Is it though? It is my understanding that the quantum fluctuations that give rise to BBs will still exist, even after (and specially after) the evaporation of black holes (perhaps assuming no Big Rip).
JohnMakin · 1h ago
It's just a joke but the average number of years for a spontaneous quantum fluctuation to produce a boltzmann brain was calculated at something like 10^500 years. You're right that the processes involved would still remain barring some kind of big rip event.
Not a physicist, but I see it this way too. My understanding of Boltzmann brains is that they are a theoretical consequence of infinite time and space in a universe with random quantum fluctuations. And that those random fluctuations would still be present in an otherwise empty universe. So then this article has no bearing on the Boltzmann brain thought experiment or its ramifications.
foobarkey · 47m ago
My pet theory: all atoms decay back to hydrogen given enough time, gravity pulls them together, stars form, the universe is one big loop that self resets :)
chasil · 15m ago
The proton itself that forms the hydrogen atom might decay (we don't know yet; we do know that neutrons decay after 15 minutes).
I went to a talk of his on CCC ages ago, and it was such a fascinating combination of geometry, causality, and asymptotics. I have absolutely no clue whether it's reasonable physically, but independent of that, it's just a really elegant fusion of topics in a fun to think about way. Worth a read for anyone who just appreciates elegant new ways of combining mathematical structures.
mensetmanusman · 7m ago
Apparently time ceases when absolutely all mass is gone, because mass is required for a clock.
This of course requires the decay of protons.
layer8 · 27m ago
The evidence about the accelerating expansion of the universe would seem to contradict that theory.
HideousKojima · 29m ago
My pet theory:
The Big Bang happened at the "north pole" of spacetime. Eventually all matter and energy will reach the "south pole" and recombine. The Big Crunch theory will never die!
blueflow · 5h ago
It is written
The researchers calculated that the process of Hawking radiation theoretically also applies to other objects with a gravitational field
but: doesn't this only apply if these objects if they have some sort of decay process going on? There are nuclides that have never been observed decaying. I would expect a white dwarf to burn out, go through radioactive decay (unstable nuclides -> stable ones) and end up as inert rock (stable nuclides) at background temperature.
jfengel · 5h ago
Hawking radiation doesn't require decay. Pairs of particles appear spontaneously. One falls into the gravitational field, losing energy.
The net energy loss comes from the gravitational field of the object, and its mass decreases. We don't have details on just what that means at a Standard Model level, but the net loss of energy means something is going to disappear even without any kind of previously understood decay.
dist-epoch · 5h ago
> Pairs of particles appear spontaneously. One falls into the gravitational field, losing energy.
That's not really true. Even Hawking admitted that's it's a simplification he did for his popular science book of what really is going on.
>here are nuclides that have never been observed decaying
Aren't we pretty sure due to things like quantum tunneling that the probability of any quantum particle existing trends to zero given a long enough time?
mr_toad · 5h ago
No, all objects with non-zero temperature radiate heat. Stars, white dwarfs, black holes, even the universe itself.
blueflow · 5h ago
I said
inert rock at background temperature
so radiated and absorbed heat should already be accounted for, right?
dist-epoch · 5h ago
Regular "stable nuclides" stuff which falls into a black hole gets spit out as Hawking radiation, so no, this is a gravitational process, radioactive decay is a standard model one.
terabytest · 5h ago
As someone who doesn’t know much about this, I'm curious:
If humanity survived far into the future, could we plausibly develop ways to slow or even halt the decay of the universe? Or is this an immutable characteristic of our universe, meaning humanity will inevitably fizzle out along with the universe?
AnonC · 4h ago
I’m not an expert on this, but I read this by Lawrence M Krauss (theoretical physicist and cosmologist):
“In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.”
A billion is just 10 to the power of nine, and that number of years in time is itself a long, long time that’s difficult to imagine. Looking at 10 to the power of 78 is…it wouldn’t matter much for us if it were to the power of 60 either. (I think!) I seriously doubt humans (as we know of now) can meaningfully affect the expansion or decay of the universe.
Strilanc · 4m ago
Can you provide the source for that quote? 5 billion years seems way too soon.
The Hubble constant is currently approximately one doubling per 14 billion years [1]. So 5 billion years isn't enough to double the recession speeds. AFAIK there's plenty of galaxies receding at less than half the speed of light. Wikipedia estimates 150 billion years (6000x expansion) for all but the local group to be beyond the horizon [2]. So your quote seems to be off by two orders of magnitude.
In just 5 billion years? This surprises me, trillion I could understand, 5 billion is similar to the age of the earth.
Incidentally, the obvious counter to "our time is special, we have access to everything" is presumably what future civilisations think as well; the implication being perhaps we have lost something over the aeons that would shed light on our current mysteries.
I haven't read the book but it's an unconvincing extract, though I acknowledge a larger context may justify it.
pixl97 · 1h ago
Someone made a miscalculation with 5 billion years, but with that said, it's only just over an order of magnitude more which isn't much
>And what are presently the closest galaxy groups outside of the Local Group — objects like the M81 group — will be the last to become unreachable: something that won't occur until more than 110 billion years from now, when the Universe is nearly ten times its present age.
andruby · 44m ago
Maybe there was a self-conscious "civilization" before the big bang. From my understanding we know very little to nothing about anything before the big bang.
generic92034 · 7m ago
If the big bang created space and time, "before the big bang" is not really well-defined.
isoprophlex · 1h ago
Is that right? Only 5 billion years until noone sees the background radiation and other galaxies?!
That's... awe inspiring.
ChrisClark · 1h ago
That seems relatively soon! I know it's a huge number, but on universal scales, that's crazy
glenstein · 1h ago
Right so we're limited in time and resources, in a sense. Only some of the universe would be reachable within those 10^1100 or 10^78 years anyway. So we are limited by time but also what we can access.
What's fascinating to me is to consider the frontier of galaxies theoretically reachable within a given window, and the potential race to colonize them before they race away.
analog31 · 1h ago
This is a good reason not to throw away your old textbooks.
GistNoesis · 36m ago
Time is irrelevant. What matters are units of computations.
When things are predictable they can be simulated fast : A spinning ball in the void can be simulated for 10^78 years in O(1).
When things are fuzzy, they can be simulated fast : A star made of huge number of atoms is not so different than another star made of a huge number of atoms. When processes are too complex they tend to all follow the law of large numbers which makes the computations memoizable.
What you want is a way to prevent the universe from taking shortcuts in its computations. Luckily its quite easy. You have to make details important. That's where chaos theory comes to the rescue. Small perturbations can have big impacts. Bifurcations like tossing a coin in the air create pockets of complexity. But throw too many coins in the air and its just random and boring. Life exists on this edge where enough structure is preserved to allow enough richness to exist.
One way humans have found of increasing precision is the lathe, which lead to building computers. Build a big enough fast enough computer and you will run-out of flops faster than reaching the 10^78 endgame.
But you have to be smart, because computation being universal it means that if you are just building a big computer what matters will be what runs on it. And your universe can be reduced to a recursive endgame state of "universe becoming a computer running universe simulation of a specific type", which doesn't need to computed more than once and already was, or isn't interesting enough to deserve being computed.
That's why we live on the exciting edge before the Armageddon, boring universes having already been simulated. The upside being universe hasn't yet decided which endgame we may reach, because the phytoplankton aliens of k2-18b have not yet turned on their supercomputer.
diego898 · 5h ago
Very strongly suggest you check out Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question”
Well, the rest of us will likely die. However, you (the reader of this comment) will only have observed universes in which you don’t die. So, due to quantum immortality and all that, you’ll figure it out I guess. And in some sense humanity will not fizzle out; at least you’ll carry it along.
It is a big project, but don’t worry, you’ve got quite a while to work it all out. I would start working on it in earnest in about a million years. If you wait a couple billion, more of the stuff in the universe might have decayed, and the end result might be less interesting, I guess.
Please tell whatever else is around about the rest of us!
felipeerias · 5h ago
If we survive far into the future, we will learn a lot more about the structure and evolution of the Universe. It might be that the questions that our scientists can ask now will turn out to be trivial or meaningless to our descendants. Perhaps the Universe is far stranger than we can imagine.
ashoeafoot · 1h ago
The origami of petal unfolding implies the rose blooms forever says all bugkind dwelling on the bud.
It's interesting to note, that the Universal AC in “The Last Question” did not hallucinate an answer.
Instead, its response—"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER"—is a model of intellectual honesty.
mykowebhn · 5h ago
Why, so we can extend the 10^78 years? I'm not sure you truly understand how large 10^78 years is, or even 10^10 years.
suddenlybananas · 5h ago
While it seems doubtful that people will last that long, in 10^78 years, one would think those people alive at the time would want the universe to continue.
rswail · 4h ago
Humanity has existed for 3x10^6 years (give or take), which is 1 x 10^-72 of that time period.
We don't need to worry, it is highly unlikely that humanity as we recognize it will exist.
mykowebhn · 4h ago
Agreed. It is so highly unlikely that the probability is effectively zero.
Let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that humanity can exist a thousand times longer than your estimate, say 3x10^9 years. That's about as long as we think life has existed on earth, which is a VERY LONG TIME. That said, it's still 1 x 10^-69 of that time period. I think you can see where we're going with this.
bbarnett · 5h ago
Imagine if we solve it. Then hope to preserve the answer long enough, that people will care.
The first problem is data integrity and storage. Will the atoms the answer is on, still be around?
The next is, what kind of search engine will we have, with 10^78 years of internet history?!
pixl97 · 1h ago
I think a bigger question is what will they do for that long?
All the things like stars will be long gone and dead before that time leaving us with long lived black holes and radiation. So everything would be based on virtual world can computation by that point. Do you just cool everything to near absolute zero and run it as slow as possible to you can last as long as possible?
The History of the Universe channel has an episode around this, but I'll have to figure out which one it was.
bbarnett · 23m ago
They'll exist because of Wan-To.
The World at the End of Time by Frederick Pohl.
krapp · 5h ago
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an immutable characteristic of our universe. Entropy in a closed system (like the universe) is irreversible.
exe34 · 4h ago
It was set to zero once, so somebody somewhere/somewhen figured it out before.
WhatsName · 4h ago
Or rather we are a fork/thread somewhere is spacetime.
VagabundoP · 58m ago
git branch
dan_can_code · 1h ago
Damn. That ruins my retirement plans
bdangubic · 1h ago
just in time for your 401k to recover :)
wewewedxfgdf · 6h ago
Despite it being quite a way out it's still a little sad to think the end is coming.
rswail · 4h ago
"quite a way out"... is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The authors of the comment show that the "gravitational pair-production" rate used in the work in OP comes from truncating the covariant heat-kernel (proper-time) expansion of the one-loop effective action at second order in curvature, an approximation that is valid only in weak-field regions where all curvature invariants satisfy |R| · ℓ² ≪ 1 (where ℓ is the Compton wavelength). When that same expression is pushed into the high-curvature interior of a neutron star -- where the inequalities fail by many orders of magnitude -- the series is no longer asymptotic and its early terms generate a spurious imaginary part. Because the paper's entire mass-loss mechanism and lifetime bound follow from that uncontrolled imaginary term, its conclusions collapse.
Simply put, it doesn't even correspond to known experiments. It's entirely driven by a narrow artefact and has no physical basis.
If humans end up existing at 10^77 years. You would hope and imagine that they would be prepared for the decay?
recursive · 28m ago
Well, that's only 10% of the way there, so they'd still have most of the time left.
hathym · 10m ago
with what's going on, not sure if human will exist in the next 10 years
jeff_carr · 27m ago
/remindme in 10^60 years
Etheryte · 6h ago
So Hawking radiation moves the estimate from the previous 10^1100 to 10^78 years. That's a pretty drastic change, but naturally, not exactly something to go and worry about. Most of us would be lucky to make it to 10^2, so there's still some way to go.
busyant · 6h ago
get your affairs in order.
coolcase · 5h ago
Another 10^3 would be good for humanity
lawlessone · 30m ago
i'll have to move that meeting forward.
belter · 55m ago
Did Broadcom acquire this Universe?
rswail · 4h ago
People will be gathering at the Restaurant At The End Of the Universe with Douglas Adams as the host.
dvh · 6h ago
> Previous studies, which did not take this effect into account, put the lifetime of white dwarfs at 10^1100 years
That's some kind of typo no? I've only heard previous estimates for white dwarf to be trillions of years, that is significantly shorter that 10^1100
Edit: never mind, by lifetime that me proton decay, not how long they shine light
maaaaattttt · 5h ago
I suppose this time is expressed in earth years? Or what would this duration mean on a Universe scale? Also given the nature of space-time (the time and gravity relationship) wouldn't time be almost still once, let's say, year 10⁷⁷ is reached?
pixl97 · 1h ago
Isn't time relative?
If you were in a place where time was still you'd have no idea it were the case. Time would still tick at one second per second. You could only tell when you looked at some other object/patch of space that had a different ticking clock.
They say their findings set "a general upper limit for the lifetime of matter in the universe."
jmclnx · 1h ago
>Because the researchers were at it anyway, they also calculated how long it takes for the moon and a human to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation. That's 10^90 years.
Well I can predict the next trend, launching very rich people's body into space so it will last 10^90 years :)
pixl97 · 1h ago
Depends what you mean by last.
Over periods of time that long it's much more likely you'll run into some other object, say fall into a gravity well or something like that.
Even if you don't, pure erosion from neutral hydrogen and space dust will have disintegrated your capsule long before then.
mediumsmart · 1h ago
so many years - and how many miles?
fsiefken · 5h ago
Ok, well, surviving beyond 1 billion years and various extinction level events, asteroids, comets, nuclear wars, are are the first priority, we'll worry about this later.
Perhaps we can set up a secret program where AI randomly selects individuals based on merit, character to get the latest in life extension treatments, philosophical and spiritual education so they can guide us (with AI assistence) into the future and beyond the solar system.
If we survive, 'we' most probably don't exist by that time in any recognisable shape or form.
rTX5CMRXIfFG · 1h ago
What values do you think we should optimize for?
NoMoreNicksLeft · 1h ago
I suspect we have more immediate problems than "can we survive the next n billion years".
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1h ago
There have already been close calls with nukes. No way in hell we last another hundred.
Ekaros · 5h ago
One more argument not to do anything about climate change. After all universe is going decay shortly...
MOARDONGZPLZ · 6h ago
I hope they’re working on finding a way to massively decrease the net entropy in the universe after this.
andreareina · 6h ago
Unfortunately there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer
watt · 6h ago
Crack on with it and don't keep us in the dark!
coolcase · 5h ago
The way to do that is to do the most unlikely things
tobias_irmer · 6h ago
To me that still sounds like forever.
chasing · 1h ago
Probably on a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
stavros · 5h ago
Oh no! What are we going to do about this?
andrewstuart · 5h ago
How can the universe come from an infinite point and have no Centre.
laxd · 55m ago
Imagine blowing up an infinitesimally small balloon. Nowhere on the surface will you find the center. Also, as the other comment says, the center is everywhere. We are on the inside of the big bang.
acuozzo · 1h ago
The center is everywhere.
Aetheridon · 5h ago
so i wonder what comes after?
Lerc · 5h ago
If there is nothing left, does time pass? Does it pass but is meaningless? Does it no longer exist?
The same question goes for space. Is there any size to the nothingness? To go further when you have notions like inflation, can you have nothing that is increasing in volume? That would suggest a change in state an thus a sense of not yet ended.
It would be a weird thing for nothingness to change state. It seems like fertile soil for sci-fi. Imagine if space itself was kind of Turing complete and once the noise of matter ended it could start the real work, which of course would be simulating the next universe.
coolcase · 5h ago
There is a theory out there that once heat death is done distance is meaningless, therefore zero, therefore big bang again.
laxd · 46m ago
Conformal cyclic cosmology, by Roger Penrose
Lerc · 5h ago
That was kind of my intuition as well, similarly for time, if there was no distinction between long and short amounts of time, an instant would be the same as eons. If the big bang was improbable but possible it would just happen. The fact that we are here is suggestive that is possible.
mr_toad · 5h ago
> It would be a weird thing for nothingness to change state.
If there are no physical laws, there’s nothing to stop that happening.
rswail · 4h ago
That question makes no sense in terms of this discussion. The heat death of the universe means that there is no "after", just as there was no "before" the Big Bang.
The actual concept of time does not exist (at least in my humble year 12 physics understanding and having read Brief History Of Time a long time ago :) )
willis936 · 5h ago
A fun tool to think around such things are Penrose diagrams. Personally I'm a little dubious of strong claims of what will happen in the distant future since we have such incomplete models of physics today. It takes GUTs to predict the future.
Good. Maybe now they can prove Hawking radiation in something that isn't a bath tub. Or an oven.
vijaybritto · 6h ago
My shower is theory is that there are infinite universes getting created all the time and we can never know about it because we're restricted in this universe. I love having these talks with my daughter.
A_D_E_P_T · 34m ago
That's almost the mainstream position in physics as of 2025 -- that cosmic inflation never stopped, that it produces universes beyond number, and we're in one pinched-off region of it.
There's a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars too.
octocop · 1h ago
the term "sooner" in this case is, you know, relative
thom · 5h ago
Ah, just time for another bath. Pass me the sponge somebody, will you?
m1117 · 6h ago
AI is going to take over anyways
coolcase · 5h ago
It'll be 42'd like everything else
keepamovin · 6h ago
Aw fuck, I was looking forward to curing a few more deaths and bringin the Bitchun Society to yet more barbarian tribes in the outer reaches. I wonder if my whuffie will last that long? I really don't want to deadhead so hopefully there's plenty more interesting things to do in the tail end.
aspenmayer · 5h ago
> whuffie
I started to read this book, but never finished it, but the whuffie idea has legs. Stuck with me longer than many ideas from books I did finish. Need to pick it up again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA
Looks like a new test case scenario for libraries that handle time/date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay
This of course requires the decay of protons.
The Big Bang happened at the "north pole" of spacetime. Eventually all matter and energy will reach the "south pole" and recombine. The Big Crunch theory will never die!
The net energy loss comes from the gravitational field of the object, and its mass decreases. We don't have details on just what that means at a Standard Model level, but the net loss of energy means something is going to disappear even without any kind of previously understood decay.
That's not really true. Even Hawking admitted that's it's a simplification he did for his popular science book of what really is going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxVssUb0MsA
Aren't we pretty sure due to things like quantum tunneling that the probability of any quantum particle existing trends to zero given a long enough time?
If humanity survived far into the future, could we plausibly develop ways to slow or even halt the decay of the universe? Or is this an immutable characteristic of our universe, meaning humanity will inevitably fizzle out along with the universe?
“In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.”
A billion is just 10 to the power of nine, and that number of years in time is itself a long, long time that’s difficult to imagine. Looking at 10 to the power of 78 is…it wouldn’t matter much for us if it were to the power of 60 either. (I think!) I seriously doubt humans (as we know of now) can meaningfully affect the expansion or decay of the universe.
The Hubble constant is currently approximately one doubling per 14 billion years [1]. So 5 billion years isn't enough to double the recession speeds. AFAIK there's plenty of galaxies receding at less than half the speed of light. Wikipedia estimates 150 billion years (6000x expansion) for all but the local group to be beyond the horizon [2]. So your quote seems to be off by two orders of magnitude.
[1]: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/49248/interpre...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Incidentally, the obvious counter to "our time is special, we have access to everything" is presumably what future civilisations think as well; the implication being perhaps we have lost something over the aeons that would shed light on our current mysteries.
I haven't read the book but it's an unconvincing extract, though I acknowledge a larger context may justify it.
>And what are presently the closest galaxy groups outside of the Local Group — objects like the M81 group — will be the last to become unreachable: something that won't occur until more than 110 billion years from now, when the Universe is nearly ten times its present age.
That's... awe inspiring.
What's fascinating to me is to consider the frontier of galaxies theoretically reachable within a given window, and the potential race to colonize them before they race away.
When things are predictable they can be simulated fast : A spinning ball in the void can be simulated for 10^78 years in O(1).
When things are fuzzy, they can be simulated fast : A star made of huge number of atoms is not so different than another star made of a huge number of atoms. When processes are too complex they tend to all follow the law of large numbers which makes the computations memoizable.
What you want is a way to prevent the universe from taking shortcuts in its computations. Luckily its quite easy. You have to make details important. That's where chaos theory comes to the rescue. Small perturbations can have big impacts. Bifurcations like tossing a coin in the air create pockets of complexity. But throw too many coins in the air and its just random and boring. Life exists on this edge where enough structure is preserved to allow enough richness to exist.
One way humans have found of increasing precision is the lathe, which lead to building computers. Build a big enough fast enough computer and you will run-out of flops faster than reaching the 10^78 endgame.
But you have to be smart, because computation being universal it means that if you are just building a big computer what matters will be what runs on it. And your universe can be reduced to a recursive endgame state of "universe becoming a computer running universe simulation of a specific type", which doesn't need to computed more than once and already was, or isn't interesting enough to deserve being computed.
That's why we live on the exciting edge before the Armageddon, boring universes having already been simulated. The upside being universe hasn't yet decided which endgame we may reach, because the phytoplankton aliens of k2-18b have not yet turned on their supercomputer.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
It is a big project, but don’t worry, you’ve got quite a while to work it all out. I would start working on it in earnest in about a million years. If you wait a couple billion, more of the stuff in the universe might have decayed, and the end result might be less interesting, I guess.
Please tell whatever else is around about the rest of us!
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Instead, its response—"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER"—is a model of intellectual honesty.
We don't need to worry, it is highly unlikely that humanity as we recognize it will exist.
Let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that humanity can exist a thousand times longer than your estimate, say 3x10^9 years. That's about as long as we think life has existed on earth, which is a VERY LONG TIME. That said, it's still 1 x 10^-69 of that time period. I think you can see where we're going with this.
The first problem is data integrity and storage. Will the atoms the answer is on, still be around?
The next is, what kind of search engine will we have, with 10^78 years of internet history?!
All the things like stars will be long gone and dead before that time leaving us with long lived black holes and radiation. So everything would be based on virtual world can computation by that point. Do you just cool everything to near absolute zero and run it as slow as possible to you can last as long as possible?
The History of the Universe channel has an episode around this, but I'll have to figure out which one it was.
The World at the End of Time by Frederick Pohl.
See this comment on their previous paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07628
The authors of the comment show that the "gravitational pair-production" rate used in the work in OP comes from truncating the covariant heat-kernel (proper-time) expansion of the one-loop effective action at second order in curvature, an approximation that is valid only in weak-field regions where all curvature invariants satisfy |R| · ℓ² ≪ 1 (where ℓ is the Compton wavelength). When that same expression is pushed into the high-curvature interior of a neutron star -- where the inequalities fail by many orders of magnitude -- the series is no longer asymptotic and its early terms generate a spurious imaginary part. Because the paper's entire mass-loss mechanism and lifetime bound follow from that uncontrolled imaginary term, its conclusions collapse.
Simply put, it doesn't even correspond to known experiments. It's entirely driven by a narrow artefact and has no physical basis.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.12326
I think about how some relativists think you could see a Hawking Radiation like effect if you're accelerating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect
although the idealized case of endless acceleration implies a certain kind of horizon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindler_coordinates
maybe the horizon doesn't matter much,.
That's some kind of typo no? I've only heard previous estimates for white dwarf to be trillions of years, that is significantly shorter that 10^1100
Edit: never mind, by lifetime that me proton decay, not how long they shine light
If you were in a place where time was still you'd have no idea it were the case. Time would still tick at one second per second. You could only tell when you looked at some other object/patch of space that had a different ticking clock.
They say their findings set "a general upper limit for the lifetime of matter in the universe."
Well I can predict the next trend, launching very rich people's body into space so it will last 10^90 years :)
Over periods of time that long it's much more likely you'll run into some other object, say fall into a gravity well or something like that.
Even if you don't, pure erosion from neutral hydrogen and space dust will have disintegrated your capsule long before then.
Perhaps we can set up a secret program where AI randomly selects individuals based on merit, character to get the latest in life extension treatments, philosophical and spiritual education so they can guide us (with AI assistence) into the future and beyond the solar system.
If we survive, 'we' most probably don't exist by that time in any recognisable shape or form.
The same question goes for space. Is there any size to the nothingness? To go further when you have notions like inflation, can you have nothing that is increasing in volume? That would suggest a change in state an thus a sense of not yet ended.
It would be a weird thing for nothingness to change state. It seems like fertile soil for sci-fi. Imagine if space itself was kind of Turing complete and once the noise of matter ended it could start the real work, which of course would be simulating the next universe.
If there are no physical laws, there’s nothing to stop that happening.
The actual concept of time does not exist (at least in my humble year 12 physics understanding and having read Brief History Of Time a long time ago :) )
https://youtu.be/mht-1c4wc0Q
You'd like this book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547222/an-infinity-of-worlds...
I started to read this book, but never finished it, but the whuffie idea has legs. Stuck with me longer than many ideas from books I did finish. Need to pick it up again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...