The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

This dramatic visualization of the timeline for the rest of the universe is well worth a watch to get a feel for what we believe the future of the universe to look like<p>[TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA</a><p>However, when you get to the end (which is perhaps a little depressing!), I&#x27;d recommend learning a bit about what we think could come &#x27;after&#x27; this period, where the universe has become so isotropic and homogenous no clocks or measuring systems of any kind can be developed so the universe loses any sense of size or energy – it&#x27;s been proposed that this creates opportunity for a new universe to exist<p>[What Happens After the Universe Ends?]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0</a><p>These are fields of study right on the edge of what&#x27;s testable by science so it&#x27;s more fun to think about than it is to have certainty (although Penrose has, debatably, claimed evidence for echos of previous universes visible in the CMB!).

I&#x27;d be interested to know how people (humanity) would feel if it were known that the universe would just come to a hard-stop in a million years.<p>In practice, it should make no difference. That&#x27;s already much, much further than any of us can comprehend. It&#x27;s a hundred times the length of recorded human history. What would it really matter?<p>On the other hand, it would seem so short, I think a sense of nihilism would already take hold.

Good. I have a big investment in a star and sometimes I worry about inflation.

It is funny, I was just thinking about this myself, the fact that in a determinable amount of time, the observable universe, will be completely unable to sustain any type of life. Really puts things into perspective.

This makes me wonder, how many sparks of life and ancient civilizations have been wiped from the universe by the birth and death of stars. How many supernovae have violently ripped them from existence. How many rogue stars have cooked them to molten slag. What a small and fragile thing humanity is in the face of these forces.

Wikipedia has a page on the Timeline of the far future[1]. It lists a ton of physical and cosmological things that are predicted to happen based on our current understanding of physics. A really fun read that always takes me down a rabbit&#x27;s hole of phenomena wikipedia pages.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timeline_of_the_far_future" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timeline_of_the_far_future</a>

Some stars will last a really long time too. If the Sun gets too old, Proxima Centauri will supposedly last for over a trillion years and is within &lt;5 light years distance. It could be reached using nuclear propulsion (e.g. Project Orion or staged nuclear-thermal) within a human life span.<p>The universe might be concluding its star-forming era but will be capable of sustaining complex life for trillions upon trillions of years. After that we don&#x27;t know what really happens. Heat death is the depressing but most widely accepted outcome.

So the universe is just biding it’s time to die? This is it, no more creation, no more new platforms for biological miracles. Interesting, so while humans figure out how to navigate the universe, many planets&#x2F;stars would simply die and we will not even know.

What is it that I’m late to <i>every</i> party?

It is important to contextualize what almost all means in this context of a vast and possibly infinite universe. It leaves an incomprehensible number of stars yet to form. It also leaves open a backdoor for a star forming Renaissance if blackhole activity dies down in another 10 billion years.

For anyone interested in this, I recommend the following book: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

I guess this sets an upper cap on economic growth

Do we really think that expansion is a constant thing in the far far future? We already have different expansion rates in the theory (Big Bang was explosively fast, and now there is a measured speed of expansion), but is that &quot;constant&quot;?<p>Does the redshift measurements assume a constant expansion, has someone looked at the redshifts data to show historical expansion rate differences somehow maybe with candles?<p>And... aren&#x27;t most stars super-long-lived dwarfs anyway? The headline seems a bit misleading.

Assuming no quirks in physics that the universe just left out for yet another pathological counter example to our understanding of everything — it could just be the star stuff hanging out and social distancing after a star blazing first act.

A question came to mind: where do the photons go if it gets past the end of the observable universe?

Whenever you see the word Universe in pop sci, you can just sub in Observable Universe.

This edifice of cosmological logic, rooted in dark matter, somehow reminds me of epicycles.<p>Perhaps Earl of Ockham has a pertinent observation...<p>(Or, maybe I just woke up grumpy this morning.)

Has the author considered K-Pop?

Until humans start making them.

Oh what a time to be alive. Future generations will have to rely on stories, eyewitness accounts, and gripping tales of stellar formation, and willmonly have access to imported, factory-made stars.<p>Oh the humanity!

*according to our small little local window of observations of the universe.<p>The universe is thought to be either infinite or 46 billion light years across. Our passive observations don&#x27;t give us a whole lot to work with, they just give us a view of 14 billion light years.<p>It&#x27;s easy to make interpolation&#x2F;extrapolations. Harder to know the impact of conscious life, the extent of it, and how anisotropic the universe might really be.<p>Intelligent life may one day create artificial stars or is already doing so. The evolution of the universe can be highly affected by a Type 5 civilization. Let&#x27;s not be so certain about these astrophysical phenomena..<p>The effect of conscious intelligence is so great, we might have to rewrite some of the laws of cosmology. After all, when a human being with a death star can simply change the angle of the beam to destroy one planet instead of another, clearly the impetus is that weakly energetic states (state of the brain) are extremely potent in the evolution of the universe.<p>Normally we think that the magnitude of energy is what matters. However, when it comes to conscious entities, it is the structure that matters. This potency of structure throws a wrench in just using total energy as a measure of the effect that an object can cause. Brains use hardly any energy and yet cause absurdly strong effects that we still don&#x27;t know the full extent of.<p>One peculiarity about quantum mechanics is that even the lowest energy particles still require the universe to compute their paths and wavefunctions. This has commonly been a target of ways to verify if we are living in a simulation - looking for screen door effects in the interference patterns of extremely low energy particles.<p>One hypothesis was that perhaps the universe attempts to save computation on low energy particles. We did not find any screen door phenomena though. So the current stance is that the universe provides full fidelity wavefunctions to particles independent of the magnitude of their energy. A low energy particle or system can have a wavefunction of seemingly limitless quantum complexity.<p>Cosmology currently revolves around magnitude of energy, not the butterfly effect or intelligence. Expect this to change as we further our understanding.