Dyson's eternal intelligence
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Dyson's eternal intelligence (or The Dyson Scenario) is a concept that states an intelligent being would be able to think an infinite number of thoughts in an open universe. As the universe cooled, the thoughts would be slower and slower, but there would still be an infinite number of them. The idea was published in a scientific paper by Freeman Dyson.
Two recent observations have presented problems for Dyson's scenario. The first is that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating rather than decelerating due to a positive cosmological constant, meaning any two regions of the universe will eventually become permanently separated from one another. The second is that there appears to be a lower bound for the temperature of a vacuum, meaning that the universe would not continue to cool indefinitely.
Also, many grand unification theories predict that protons are unstable, albeit with a very long half-life. Thus the material base for intelligence could eventually disappear (in which case another type of matter could possibly be utilized). No evidence for proton decay has yet been detected, however.
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