tar

studiot, 

you are right again, the water will sometimes run up the board, if capillary action is a possibility or if the board is being spun around on carnival ride or with a stiff wind blowing to force the water uphill...so not a sure thing, but still to the sure thing end of the spectrum, with the things that could make it not a sure thing, sure things themselves

pure random possibility, that acts like magic, like the possibility of Alexander the Great's Army marching out of your left breast pocket, need not have a probability assigned, because it is impossible.  Not improbable.  Impossible.  The army is dead and buried and your pocket too small.

Reality relies on itself to do the next thing.  That is, you need the current arrangement to evolve/modify/morph/move into the next arrangement.  A particle has to make the trip between A and B at less than or at the speed of light.  It cannot blink out of existence over there, and pop back into existence over here.  Once it has made the trip, its path between A and B cannot be longer than the distance light could have traveled the path.   That cuts down the possible arrangements that the universe can take in the next 10 minutes for instance.  A groknoid looking at cladking's cloud on planet Distant can not draw us a picture and fax it over, and have us know the shape in the next 10 minutes.

Regards,  TAR

well wait, there is information storage and transport and cloud engineering possible, so it is possible that the groknoid could have designed a cloud shape three years ago, sent us a fax and informed us that he would be creating the cloud today

12 hours ago, cladking said:

If your predictions are coming true then it's not because you are prescient or smart; it's because you're predicting easy things.  Try predicting the shape of a cloud on the nearest earth-like planet in 2051. 

Reality unfolds in exactly one way that has nothing to do with "error bands".  It does what it does against all odds. 

cladking,  

If a thing is easy to predict, then I would put that thing, still in the grey area, but toward the sure thing end of the spectrum.  If its hard to predict then you don't have enough information, or the thing has plenty of random aspects to it that are not controllable or repeatable in the exact same manner.  I like using the shape of a wisp of smoke in a nearly still room, instead of the cloud on a distant planet, because you can't see the cloud developing on the distant planet, while you can watch the wisp of smoke curl and stretch in the air. Just making a puff of air in the direction of the wisp causes some activity in the motion of the air, that is noticeable in the pattern and shape the wisp takes.  

Take the tree, falling in the woods, in terms of whether it makes a sound or not, if there is no one there to hear it.   Does the planet where you need to know the shape of the cloud, before it forms, have any inhabitants?   Is it important to know what shape and pattern every wisp of smoke has taken in the history of the world, what all the patterns were a minute ago, now and in a minute? Next year?    I am not sure, for point of focus consciousnesses such as us, that such prescience is at all helpful.   Not even possible actually, given the speed of light, and the number of brain cells we have, and the way our senses work, an7d we compare the world we see with the world we saw before, to  recognize a change.

Reality unfolds in exactly one way, but that is only in retrospect.  What comes next is what the universe is currently engaged in arranging.  The future has an unlimited number of ways to unfold, but that means exactly that the universe does not have only one way to unfold.  It does not unfold against all odds, but in the sense that there are too many permutations that branch off each   permutation to forecast which of many possible patterns the place will take,  but at each permutation possibilities are added and possibilities are subtracted.  But water will run down hill every time you pour it on a slanted board.  Predictable because there are plenty of things the universe does every time the same arrangement happens.  Repeating stuff.  From the orbit of electrons, to the orbit of the Earth. 

Regards, TAR

I threw out (recycled) a stack of yellow pad papers I had that had a brief note about every call I took on a third level technical hotline for 6 or seven years of my life. 

I used to say, on particularly stressful days, that in 100 years nobody will know or care, what happened here today.  Wisps of smoke, the shape of each mean something when they are happening, but keeping a record of the place is not required in order for the place to do the next thing it is going to do.  History never repeats itself exactly, but it often rhymes. 

studiot.

Don't mean to be argumentative. Just want to make sure that nobody is leaning all the way to accident, since I think the universe is a lot more dependable than that would allow.

Regards, TAR

cladking,

But it does not unfold in entirely unpredictable ways.  It unfolds within the error bands. Most of the time within two or three standard deviations.   Once in a while you get the black swan event, but after all it is still a swan.   It is not a grocktoid.

Regards, TAR

During our last deep recession it looked like stocks would fall to zero...  except they got so low people could not help but buy them, 60 dollar banks at 5 dollars and such.   The world, reality is something like game theory.   People always make their best move.   Reality always does the thing that fits, that works that responds to all the inputs.  Water always runs downhill and such.  There are sure things all over the place.  Sure the chaos in the stream of water at the top of the water slide can cause harmonic motions left and right that by the time the rider gets down the course he is thrown out of a course designed to never have a rider thrown out, but most riders...nearly all riders stay in the chute.  In the grey area between random occurrence and sure thing, where we spend all our time.

studiot,

So I imagine the limit state analysis on the nuking of NYC would have to include levels of operation of various statewide and countrywide infrastructure in the aftermath, combined with the critical or non-critical nature of the program you were working on.  But it seems to me that one could just as easily make your plan, assuming there will be no nuke, and play it by ear once something on that scale would actually happen.   Like if there was no internet, your programmers shouldn't be working on an internet based program to keep your copier fleet up and running and economical, they should be working with the civil defense authorities to get the internet back up.  But if the program you were working on was an early warning system for nuclear attack, then the priorities would be different and you probably should have a plan to shift the development to an unaffected, operational, team.

But the nuking of NYC would not be a result of a random chaotic happening, that could not be avoided.  It would be the result of letting somebody that wants to nuke NYC acquire the ability to do so...and such.   Not random.  More along the line of sure thing.  Like if we were to nuke China and Russia and Iran and North Korea on the same afternoon, it would not be a sure thing that tomorrow morning in New Jersey would happen on schedule in the way I expect it to....but to the thread title, the nuking of NYC is not a random thing like the decay of an element.   The failure of a bridge is not due to random occurrences, usually, but due to the steady degrading of the materials that hold it up.  That the materials will decay is a sure thing, and part of reality that can be reliably counted on.

Regards, TAR

And the possibilities before the nuke go off are different than the possibilities after.  It is like talking about whether there is life on another planet and calling people that see UFOs crazy, before there is a space ship on the White House lawn, or after.  After, everybody would instantly accept the existence of life on other planets, and start thinking about what they want, and are we stronger or weaker than they are, and is it in a best interest to fight or make concessions and such.   So the situation dictates the possibilities going forward.  My wife and I are planning to sell our house in NJ and move to Virginia.   What house we live in now does not need to be in a good school district or near employment.   The possibilities are the same, but what house we live in is partially dictated by who has to live in it and what my wife and I plan to do in it and who we plan to host from time to time and such.

Meaning that you can flip a coin a hundred times and it will always come up heads, or tails and once in a great while might come up an land on its edge, but it will never come up the Queen of Hearts, for that you need a deck of cards, (or a coin with a Queen of Hearts as the head,)   Reality provides a starting point, from which events can occur.  Life on Earth developed to fit the Earth.   Life on the surface breaths oxygen and is carbon based.  Life at the bottom of the sea near a volcanic vent is sulphur based.   The possibilities are somewhat framed by what already is established.

Regards, TAR

studiot,

And probability of, is a statement that requires there be a probability of not.   To this, the definition of failure of the bridge has to be defined.  If a rail falls over, has the bridge failed.  If a chunk of cements falls off the roof of the tunnel and crushes a car, but a train can still pass above, has the bridge failed?

In my brief, 2 year stint as a software tester, project management was a thing I studied, and risk analysis was one of the components.  Never was quite sure how one was supposed to  figure the nuclear destruction of New York City, into the development plan.

(such would have put the completion of the project rather far on the back burner)

Regards, TAR

Studiot,

So perhaps the relationship between random, chaotic behavior and sure thing is when a sequence, a cause and effect relationship is established because the component constituents are still present for another cycle to occur.  A crystal grows in a certain pattern, a certain shape, because the element is present and binds to its neighbor in a repeated fashion, not random but just the one way that works the best.  Two and two is four every time, it does not randomly add up to 5 every once in a while. Take the geometry of dense packing.   If items of a similar size collect in the same area,  they arrange themselves according to their neighbor.  Gas molecules fill a volume, liquid molecules fill their container and create a level surface, solid balls stack themselves in square and hexagonal patterns.  If you put a penny on the table and surround it with as many pennies as you can, with each of the new pennies touching the first, you cannot get more than six to touch (all pennies laying flat on the table), and when you have six surrounding the center one, all six touch their neighbors in the same equilateral triangle and a hexagonal pattern develops where you can build out around each new penny as if it was the first, so that each has six around it.   Not random.  Always a sure thing.   You can try it, I can try it, it always works the same, reality always fits with itself, it always "works" according to the same principles, the same rules the same laws of physics, and this creates the large grey area between random chaos and the Mandelbrot fractal nature of reality, where a pattern repeats on larger and larger scale, because it fits, because it works, because that is the arrangement that works out in a similar fashion every time, regardless of which penny you place next to which, in whatever random order or speed.

The bridge stands because the concrete and steel have been put together in a manner that satisfies the component molecules' need to arrange themselves any differently. A mountain stands because the component crystal structures are frozen in place, not anxious to change their pattern, their arrangement.  And the Earth keeps falling around the Sun, again and again, and this is a sure thing, not random, because the forces involved have fallen into a pattern, which has no current reason to vary in any random way.

Regards, TAR

Relationships for example are not random, they define themselves.  Many people have a mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and sister and brother and aunt and uncle and second cousin.   As soon as their is a child, there is a father...the relationships develop the same, even if the people involved don't know each other, or live in the same area.  Reality fits together and works out the same to where random occurrence falls into the same patterns because the relationships define a new entity which then also falls into a relationship with other entities on the same scale. 

5 hours ago, Lord Antares said:

I understand what you are saying but I don't see your point. I did agree that, for all intents and purposes of humans, things are random. I'm simply pointing out that randomness isn't an objective, exact ''thing'' which can be agreed upon. What may be random for humans might not be random at all for some possible alien beings. We do agree here.

I did say ''except for QM, arguably'' in my next post.

Lord Antares,

I am not in agreement, because of the isotropic principle.  Even another race similar to ours, but with better senses and memory and far advanced in technology and such would only be able to witness the place a photon at a time, same as we do.  That is they would have to be alive on a grander scale than us, to know what the universe is doing someplace where they are not, and I am not sure what that would look like, or be like.  Like if you were god and knew everything, what would that be like, just everything at once, there would be no distinction between things, no cause and effect, no sense of space, no sense of time...it would be sort of like unity, no self, because you would be everything.   Does not seem workable to me.  I don't believe in god, and have reasoned long ago against there being a race that evolved from the universe that would be better than the place, or capable of building a computer that would be able to compute the position and momentum of every quark.  How about the quarks you would need to operate the computer?  In a sense the universe is already making manifest every combination that it has so far tried, so recording this and playing it back makes no sense.  Would be redundant, and no creature, that evolved in the place, would be able to contain the whole shebang.   So no, there is not a race to which the universe would not be immense and long lived, way beyond their ability to witness it  all at once in any other manner than we witness it all at once, with close stuff reporting immediately and far away stuff reporting with a lag, and really far away stuff not able to report at all.

Regards, TAR

5 hours ago, studiot said:

So what happens after 100 years?

Do tell.

studiot,

It crumbles or breaks or gets torn down and replaced.  But it lasted very many electron orbits, as something a human is able to see every day in the same sure thing manner.

Regards, TAR

1 hour ago, cladking said:

A "google" is a tiny little number of virtually infinitesimal size comparted to the number of possible futures that apply to even a cubic meter of matter in  a few nanoseconds. 

The fact that the sun came up at 5:59 right on schedule hardly proves you were correct about anything at all. 

Everything affects everything else. 

cladking,

what I want to be correct about is that reality is a large grey area between random occurrence and reliable repeating sure things

which so far seems to be an unchallenged, unremarkable, agreed to claim

Regards, TAR

So if so many things are possible within that random cubic meter of matter, why does the railway bridge stay a railway bridge for 100 years?

26 minutes ago, Manticore said:

I think you must mean 'googol' not 'google'.

yeah 100 zeros

the laws of physic remain, while a google of combinations of entities make up our reality on a day to day basis

3 hours ago, Lord Antares said:

Exactly,  but my point is, randomness is an arbitrary term, given as a statistical probability measure for what we don't know. If we did know, nothing would be random to us, hence the nature of the universe cannot be random. Things CANNOT be unpredictable in a technical way (except for arguably QM, but will not go into that), because if they could, the laws of physics couldn't exist and the sole purpose of laws (to standardize and always measure a predictable result) would be defeated. Therefore, reality is not random. Do you agree?

Lord Antares,

Not exactly.  There is a twist in your logic where I veer.  When you say "if we did know" you are assuming a godlike stance where all the stuff coming in to the Earth, all the photons, all the cosmic rays, all the gravity waves, are already known.   My understanding of humans as point of focus entities and my understanding of the place as not having done yet what it is going to do next, forbids a human, and to my mind, every point in the universe, from experiencing the place all at once, except in the "old news" way we do experience it.  Therefore in my understanding of the place, everything is currently out of reach...until it gets here.  The star we see pulsing is pulsing now, but it is on its 1,000,000,000th pulse and we see its 9,999,456,983th pulse.  What its 9,999,456,999th pulse is going to look like, is mysterious to us, except in the fact that because we experienced and timed and measured 9,999,456,982 and it was similar to the prior pulse 9,999,456,981 and this looked a lot like how 9,999,456,983 is looking we can rightly predict that this particular star is going to have a pulse 9,999,456,984 that bears some resemblance to the prior pulse, and foretells how, sort of 9,999,456,985 is going to look.  So we cannot be god, and the universe gets to us exactly at the pace, the speed of light, the speed of comets, the speed of asteroids, the speed of solar wind, that it gets to us, and the getting to us is actually  an occurrence in an of itself, the photon gets focused on the back of our eye and rods and cones respond to its impulse, and we witness that part of the universe where years ago an electron fell into a lower orbit around its nucleus and emitted a photon....

So yes, if we knew the flight of every photon in the universe we could calculate what looking in any direction at anytime is going to look like...but we don't know, and the way the universe looks and acts, is BECAUSE it does things the way it does them, and things are separated by space and time in the exact manner that they are, which does not change much from moment to moment.   Everything changes constantly, but there are elements, big things, like the Earth and the Sun, that do not change much within a human lifetime, and it is our timescale that matters to us, and it is our position in time and space that matters to us, and it is the arrival of the rest of the place at our location that we witness.  

Regards, TAR

The laws of physics are partially put together based on the congruence we see, the match we see between what the universe did yesterday compared to what it is doing today.  The things that change we take as motion or growth or decay or whatever, the things that stay the same we consider invariant "rules" that the universe follows.   You walk in one direction on a   sphere and you wind up back where you started after traveling the circumference...Every time.   Not random.

there must be some warning signs for things like that

as there would be a sign if the cosmos were about to blow...

and anyway as far as we know most of the universe could have already blown...we would not know about what happened to a neighbor galaxy for a million years

Would we not have an inkling if the Sun was about to explode?

4 minutes ago, cladking said:

The sun exploding would take 8 1/2 minutes to wipe us all out.

Why would you believe there is no force, natural or otherwise, that could target the sun, the earth, or the entire cosmos.  What happens if you go back a hundred years and kill your grandfather?  Maybe there is no more universe. What if the "laws of physics" get tweaked by some means and all matter in the region flies apart? 

Nothing has ever been certain. Nature behaves no laws and this is just human hubris to imagine we can determine its limitations.  Even if it did behave laws it's painfully obvious that we don't know what these laws are.  We don't even know what keeps this section of the universe from just flying apart.  All events are "impossible" because the odds against them occurring are impossibly large numbers. 

Yes, the sun will most likely come up at 5:59 AM local time tomorrow but to say there's a 100% chance of it is to ignore the nature of reality. 

cladking,

The nature of reality is for it to be here tomorrow, regardless of what we think of it, or how intact the Earth might be or whether the Sun will be shining the same.  Something of the Earth will survive any occurrence, and the Sun cannot physically burn all its fuel by tomorrow.  Reality is pretty solid stuff.  Pretty far from random chance.

Regards, TAR

9 hours ago, Lord Antares said:

Obviously, reality isn't ''random'' because randomness isn't a real ''thing''. It is only applicable to an ignorant observer. For example, a coin might have a ~50% chance of landing on either side for your or me, but only because we don't know at which angle it was flipped, with which force, velocity etc. If this information was known to us, we would know how it would land with a probability of 1.

Same goes for the rest of the universe. Every reaction was caused by an opposite action which we may or may not be aware of, but it is present nevertheless. It may be random to us mere mortals, but it isn't ''actually'' ''random''.There is nothing mysterious there.

Lord Antares,

I get your point, but we don't have anything but ignorant observers to keep an eye on the place.

That given, everything is actually mysterious to us.

Regards, TAR

12 hours ago, cladking said:

It is neither random nor determined.  Each event is determined by preceding events which are never really predictable.  Every event has a virtually infinite number of possible outcomes.  The number is so large as to make its computation meaningless. 

A device might arrive while you're in the shadow of the planet tonight from a distant star system that will stop the earth's rotation, pulverize the planet, or merely turn off the sun.  An asteroid could interfere with your prediction.  There are likely  virtually infinite number of events that could make your prediction untrue.  If one of these transpires there will be a virtually infinite number of outcomes. 

Cladking,

I did not think about the device arriving, so you are right, I can't claim 100%, but I had thought about the asteroid, and we have been tracking all the big ones that would do significant damage to the planet, and there are none schedule to interfere between today and tomorrow.   That is the basis of my claim, that we would see the punch coming, so we would know when it was possible that tomorrow would not come, and since we don't see an asteroid ruining tomorrow, we can take that 1 in a billion thing off the list.  Not the list for ever, but the list for tomorrow.  Same perhaps for the device coming from a distant star system to turn off the Sun.  It would have to be huge, and would have to be traveling at less than the speed of light, and may or may not be cloaked. so we would either see it coming, or see a big shadow approaching, or see the orbit of Pluto thrown Soff by the devices gravity. or something.  Things that huge usually can't sneak up on a solar system, I would think.   So my question would be, if you have a way that the Earth , or a particular place on the Earth, away from the pole tilted toward the Sun and not experiencing a night tonight, could possibly not experience a night, followed by a day, in the appropriate manner dictated by its latitude, this night, and this day's tomorrow...then with 8 billion people looking, with today's technology and equipment, that "way" would be noticed approaching, and we would have more than 24 hour notice.   Since we have not received the warning, I claim there is no big enough event  possible, to disturb my claim.  Except for a cosmic blast coming at us at the speed of light.  And even a normal cosmic blast would not turn off the Sun, and even if the oceans were vaporized, the planet would still turn and even if there were nobody left alive, up above the clouds the Sun would continue to shine on half the spinning globe.  

The point being, you don't have an infinite number of events that can occur.  Only the events that fit the place can happen.  There is no magic available, it has to add up and be consistent with all the other stuff the universe does.  It has to follow the laws of physics, it maybe can do stuff we were not expecting, but it can't do impossible things.   Your mind can have it do impossible things, but the waking world, does not operate on a whim.  Everything has to fit together.  So perhaps in your mind, you can imagine an infinite number of outcomes, if you jump( without a device to prevent your splattering), out of a 10 story window unto an empty street, but I think reality will only provide you with one outcome.

Regards, TAR

And a civilization on another star system would have to have evolved over time to their state of capability and size and to acquire the knowledge and reason to snuff out our Sun.  They only have had the same 13.8 billion years we have had, using the same elements created in approximately the same amount of generations of stars and such.  That is, if such a group were so close,  they developed within "our" environment and we might have noticed their activity, before the day they decided to snuff out our Sun.  My claim is that New Jersey, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milkyway Galaxy will experience the morning of  8/15/2017.  Absolutely no question about it. (check back in 45 minutes for confirmation of my claim)

15 minutes ago, swansont said:

And yet, if your sample of Si had some Si-32 atoms in it, you could not predict which one of them would decay next. If you shot a Si atom (or a photon) through an appropriately-sized double-slit, you could not predict where it will end up.

Has anyone seriously suggested otherwise?

Occasionally.   Some have said it is random and undirected.  Others have said it must have been put into motion by a programmer.  It appears to be something in between an accident and a plan.

Regards, TAR

There is, in my estimation a 100% chance that the Sun will rise tomorrow.   I may die, it might be cloudy, there could be nuclear winter, a meteor bound to split the Earth could be on its way, but the only thing that could stop the Earth from turning away from the Sun tonight, and toward the Sun again tomorrow is some Cosmic burst that would be so powerful and violent as to blow the Earth or Sun to bits, in which case we would not be around to notice I was wrong, as the definition of tomorrow would be moot. and the burst would have arrived at the speed of light, with no warning and brought the turning of Earth, or the integrity of the Earth immediately to a halt.   So no big meteor is on its way, and we currently, today, do not have the technology to halt the spins already in progress.

Like a ball on its way to the center field bleachers, there are things that could happen to change its course, but as the electronic sensors that judge the distance the ball traveled based on the exit velocity and angle off the bat, the distance is known to a high degree of certainty right off the bat.

So reality is not completely random nor is it completely deterministic.  There are long term entities which stand against the wind and rain and cosmic winds and the small scale forces, to where the flightlyness of an electron around its nucleus where one cannot assess both the position and momentum at any moment, becomes a sure thing, in that the electron will stay with the nucleus, 'till a replacement arrives...well not all the time, and ions form, and atoms randomly decay and such, but in general, as haphazard as the arrangement seems at the atomic level, there is something well enough established in the silicon and calcium and oxygen atoms and such that exist in the railway overpass that has been there every day since it was built a hundred years ago to suggest that the random actions of the electrons are not going to cause the overpass to disappear overnight.

Any entity in the universe is in the presence of every other entity.  A match I lit when I was 13 and I held to the sky on a dark night sent out photons that are currently 50 lyrs from where the Earth was, that night.   Should one of those photons hit a sensor, or an atom 50 lys from here, it would not be a random event.  Some lifeform on Earth, caused it.

Regards, TAR

Also the tester could have weighed the cards 5 times placing them in the exact same manner on the scale, and seen what the range of weights were to test the accuracy and repeatability of the instrument (and then tested the scale with the same 12 cards place all together, spread out on the corners, and other random alignments to see if the scale always reported the same weight regardless of placement).  Also, I was thinking, if you are talking minute differences in weight, the temperature of the cards might make a difference, as a warm card could act like a tiny hot air balloon, and have a little "lift". since the board is housed within a plastic sheath.  This would make them lighter after handling and picking up any heat from the equipment, but the timing and storage of the cards was not mentioned and the first weighing could have been after they were sitting in the sun for an hour, and the second weighing could have been made after sundown, or when the temperature of the room had dropped.  Also, the weight of the information would, if there is a difference between 1s and zeros be exactly correlated to the code the information was coded in.  That is an FF would be heavier (or lighter) than a 00.  It would not matter how "heavy" the information was, like a picture of a tank or a bicycle would weigh according to the weight of the paper and ink and not according to the amount of steel in the vehicles pictured. 

Perhaps it would be a better experiment to handle the cards and put them in and out of the equipment without changing the information on the cards at all, to check if the change in weight is due to skin cells and oil and any residue picked up in the slot.   Also if it were true, removing the data and weighing it again would return the cards to their original weight.  I think it not likely to be true, as has been mentioned, there is data, 1s and 0s even on a blank card, so the test would be to load the card with all 0s and weigh it, load with maximum number of 1s and weigh it, and then load with equal number of 1s and 0s and weigh it.  The difference between the heavier condition and the lighter condition should be x and the weight of the half and half condition should be light, plus 1/2x.  Otherwise, 1s and 0s probably are not different weights.

My 91 year old father in hospice has a will to live, he also does not want resources wasted to keep him alive should he fall into a situation where extraordinary measures would have to be taken for him to get sustenance and oxygen...he does not want to be kept alive if he can not manage it on his own, in order to leave some money for his wife to continue surviving, or in general the population of the area which has only limited hospital space and funds. The will to live is his emotions, his neurotransmitters, talking, his directive to not go back to the hospital for any life lengthening procedures is a rational mind decision.   His anxiety and need for anxiety reducing medicine is a result of his will to live overriding his rational decision to accept that his useful life, his ability to get up and walk around, his ability to live life, any self serving "reason" to stay alive, is over.   We still want to enjoy him 'til we can't. He can still think and talk and listen to people and enjoy food and watching the Yankees, so his life is not over.  Perhaps he will outlive us all.

The rational mind belonging to the self in question.

Not that we don't sacrifice for those we don't know, but the drive, the emotional reaction, the rational decision is to protect yourself and those you include in your feeling of self.

So there is my coping with death strategy.  It is OK if I die if my daughter lives.  Or my second cousin...or my 4th cousin thrice removed, or anyone of my race, or anyone of my species, or anyone of my phylum, or anyone of my kingdom...because then a little of the pattern I spent my life protecting, will still be surviving.

Ten Oz,

I hope my great great....grandchildren, if I have any, will be smart enough to leave the area before the sun blows.

They will have a will to survive, and the technology to accomplish it.  The Sun's end does not force mankind to die.

And perhaps the end of the universe will never come.   It is possible that existence was always so, that there was always some false vacuum with something popping in and out of existence.  The overall scheme, way beyond our comprehension, and from which we are securely insulated by space and time, will NEVER be something we can completely experience. 

Perhaps this is my acceptance, my coping, that the end need not be feared, because there is no end.   You say that everything comes to an end, which is true, but you don't mention the fact that with every end is a new situation, a new beginning.  Grandma dies, but niece survives.  The Sun dies and the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria are on their way to Alpha Centuri to find an orbit to inhabit.  The universe ends in a big crunch and a new universe emerges on the other side of the point in a new universe.   Perhaps my protection from the fear of death is the knowledge that when I die, you will still be here to take care of the place, and enjoy the place...and even if every human dies, perhaps an ant  colony will carry on this life business and we, as life on Earth, will have a victory in that.

Regards, TAR

B.S.?   I don't think so.  We look after those we love before we sacrifice for those we don't know.