Eventually, can the human race achieve omniscience?
I'm working on a story that deals with an inordinate leap into the future and was wondering what leaps and bounds in science the human race may have reached by then. So here's what I'm wondering:
Over time, we have been able to access information in more and more areas. For example, we're dealing with computation at a quantum level now: a level we previously didn't even know existed.
Further, as we evolve it seems we are also getting better at learning more from less information. As we compile information we have learned as a species, and develop new equations for such information, we can extrapolate more from less. Another example: you have a circle with a radius of 1m. What's that circle's circumference? Chances are good you didn't have to rediscover pi. I realize that example's pretty basic, but hopefully it gets the idea across.
It seems to me that as we learn more and more about the creation and subsequent events of the universe (which I guess is just all of them), we can start to know about events and matter farther and farther away, both in distance and time. It also seems that if we take this to the extreme (I'm assuming humans make it as a species), we'd know as far away and as far ahead (or back) as possible, making us, for all intents and purposes, omniscient.
The only bottleneck I can think of is that pesky Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Since we can never have complete information about subatomic particles, and they certainly affect the universe, it seems we might run into trouble there. But it also seems like we still might be able to learn enough anyway through everything else that this wouldn't matter.
My question is: given this constant advancement of knowledge, could my future humans ever realistically reach the level I'm talking about? We're able to land spacecrafts on asteroids, clearly we can already predict so much about our solar system from it's current state in time. What's to stop us from eventually extending this to the edge of the universe?
(I'm not worried about this being a laughably long time from now. I'm just wondering if it's possible.)
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/51997. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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