Will human beings/intelligent life exist at the End of the Universe?
The Earth will be uninhabitable long before the Sun dies, and our Sun only has about 5 billion years of life left, and it’s just a matter of time ’til our galaxy gets the final flush down our very own central black hole. All of which will take place long before the final heat death of the universe. Unless Homo Sap or his descendants manage to get to other star systems, and even to other galaxies, they’ll be toast long before the Big Chill sets in. In any event, whatever kind of critters are around a billion years from now, even if they evolved from us, will be as different from us as we are from what was running around here a billion years ago. We’ve only been around about a hundred thousand years and there’s an excellent chance that we won’t be around for another hundred thousand. That’s some teensy part of an eye blink in universal time. The dinosaurs were around for 160 million years and their descendants get breaded and fried. So it’s a tad premature to consider ourselves a success
The theory you describe will take billions if not trillions of years. Our sun is expected to run out of hydrogen in a few billion years and end its main sequence life. But that will not be the end. After ballooning into a red giant, it will shed its outer layers and survive as a white dwarf star for many more billions or trillions of years. It will not grow cold quickly since its remaining surface will slowly burn remaining gases and gases that its diminished gravity manages to pull in. Humans will not be recognizable after this amount of time. Homo sapiens have only been around for a few thousand years. After a million or billion or trillion years, if our decendants are still alive, they should have mastered the conversion of matter to/from energy by then. They would not be limited by the need for light or heat or specific resources. They can convert the dead matter they find into energy and back into matter that is useful to them. A wild theory could be that they could prevent the co
One of the sad effects of the SETI project is that while there may be intelligent life out there, the universe doesn’t seem to be teeming with it. That could be because life is rare, or that intelligence is rare. Or it could be that intelligent races don’t stick around very long. We’ve only been intelligent enough to emit detectable signals for a few decades, but the hope was that somebody had beaten us to it by a billion years or so and had been broadcasting all that time. It’s kind of a depressing thought, that maybe the logic of competition simply doesn’t permit us to last long without wiping ourselves out. I’m more hopeful than that. The argument I outlined was conceived at the height of the Cold War, when it looked very much like we were five minutes from becoming non-existent. Life is incredibly persistent, and there is plenty of time for life to arise over and over and over. Life appeared for the first time here only a measly four billion years ago, and the universe is expected
