I have read that according to cosmologists, the stars will begin to exhaust their hydrogen , and billions of years from now, the universe will get blacker and blaker. The stars will burn out, and life will cease. Lateron, an even more insidious threat-the actual matter we are made from (protons actually) will decay!
My question: can man escape the death of the universe? Can we construct life systems independent of the stars (and hide out on a white dwarf, for example)?
How can we cope with proton decay thought? Should I be worried about all of this? Of course, we have plenty oftime to plan a strategy-what CAN we do to insure that the human race survives the running-down of the universe?:eek:
There are other sources of energy in the universe besides stars. For instance we could toss stuff into a black hole and get energy that way. However, probably a more practical approach would be to store stellar energy in big antimatter batteries. That way, when the stars all go out, we’ll have enough energy saved up to last for a while.
As for escaping proton decay… no. Sorry. You’ll have to count on a breakthrough in physics some time in the next 10[sup]40[/sup] years. However, this isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s not like you’ll be sitting behind a desk at some point in the future and all of your protons will spontaneously fly apart. It’s a very gradual process. Your body’s protons are decaying at no faster than one every million years or so.
Find God.
Unless we discover a way to move into another universe.
Or, although evidence points to the heat death of the universe, we don’t know everything and we could end up in a big crunch. That makes sense to me, but I’m not a physicist.
Find God?
Given a few billion years of technological evolution, humans may as well be God.
And give him a spaceship. 
Balthisar, science seems to have settled on the fact that there won’t be a Big Crunch. Probably the universe will expand forever, much like Marlon Brando.
Do you really think there will be “human beings” in billions of years? By then, we will have destroyed ourselves and/or evolved into something totally different (think of how life has changed in the **past **billions of years). And even if we destroy ourselves, whatever is left will evolve into something totally different. Either way, our direct descendents, if any, will either be up to the challenge or too dumb to grasp the problem.
Things to do to survive the heat death;
find a non volatile form of matter, which is more long-lived than protons;
electrons, or neutrinos perhaps…
how long would it take for a neutron star to evaporate?
Geon/spin networks?
Baby Universes?
find a long lived source of energy- supermassive black holes are good for perhaps 10[sup]99[/sup] yers, which is a long time…
can we extract dark energy fromthe vacuum , and perhaps slow down the expansion in the process?
reversible computing is supposed to allow intelligent processing to continue with very few resources, and the expansion of the universe may continue until every particle is far from each other so that processing will take a very long time or cease altogether…
if the Big rip theory is correct, this might happen relatively soon, at 10[sup]22[/sup] years, and no organised matter will remain;
but if there is a way to continue processing and to maintain memory deep into the future, eventually random fluctuations may produce new matter, stars, and galaxies- even a new big bang; but that might be a googleplex years or something into the future-
who knows.
Not me, but I fondly hope that one day something far more intelligent than I will bend its vast resources towards finding out.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
To quote, ahem, myself from this previous thread about ultra-longterm human survival possibilities:
I don’t think the prospects have greatly changed since April …
We don’t even have a practical means theorizied to get out of the solar system.
So what if matter decays? Create new protons. That should be no big task. The tricky problem is energy.
Maybe there will be a way to harness the quantum foam. Something like tiny windmills that will be set in motion by spontaneously appearing particles.
Or find a way to interact with tachyons and exploit the energy that comes from the future.
Or find a way to extract energy from the motion of the decayed stars. If the universe is expanding the distance between stars will increase forever. This should be translatable to kinetic energy. Of course matter (or what is left of it) will not dissipate and spread evenly throughout the universe, because it will still be held together by gravity. In fact, I’ve read once somewhere that those decayed stars will look something like glass.
The most efficient thing to do though would be to create new universes. I understand that universes are always created in pairs, one positive, one negative, so that the total energy balance will be zero. Find a way to contain them within our own universe, perhaps by creating them with the same set of dimensions as our own universe, minus one. Then set them to interact, maybe by connecting them with a tube of some sort. This will release plenty of energy as the two universes slowly annihilate eachother.
Of course, finding our own negative universe and feeding all the decayed matter into it should release enough energy to get us going for another trillion years…
How far out is the universe? Maybe we should go beyond it.
See Heinlein’s “Let There be Light”.
No problem. 
Realize that in the end no matter what you do we are doomed. We might be able to extend life past some point with clever means but sooner or later nothing will work and life is done for.
Realize that all the energy/matter (interchangeable) currently in the universe will still be in it 10[sup]99[/sup] years from now. As I understand it however all of that energy will no longer be in a useable form.
In short, entropy always increases (at least in teh grand scheme of things). You are fighting a battle that can’t be won no matter what you do. The only hope for ultimate survival would require finding other universes and a way to get to them to escape ours.
Of course maybe the ‘Brane Universe’ ( http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/bigbang_alternative_010413-1.html ) idea will work out to be true and our universe may manage to recycle itself. I’m not sure, however, if anything could expect to survive that even if it managed to live long enough to see it occur.
I tend to put my hopes on one thing eburacum45 said.
Perhaps we will find a way to tap into the dark energy that is accelerating the universe apart. We kill two birds with one stone, keep the universe from falling apart, while getting usable energy.
And Pohl’s The Heechee Saga. Probably not as good as Let There be Light (I love Heinlein) but they have a method of living past the end of the universe in there. It might not be until the 2nd book though, but Gateway is a great story anyway: one of my faves.
Oh God! I used to have dreams about being dead “oh God, I’m rotting!”…now I worrry about my protons decaying!
Foryouphysicists…has a proton decay event ever been observed? Or is it just a theoretical idea?
It’s just theoretical right now. And it’s not even an “almost certain” theoretical that we just haven’t gotten around to observing yet. It’s a maybe.
Could’nt we all just seal ouselves into individual boxes and shoot them off into space? Maybe take a rotisserie chicken, some mayo and a French stick for something to munch on.
This thread makes my brain hurt, but I like it. Everytime I read about the end of the universe and things happening 10^22 or more years from now I get a wierd feeling in my stomach but I can’t stop reading.
In order to stay on topic, I have a question for those smarter than I. If we live in an ever expanding universe, after a period of infinite time (work with me here), wouldn’t everything (galaxies, planets, stars, atoms) be infinitely distant from every other object in the universe? What happens then?
i doubt i’m any smarter than you are, but i’ll answer anyway.
“after a period of infinite time” equals “it takes an infinite number of years”, which in turn equals “this point in time is never going to occur”. so, at no point in the history of the universe will two objects be infinitely distant from each other.