Did he really write such a story? That quote was the punchline from Asimov’s The Last Question, which is what came immediately to my mind when I saw this thread title.
In Fred Pohl’s Tau Zero some people manage to survive the big crunch by going into orbit around the monobloc (in a ramjet doing .9999… c). Don’t know how much of the physics makes sense anymore though.
Nope, doesn’t work. If the Big Crunch occurs, it’ll be everywhere, in exactly the same manner that the Big Bang was everywhere. You can’t orbit around the end singularity, any more than you can sail off the edge of the Earth.
And proton decay is not something to worry about. It’s happening now at the same rate that it’ll ever happen in the future, and the current rate is so slow that I don’t think a proton decay has ever been observed. So every few aeons, you’ll lose a proton, and then just take another bite of your sandwich to replace it.
The real problem is where you’re going to get your useable energy. It’s conceivable that you might be able to slow down asymptotically in such a way as to use a finite total energy and yet think an infinite number of thoughts, but there’s no known way to put that into practice. And it’s conceivable that entropy might be reversible, but we’re even more clueless on how, if at all, that can be done.
There’s a book called “The Five Ages of the Universe” that deals with this in detail.
Highly reccomended.
Insufficient data for meaningful answer.
ROFL! Thanks, I needed that!
Damn, Keeve, you’re right. It was Asimov’s story. Google would have found it.
I blame it on posting from memory too late at night.
I’ll go away now, hanging my head in shame.
A lamer version of the “Tau Ceti” solution - just accelerate to the speed of light. As I understand it, the passage of time would stop for you, subjectively - so in this timeframe, you would still exist for an infinite amount of time. Of course, since the passage of time has subjectively stopped, you’re frozen in one instant and can’t do anything, even think - everything has stopped. So this isn’t actually a “useful” solution, and from the standpoint of the rest of the universe you’ll still be destoyed with everything else.
shrugs Maybe someone will invent time travel? This begs the questions of how come we haven’t been visited by time travelers if the technology will be invented - but maybe they’ve simply decided to move in time AND space, traveling back a few billion years from the end of the universe and also to “a galaxy far, far away”. shrugs
Time travel is the best bet. The only answer to the paradox is that you can only travel back as far as when the machine was first invented. Since it hasn’t been invented yet, they can’t travel back to now; thus, no visitors yet.
Time travel is a bad option. As soon as the first time machine is invented we will be swamped by refugees from the heat death and the mass of the present universe will increase till it collapses.
Unless you carefully manage the mass balance to create a steady state universe- like these guys the Chronomegists