If you are reading this, you are probably in the first half of the XXI century. Arbitrary measure of time that our civilization is currently using assumes the probable date of Christ’s birth as the first day of our Era. The era that doesn’t have an end date. Or does it?
For the purpose of this text let’s assume that the big bang was the real start of the universe as we know it. What had been before? We will probably never know. We can suspect that the universe had never been created – it just had existed in some kind of a limbo until the bang happened. We suspect that it happened around 13,7 billion years ago.
What fascinates human beings though, is not how things start but how they end. It doesn’t matter if a book or a movie was great if its ending was terrible, right? Unfortunately, in our case, it is even less satisfying than the last scene of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The most probable scenario is what we call a heat death.
(Heat death shirt: https://store.dftba.com/products/heat-death-shirt)
The heat death of the universe was first discussed in the second half of XIX century thanks to William Thomson’s work. He wrote two articles about the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy which led to forming a theory which forecasts an "end of all physical phenomena". But how could it happen?
(Source: http://www.eoht.info/page/Heat+death)
The universe is constantly expanding. For some time, we thought that the rate it happens is constant but in reality, it expands faster and faster. Because of that, every particle is slowly separated from its neighbors, slowly losing energy at the same time. If the expansion never stops it is bound to enter a state which dissolves all energy, making everything cold, quiet and motionless. At some point, in billions and billions of years everything needed to form new stars and plants will be exhausted and the universe will turn dark. Remaining suns will die, leaving the universe full of black holes, which slowly dissipate, ending the process. It is impossible to predict the time frame for the death of the universe but we’ve calculated that it takes around a googol years for the most everlasting objects in the universe - super massive black holes - to decay(a really long time comparing to the 13,7 billion).
To understand the topic better you can watch the following video:
But there is hope. The "heat death" situation could be avoided if there is a method or mechanism to regenerate hydrogen atoms from radiation, dark energy or other sources. It would allow future humans or some other intelligent species to generate energy forever, making them essentially gods. Other possibility is a big crunch that can lead to a new big bang and the cycle starting anew.
No one knows what will happen in the far future when we’re all either dead or living as immortal super humans but it is definitely interesting to imagine. Share your thoughts about the topic. What do you think is the future of our species and the universe? Do you believe that the world as we know will end some day? How? Do you think it is possible to overcome the death of the universe itself?
Sources:
The video listed above,
http://www.eoht.info/page/Heat+death,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe,
http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae181.cfm
Comments
I really like the idea of Great Filter, which bases itself on Fermi Paradox. It states that some steps of evolutionary path might be almost or not possible to achieve at all, because our galaxy should be full of life given all its parameters and yet we only know of one place where it is present. We destroyed our own planet, the only hospitable place we know. There is a law of nature, which states that every species that overshoot its caring capacities will be culled down to reasonable numbers. So maybe before thinking about fouling other solar systems we should stop and try to repair what we destroyed in our own home.
Human race can't even handle many things about this world and our own home planet. If it doesn't change, I'm pretty sure that we won't be witnesses to the end of the universe.
The world that we know would eventually have to change in order to addapt to the new events that may occur in the future, some of the changes may mean that some of the planets inhabited by humans will cease to exist, but I believe that we, as a race, are capable of surviving. Maybe by inhabiting different galaxies, or maybe different universes, I can't really tell now.
I don't know if it's possible to overcome death of the universe now, since we can't be sure that it's dying. This is one of the problems that will probably have to be discussed eventually, in the future.
Universe is expanding and will be as far as we know, eventually it will stretch to the point of heath death. What's wrong with exploring galaxy? We can learn about earth by knowing the far away space better.
I like the idea of big crunch, expanding and then contracting universe in cycles with big bang as fullcircle point. It makes sense for me. Everything in nature works in cycles so maybe whole universe is. Hopefully, because heath death is not most optimistic perspective even though we as a specie can be long gone before it happens. Or become gods, who knows? We shall not see.
The thing is, just as a person caught in a computer simulation has to follow the timeline, so have we. The universe we live in might grow cold and come to stop someday, but as 4-dimentional we wouldn't be able to fight with it, as we wouldn't be able to notice it in the first place. At some point things would just stop.
I didn't even know if our world will stop existing. Maybe yes, but we or our children won't see and know it. If yes, it will happen in the future, after thousands of years. And I am inclined to think that yes, because our planet become worned down too, but very slow. So maybe when something bad happened to it, people would be at another planet.