Cheer me up, /sci/
I was thinking about, ultimately, the age of existence and the universe. How long can existence as we know it POSSIBLY go on? How long until there's just nothing left to burn up in the cosmos and all the stars are dead and the universe is a lightless, hopeless sea of black that's trillions and trillions of billions of light years from even the nearest two atoms? At least, that aren't part of a black hole.
I got to thinking about how while the universe is infinite in size and expanding, the matter that exists inside of it is not infinite. We have a finite amount of matter. We have a finite amount of energy. Entropy is a thing, ever present in all things, whether they're near you or 14 billion lightyears away. All things with atoms experience decay. Even if, after trillions of times the age of our universe, the last Bismuth atoms decay down to the lowest tier, leaving no matter left in any form. Eventually, all matter in the universe will degrade like garbage and dissipate into the universe as heat.
Our sun has an estimated lifespan left of about 2-ish billion years, before things start getting unlivable. And that means every sun of comparable size and intensity is also going to be dying. While of course, new suns are born and old ones die all the time, that's just because our universe is still relatively young.
Eventually there won't be new stars forming. Because the ambient hydrogen and helium in the universe will have all been burned away. There just simply won't BE the material, statistically, to form new stars of orbiting planets anymore. Eventually, we are going to have to realize that our civilizations and existences are kind of like sitting at one food court in a mall with a million restaurants. The mall itself will close within a year, and no matter how much we may want, we can't visit and eat at them all.
This means by necessity, our species is going to have to break up and spread out. (continued)
I was thinking about, ultimately, the age of existence and the universe. How long can existence as we know it POSSIBLY go on? How long until there's just nothing left to burn up in the cosmos and all the stars are dead and the universe is a lightless, hopeless sea of black that's trillions and trillions of billions of light years from even the nearest two atoms? At least, that aren't part of a black hole.
I got to thinking about how while the universe is infinite in size and expanding, the matter that exists inside of it is not infinite. We have a finite amount of matter. We have a finite amount of energy. Entropy is a thing, ever present in all things, whether they're near you or 14 billion lightyears away. All things with atoms experience decay. Even if, after trillions of times the age of our universe, the last Bismuth atoms decay down to the lowest tier, leaving no matter left in any form. Eventually, all matter in the universe will degrade like garbage and dissipate into the universe as heat.
Our sun has an estimated lifespan left of about 2-ish billion years, before things start getting unlivable. And that means every sun of comparable size and intensity is also going to be dying. While of course, new suns are born and old ones die all the time, that's just because our universe is still relatively young.
Eventually there won't be new stars forming. Because the ambient hydrogen and helium in the universe will have all been burned away. There just simply won't BE the material, statistically, to form new stars of orbiting planets anymore. Eventually, we are going to have to realize that our civilizations and existences are kind of like sitting at one food court in a mall with a million restaurants. The mall itself will close within a year, and no matter how much we may want, we can't visit and eat at them all.
This means by necessity, our species is going to have to break up and spread out. (continued)
