>The universe will collapse into a single black hole. Basically no one believes the Big Crunch theory is likely to be accurate these days, which is what I imag

>The universe will collapse into a single black hole. Basically no one believes the Big Crunch theory is likely to be accurate these days, which is what I imagine he is referring to here - but it's also inaccurately stated even for that theory, because the laws of physics are so different when the universe becomes that compact that the properties that allow black holes to exist are incredibly different. Not all singularities are black holes, and indeed, the universe would not condense into a single black hole if the Big Crunch were true. If he's not talking about the Big Crunch, I have no idea what he could mean, since there's no conceivable theory in which all of the matter ends up collected in one big black hole otherwise. I know astrophysics and climate science are very different fields, but someone writing about how Thing X but not Thing Y is actually an existential crisis, some basic understanding about the ultimate fate of the universe would be nice. >It turns out that planetary life is a downhill chemical process if you have sunlight and liquid water. All evidence we have is that life, or at least intelligent life, is quite rare. We don't understand abiogenesis, either. Between these two things, acting like it's a given that we'll have life in short order if we have sunlight and liquid water is absolutely silly. >I have a short story in an upcoming anthology inspired by this point. The third entry in the fantastic WASTELANDS series by John Joseph Adams will have a story by me about a place where our worst case scenario has already happened. > (If you want to read my solution for how to wipe out all of humanity, check out WOOL and the Silo Saga. Spoiler: it ain’t pretty) Oh. It's just a long form advertisement for his writing. As others have pointed out, no one is really arguing about whether or not humanity might survive in some shape or form in these scenarios, but it wouldn't be anything like modern civilization. Our entire modern way of life ceasing to exist is plenty existential, and there's no guarantee that if we were reduced to a population of 2000 or so again that we would survive. See again the fact that as far as we can tell, intelligent life is incredibly rare - if intelligent life can keep hitting the 'restart' button when they fuck things up, we'd probably see evidence of life existing elsewhere in the galaxy.