out, then likely all creative things have been done too, so you're left with experiences.
@@cosmictreason2242 I don't disagree with that, but most of it could be achieved in a couple decades or at worst a few centuries and at that point we'd likely have moved onto near ageless types of existence. So you'd live forever, and likely wouldn't be having children at that point if no one ever dies, so you would eventually run out of everything to do at some point. Then what is the purpose of life? Helping other civilizations grow, prevent them from offing themselves with other filters? Maybe you set up civilizations and see what happens through experimentation, but we assumed science is all known so it seems cruel to have Guinea pigs...
@@jackl4laughs "So if science is all figured out, then likely all creative things have been done too, so you're left with experiences." Suppose a universe so vast that all possible paintings have been painted. You can still just go and paint something. So what if someone you have never interacted with painted something almost identical a billion lightyears away.
As incredible as your channel is, how you don't have millions of subscribers is an indictment on the attention span and curiosity of society.
I think it takes a certain kind of person to get really into Isaac's stuff
After a woefully long time at the sub 400K category, the subscriber count increase has been accelerating in the last year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the channel in the millions this time next year, after all the channel is increasingly getting referenced outside YT now.
That's a very Frank a snobbish thing to
sa.........oh look, a bird.
Seriously though, Isaac's channel is a pure gem amidst the prevalent and pedestrian muck on RUclips. There are some good content creators, but unfortunately, they're the exception and not the rule.
Idk, 705k seems pretty good to me! 😉
Probably :) Though there are some excellent channels that do the long TV episode-length deep-dives and are well over a million subs
The only runner up for a post - science civilization, would be a Type 3 or Type 4 Kardeshev Civ. That reminds me Isac, did you ever read a short sci-fi novel from the early 1970's called "The Flying Sorcerers" by David Gerrold and Larry Niven? that touches upon the theme of this episode on science advancement. Good book.
Yes, it taught me the meaning of mauve in a fashion that I cannot forget. The characters were take-offs of various Science Fiction Writers of America members, including Purple-Gray (as a mauve).
Nerds
"And Isaac Arthur wept, for there were no more technologies to discover"
I bet Isaac Arthur would still have new episodes even if we ran out of science.
@@catdogfishdogcats in case you didn’t know, it’s a reference to Alexander the Great
SFIA. my jam. after all these years, comfort food for the mind
Nice episode concept , can't wait to finish it
Interesting. I always regret that I was born too late to explore the world, and too early to explore the stars. But maybe someone in the future will look back nostalgically at our time, when tech was still progressing, and science was full of unknowns.
I was just thinking about this and then Isaac posts a video about it. Isaac is a mind reader confirmed.
I know a world building spec evo project where humanity advanced for 43 million years they hit a hard wall in advancment managed to create alcubierre warp bubbles but never schived ftl because in that universe their is no way to propell the bubbles but they still have space ships that go pretty fast 95% speed of light to be exact some members of that humanity is even dyson swarms at this point most are transhuman their is billions of species that branched of from homo sapiens
In the year 3000 I am hopeful that i will be watching SFIA on Thursday.
This reminds me of the episode of Futurama where Professor Farnsworth figures out every single bit of science.
This thought has plagued my during all my 5 years of college. Not finding an answer, I was terribly worried that scientists are working at their demise, bringing forward their ultimate uselessness. Thanks to your channel, I have finally found all the answers I needed AND resumed pursuing becoming a scientist. Thank you!
I think that almost all Isaac Arthur videos are what a post-science civilization would look like. As we limit ourselves to what is possible within known science.
Happy belated birthday Isaac Arthur, you are now 6*9 years old. Yes science still has a long way to go considering what we started from.
"In conclusion, we have answered all relevant questions in this field, and no further research is needed"
This was one aspect of the Utopia of The Culture that I found depressing. A universe where no new science can be found is like one where no new music can be heard.
“Things like free will and porpoise” I know what he said but my brain couldn’t not stare at this echoing in my thoughts. 21:04
After you solved all science
- the final thing was to solve the message hidden deep within vibrations of dark matter, after we did this is the message that we discovered
- congratulations, tutorial level finished. Moving on to the level 1.
I love looking your channel back up just in the nick of time to see a new one!
I fear a post-Isaac future, where there are no more topics to be covered. No new videos to be made.
I don't think science can be completed because there will always be something beyond the limits of our understanding. Questions like what lies beyond our Universe or is there some meaningful knowledge beyond Planck's units will probably take hundreds if not thousands of years to answer and it will just lead us to some completely new boundaries that we will have to surpass once again.
Even if we could determine that there is something beyond this universe, it being possible to run experiments (which would be just different rearranging of matter and energy in this universe) is another matter entirely.
If you hit the limit of what you can run experiments on, then you've reached the limit of what you can ask falsifiable questions about, and thus reached the limit of science even if there are still things you know you don't know.
I cant think of a single reason why anyone would do a crossword to wake up their brain in the morning when they could watch SFIA instead
every time you discover answers, you also discover questions. there will always be more to knowledge to uncover.
We may find that the post-science age begins with "Trust the Science", and "I am the science"
When you are using words like Trust and Believe you are talking religion, not science. Science doesn't beg for trust, it just proves its point and walks away.
@@GOPGonzo Tell that to the science believers and trusters. Religion doesn't ever need to prove its point because it always is.
The greatness of science has always been that you don't have to trust the science.
@@glensmith491 Now you have to trust the science or you are some dangerous radical.
I don't think science would ever end but 3 is what is likely in my head to happen, Judging by most other people I am not sure if they will understand that much new science. So if it happens if could turn into a niche hobby for few people.
I think my most likely prediction in regards to the end of science topic is that it eventually it would take as long as the Roman Empire has existed to make a breakthrough unlike today which can take decades at the longest
Note: the Roman Empire lasted 1480 years
That’s the equivalent of a making a breakthrough in field of research that was started in 542
I totally wasn't expecting the 40k twist in the speculation. I appreciate it.
Lol, loved the clip of the dude with the head gear on staring at a computer motherboard like it's some futuristic near incomprehensible tech!
Great video! Thank you for making it
Honestly our biggest barrier is the limits of our minds. Personally I think we hit that limit sometime in the 80s or 90s. Thankfully computers have stepped in and pushed us forward.
But also backwards. Lots of software is eating so much resources without needing to. See the memes/jokes about Chrome and RAM as an example.
Optimisation has been thrown out the window for years now. Instead more power is thrown at the problem because it seems easier.
A post science civilization feels like what happened to the Q Conitnuum of Star Trek, where the Q have effectively experienced everything and done everything and experience and done everything so many times that they have grown bored of everything, of course for them it went beyond scientific knowledge and was all possible experiences. If we become immortal, the value is that things don't end you just move on to the next thing, but if we ever reach that point where everything has been done then things have ended. Complete immortality therefore would require a never-ending supply of new things to experience or learn or do.
A very interesting topic, thorough in presentation, and thought provoking video as always.
I am looking forward to your upcoming episodes, especially the Grabby Aliens (which I have seen a lot of people talk about lately).
If you are ever looking for more topics to consider, some I would suggest are:
* Returning to some old topics with a new spin or update, like life extension or anti-aging or brain-computer interfaces and VR, etc...
* Looking at some of the new future tech that we may see in the short-term (a matter a just a few years or decades)
* AI drug discovery and AI scientists and AI engineers and inventors/innovators
* Robotic social and sexual relationships with humans or the non-human or semi-human descendants of today's humans
A temporary solution is to forget non-critical memories that is associated with entertainment, with it you can enjoy things repeatedly, although it might lead to some existential crisis lol,
If humans are immortal now, it would actually be kinda alright, as human memories are like what i mention, not fully precise and permanent
Of course the true solution is new creation, "they've grown bored of their finite multiverse, so they made it infinite" < paraphrased from downstreamers,
To have an immortal is to be a civilization worthy of an immortal :3
I can image a state of affairs where the universe is fully understood, fundamentally -- but where you could still spend a very long time working to understand large-scale, complex dynamic systems.
And -- related to the previous point -- I think advancements in engineering could go on long, long after a civilization is no longer making much progress in fundamental science. Science and engineering shouldn't be _too_ tightly coupled. In other words, 1 million-year-old *Civilization X* and 100 million-year-old *Civilization Y* might have the same level of fundamental scientific understanding, but I believe that *Civilization Y* could be wildly far ahead of *Civ X* in technological capability and achievement.
imagine an alchemical sort of science fiction story set during the time of isaac newton, in which light was just a particle and not a wave, gravity was a force, there was no quantum mechanics, no nuclear fusion, certain objects such as stars just emitted heat infinitely depending on their mass, and the speed of light was infinite. insanely simple totally mechanical universe with no mind bending nonsense going on. space ships operated on the principle of using vacuum balloons, which could float into space on the aether that surrounds everything in the spaces between the planets.
I don't think we'll ever run out of science. There seem to be an infinite number of patterns to discover just in the set of natural numbers. If you've been following Numberphile for the last decade you'll know exactly what I mean. Prime numbers, perfect numbers, triangle numbers, square numbers, Pythagorean triplets, the list goes on and on. And that's just the most basic math we can do.
And pray tell what will you do with proper research mathematicians once someone invents a generalized mathematical computer that can synthesize any and every optimal solution for every problem you can imagine?
I'm not being facetious here either, it's the most probable "future tech" we are likely to invent, far before we get AGI or widespread safe fusion even, in the form of self-retraining quantum neural nets.
@@RiversJ That's a different story. I said we'd never run out of math, not job security for mathematicians 😂
Another limit might be how much knowledge a human brain can process in a lifetime.
On the other hand, an artilect that thinks a million times faster than a human might hit an 'insufficient data' state very quickly and have to wait while data gathering equipment is built and gathers sufficient data ... to overcome the 'insufficient data' hurdle.
Once the artilect has learned everything that (currently) can be known, asking it a question might trigger the response: 'You lack the necessary capacity.'
The content is always amazing. It really gets you thinking about what could be.
It may be possible to run out of learnable information. Due to the expansion of the Universe, there are galaxies that recede so fast that, while we once could see them, we no longer can. Eventually, the information that has receded may be vital to decide questions previously askable. When the visible Universe has shrunk to the Local Group of galaxies, any questions larger than that will be undecideable.
Thank you SFIA! I remember at least discussing this in an old episode. Named something like "The Last Technology" or "Ascension Science" or similar. Such as the Ancients in Stargate. I have always been fascinated by the idea. (might have been Kyle Hill or Joe Scott episode, too, I forget)
Science as the act of observation and measurement can never be complete because there is more to the universe than we can observe and measure.
This "post science" world you talk about is very easy to imagine. (*gestures vaguely at everything around us lately*)
I sure someone 100 years ago has said the same.
You are insane. We are at the early stages of scientific discovery and are rapidly advancing.
@@MrNote-lz7lh More like degenerating. Populations are rising against its leaders around the world in growing numbers and being violently put down. What is counting as science is untested killing medicines that don't work as advertised and chemical castrations.
An interesting idea, but if the universe is infinite, then so is science!
We are already at statement #3. Just look how much effort it took to find the Higgs boson. The particle collider that made the discovery took decades to build and cost hundreds of millions.
This is particularly interesting in the context of Marvel's Asgardians.
Has Isaac done a "future of education" video? I think that would interesting.
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
Try answering the collatz conjecture.
And questions like that become physics questions when you can find or imagine a physical system that works like that.
Try understanding everything, good luck with your quest.
great job
tbh im optimistic that we would just make Clarktech look like child's play in the future if we discover tips and tricks on the road. i mean if we already theorized something like an Alcubierre drive or how to transform the human body in any shape the user of it wants to... then i guess it will be possible one day to just surpass these barriers if we put enough effort.
after all, isn't the first rule of warfare the one that goes like: "if you're not puting enough power on something, you're not doing it right. There isn't Overkill"?! XD
What would that even mean? Just because someone understands it all, the rules anyway, does not mean that all human beings know the rules let alone the consequences of the rules. There was a book series by Micheal Moorcock called Dancers at the End of Time where humanity had gone so far in technology they were immortal and could change their own form and everything around them to whatever they wanted. They spent their time enjoying recreating the past, inacurately, and throwing parties. They used energy on a staggering level. No one was in conflict with anyone else.
God i love this channel …it answers questions i have when i have my anxiety universe questions
I'm myself a biologist and futurist, I'm glad I found this channel ✌🏻
Thanks to Isaac Arthur I got to watch this on my 67th birthday and in reflection I realize that being 66 means I've slept 22 years of it away...
One problem with the idea that you may run out of science is Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows there is always some rule which is true and no able to be proven within a axiomatic system. In this context on option 3 is permitted in the basis of axiomatic systems.
Technically free will *is* an illusion caused by the sheer chaos of our universe and frankly our brains reactive processing and retroactive justification is naturally hidden by how we perceive our world.
In the case of biology its currently undergoing major revolution due to molecular biology improvements which discounts the claim that its largely the same as when Einstein was around. We have even found entire organs that go missed in humans.
Science can spawn engineering, but engineering can also spawn new science. As we are designing new technological systems, they are getting increasingly more complex until they spawn new emergent properties or behaviors that in turn need to be researched, combining the systems to a new layer of functioning and complexity that in turn needs to be researched as well. Biological evolution is doing that for billions of years and we are faster and much less coincidence-based than evolution, but our technological evolution that consists of cycles of research, development and reflection will probably still last a while.
Maybe we will reach a point where expanding in size makes no sense or at least yields no profit, and we will instead expand into the smaller scales, making everything smaller and more efficient, including ourselves, until we hit the hard Planck limits of the quantum resolution of the universe. That would be a new tree of exploration and development that could give us a few more millenia of progress and curiosity. Maybe that would make us smaller than an ant but at least as intelligent as today, in turn freeing up massive capacities to do new research in the larger or growing scale.
I am reminded of the 1900 belief that 'science was complete' with Newton's Laws, Maxwell's Laws, Thermodynamics, Chemistry, and Evolution all 'well understood' ... Only a combinatorial explosion of possible configurations remained to be explored.
I remember reading a book that I borrowed from my University's library in the early 2000's and it was called "The end of science" :-)
The premise here reminds me of the director of the US patent office who recommended closing the department because everything had already been invented…in the mid-1800’s.
"Check yourself before you wreck yourself" and "haters gonna rotate."
Science will not end with a whimper, but with a BANG.
One thing, every 20 or so years, there is a whole group of people that have the whole body of science as something that is new. There is a whole effort to refine existing class of science to deeper levels of precision.
This is a really cool one.
You can get into all kind of interesting philosophical rabbit holes about the concept of completeness. Ideas of demarcation, consillience and commensurability underdetermination for how future. societies may address these debates.
Sometimes it seems we are in a ‘science denial civilization’.
This video gave me a little hope in today's world. We are coming to the end of Banned Books Week here in the US today.
I agree I feel like after science there would still be scientists but they’d be like science artists or science artificers, making incredible things using science or to visually display some rule(s) of the universe, it’s gonna be great
Personally, I kinda suspect that, once we become intelligent enough to model the entirety of creation and predict everything, there will be nothing left to know/explore and hence the ultimate great filter.
The type of post science civilization I found the less likely, is the one that we collectively decide to not go further because this obviously dangerous. That because it has to be assumed we got one homogeneous civilization, sharing the same ideas and no entities competing with one another for whatever reason, even having passed post scarcity.(Or unlikely as long we are the same psychologically speaking.)
Heat death is inevitable; when death is certain, it is foolish to stagnate out of fear of the inevitable coming sooner. Pursue the heights of experience.
@@EgoEroTergum yea sure, but I was going for something of the line "nuclear annihilation" at galactic scale (or any equivalent to us), than anything philosophical.
This episode describes the Empire of Mankind
I could see science becoming complete but engineering will go on forever. Figuring out how to build something will just become creative thinking using the developed science.
24:36 Most new solutions are an application of what we already know, combined
into a form that allows something new to happen. True new discoveries are far between.
Dark age of technology humans see even literal magics as real science instead of pseudoscience
"As less important questions remain. . ."
*one hundred cats, each with a piece of toast on its back butter-side up, mill about in the lab. . .*
Post-science society: "Pre-Eye of Terror Eldar is an option" was not what I expected to hear on this channel.
It's 1 thing to discover the laws of science, but that doesn't account for the potential applications of that science. Innovation often comes about after someone has an idea to apply 1 or more known things in ways that nobody else has before.
Does this include all variations of physical laws?
An end to discovery? How would you know that you know everything there is to know? There might be something left to discover. What happens if you find a new problem, or an unseen application? The emergence of existential apathy or ennui, however, on the presumption that there isn't anything more worth discovering could be a problem no one is trying to solve.
Think of Arthur C. Clarke's "City at the Edge of Forever" for an example.
I imagine there's probably some threshold where if you go n number of years without a new discovery and every phenomenon you encounter in the universe is explainable by known science, even if from an objective viewpoint there was something we wouldn't discover for many generations or flat-out would not be capable of encountering for some reason, we would think we were post science and probably not without decent reason to think so. I like to imagine even at that point there would still be a faction devoted to doing endless replicaton studies, _just in case._
I am actually VERY worried about a near Slaneshi existence in the near-ish term as VR becomes more sophisticated. While I don't think it will bleed into real world, I think there may be serious addiction traps in that sort of thing. The impact that could have over the youth could be dramatic and catastrophic as well. If parents continue to relax moderation standards for children it could get pretty gnarly in VR space.
Would you rather have people acting out their darker/stranger impulses in Real Reality?
@@Vaeldarg you're completely missing my point
I think the universal nature of a constant direction towards entropy, knowledge IS infinite as long as we have not reached complete, perfect entropy