You can yoink energy from a spinning black hole so there’s ways to keep on trucking in the dark universe
Comment on one bright second
happybadger@hexbear.net 20 hours ago
As existentially bleak as living through climate change is, I’m glad my brain only has to deal with the crisis of watching one planet in one solar system die. The average schmuck in Warhammer 10^10^ will be chasing the last sparks of warmth in a blizzard that will only get worse. The last habitable planet, the last active star, the final energy source they can find that will keep the temperature above 0 K for their grandchildren. They’ll have every beepboop gizmo the universe ever achieves to counter the crisis but there’s nowhere they can go short of making a new one, the same kind of deus ex machina we hope for but representing a new kind of hyper-death instead of just clean energy. Maybe they’ll still be able to grow crops if scientists manage to duplicate physics perfectly in some kind of thing outside of everything within the next 18 months according to the latest IPCC report. Individuals aren’t built to manage whatever psychic damage that causes no matter how much we abstract what it means to exist.
fox@hexbear.net 20 hours ago
happybadger@hexbear.net 19 hours ago
I mean the period of heat death beyond that. The black holes have to be fed and eventually that matter will dry up. The universe will keep expanding and chasing thermodynamic equilibrium until some maximum point of entropy where every particle is spread out over increasingly vast distances, with such a total loss of interactions between them that temperature across the universe is 0 K. We’d be doing the Alpha Centauri generation ship thing but to find the next electron.
AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 13 hours ago
a scifi book where the last humans go around the universe with ftl tech powered by the use of spinning black holes, which they feed all the other black holes in the universe to, stoking the last fires of humanity, until all the remaining matter in the entire universe is within their spinning blackhole, and they have nothing left to throw in but themselves.
still nothing compared to the amount of time that would come after even that final black hole that ate every other black hole dissappeared
woodenghost@hexbear.net 16 hours ago
Life could also just slow down a lot, use less energy. It would feel the same. Billions of years go by in a flash on the far end of the bell curve. But no problem, there always more time.
woodenghost@hexbear.net 16 hours ago
Or imagine it the other way around: The heat death has long started and we live in it. Who knows what kind of civilizations existed in the first quark gluon plasma 10^-12 to 10^-5 seconds after the big bang? They would have been tiny, fast and highly energetic. There are many orders of magnitude in size more between us and the plank length then between us and the observable universe. There’s lots of room down there. To them, we would seem like sluggish giants living off of tiny sparks within the faded light their long dead world set free when the universe became transparent 18,000 years after the big bang.