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The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make
- amelius 5y agoUntil humans start making them.
- anaganisk 5y ago“The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.” - Dr. Otto Octavius.
- boxed 5y agoThe important part is to disassemble stars. They are burning all the hydrogen way too fast.
- politician 5y agoIt's truly a bigger ecological crime than Bitcoin Proof of Work.
- benlivengood 5y agoOr dumping them into supermassive black holes. They'll survive a googol years or so, and feeding matter in will produce plenty of energy.
- rbanffy 5y agoAnd when we run out of matter to feed, we can always steal energy from their rotation with the Penrose process.
- rbanffy 5y agoThere must be a lot of brown dwarves lying around.
- progre 5y agoGood. I have a big investment in a star and sometimes I worry about inflation.
- vessel 5y agowell... unfortunately...
- devnulll 5y agoInflation is part of the problem here. It appears to be getting worse. Soon enough, inflation will make strangers of us all...
- slickrick216 5y agoPeak star was a lie spread by the anti solar lobby to get us back on oil.
- effingwewt 5y agoWhere can I sign up for starcoin, I've heard it's all the rage on reddit.
- digitcatphd 5y agoIt is funny, I was just thinking about this myself, the fact that in a determinable amount of time, the observable universe, will be completely unable to sustain any type of life. Really puts things into perspective.
- acheron 5y agoINSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
- mormegil 5y agoCollect additional data.
- lanstin 5y agoLet there be light.
- effingwewt 5y agoI laughed but it was a sad laugh followed by 'JFC'.
- bl0rg 5y agohttps://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH for the uninitiated.
- philipswood 5y agoSee the "last question" for the reference: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- marton78 5y agoNo thread about the heat death of the universe in the internet has ever lacked this comment. And justly so. Absolutely stunning short story.
- javajosh 5y ago
- yalogin 5y agoSo the universe is just biding it’s time to die? This is it, no more creation, no more new platforms for biological miracles. Interesting, so while humans figure out how to navigate the universe, many planets/stars would simply die and we will not even know.
- madmads 5y agoI mean the universe is so incredibly vast that even if we figure out how to travel at the speed of light, we'll only ever get to see a small fraction of it. I don't think we'll have to worry about running out of places to explore.
- roberthahn 5y agoSo, about that. One of the weird things about General Relativity is that if we COULD travel at or near the speed of light, then time dilation and length contraction will conspire to enable a trio to the end of the observable universe in 30 years. So we could definitely explore the universe, we just have no way to share what we discover with our friends back home.
- kibwen 5y agoThis is forgetting to account for the accelerating expansion of the universe. Even if one were to depart from Earth today, traveling at light speed, 94% of the observable universe is already impossible to reach. See this excellent video for more detail: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM
- losvedir 5y agoStill, the observable universe is only a small fraction of the whole universe (we believe, based on spacetime curvature, I think).
- kamaal 5y agoFor the timelines we are discussing here, sure there will lots of new discoveries in physics. And who knows may be somebody will toss out what we know today and come up with something new, where none of these limitations we know today apply.
- api 5y agoSome stars will last a really long time too. If the Sun gets too old, Proxima Centauri will supposedly last for over a trillion years and is within <5 light years distance. It could be reached using nuclear propulsion (e.g. Project Orion or staged nuclear-thermal) within a human life span. The universe might be concluding its star-forming era but will be capable of sustaining complex life for trillions upon trillions of years. After that we don't know what really happens. Heat death is the depressing but most widely accepted outcome.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoOk this trillion number you are talking about makes me feel better about this article.
- api 5y agoYeah we have a good backup star <5ly away. In hundreds of millions to 1-2 billion years when this becomes a problem we (or more likely whatever descends from us or the AIs we build) will either be able to move easily or will be extinct already. AI intelligences would have no problem traveling between stars. Who cares if it takes thousands of years even... just turn yourself off. Even better send automated factories to build compute power and robotics and then transmit your minds when the new site is ready.
- misthop 5y agoWikipedia has a page on the Timeline of the far future[1]. It lists a ton of physical and cosmological things that are predicted to happen based on our current understanding of physics. A really fun read that always takes me down a rabbit's hole of phenomena wikipedia pages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- stackbutterflow 5y agoThere's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.
- webkike 5y agoSuper Mario bros is pretty fun
- lemonberry 5y agoI imagined this as a modern buddhist story: The student approaches their master lamenting the meaninglessness of everything. The master, "Super Mario bros is pretty fun". Enlightenment ensues.
- itronitron 5y agoAnd then two schools of Buddhism diverged, one favoring Super Mario Bros and the other Super Mario Bros 2
- rbanffy 5y agoI hate both, but Super Mario 64 is great.
- handrous 5y ago
- lonelyPM 5y agoFor anyone interested in this, I recommend the following book: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
- platz 5y agoWhenever you see the word Universe in pop sci, you can just sub in Observable Universe.
- SamBam 5y agoSure, but scientists have fairly good reasons for assuming that the rest of the universe looks pretty much the same. They could be wrong, of course, but "could be wrong" is always an assumption with these kinds of things anyway.
- platz 5y agowhat is 'pretty much the same', and what are the 'fairly good reasons'?
- wizzwizz4 5y ago“Pretty much the same” is “has stars and planets like we do, ignoring the solar system which might be weird”. The “fairly good reasons” are that that assumption has allowed us to develop a very good understanding of physics – good even by standards that don't make that assumption. If an assumption is a good one, it's probably a true one… at least, the others have been, and I assume we can generalise from them.
- platz 5y agoInflation is the leading cosmological theory. If that is true, all our observations are descended from a pinpoint region of space that contained everything we can observe now. We don't have any means to judge whether the parameters of space are the same or different in regions that have always been causally separated from us. Be more comfortable with saying "I (We) don't know".
- wizzwizz4 5y agoMost physicists agree.
- haxiomic 5y agoThis dramatic visualization of the timeline for the rest of the universe is well worth a watch to get a feel for what we believe the future of the universe to look like [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA However, when you get to the end (which is perhaps a little depressing!), I'd recommend learning a bit about what we think could come 'after' this period, where the universe has become so isotropic and homogenous no clocks or measuring systems of any kind can be developed so the universe loses any sense of size or energy – it's been proposed that this creates opportunity for a new universe to exist [What Happens After the Universe Ends?] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0 These are fields of study right on the edge of what's testable by science so it's more fun to think about than it is to have certainty (although Penrose has, debatably, claimed evidence for echos of previous universes visible in the CMB!).
- marton78 5y agoObligatory link to Isaac Asimov's wonderful short story "The Last Question" which explores this topic: https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
- haxiomic 5y agoI have never read this before, thank you :)
- rbanffy 5y agoIt's one of my all-time favorites.
- sooheon 5y agoAnother great one dealing with this topic is Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Less cosmic, more provincial, but still beautiful. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
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- SamBam 5y agoI'd be interested to know how people (humanity) would feel if it were known that the universe would just come to a hard-stop in a million years. In practice, it should make no difference. That's already much, much further than any of us can comprehend. It's a hundred times the length of recorded human history. What would it really matter? On the other hand, it would seem so short, I think a sense of nihilism would already take hold.
- ant6n 5y agoSo uh another million year wait for Jesus?
- dekken_ 5y agoor maybe you're Jesus?
- jrochkind1 5y agoWe already have so much nihilism, it's hard to imagine it being possible to turn the dial up further.
- CDRdude 5y agoI don’t see this. Many people in my country are religious, and believe that God (the Christian one) has a plan for them—-the exact opposite of nihilism.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoThis does often manifest in what is essentially nihilism, though — e.g. “I’m not taking the vaccine; if God’s will is that I die from COVID then so be it.”
- CDRdude 5y agoThat’s a good point, I hadn’t considered that.
- fghorow 5y agoThis edifice of cosmological logic, rooted in dark matter, somehow reminds me of epicycles. Perhaps Earl of Ockham has a pertinent observation... (Or, maybe I just woke up grumpy this morning.)
- m3kw9 5y agoA question came to mind: where do the photons go if it gets past the end of the observable universe?
- jeremyjh 5y agoThe observable universe is simply what exists in our light cone - what can reach us before the space between is expanding faster than the speed of light. There is no reason to think there is anything special about us or our light cone and no reason to think things outside it would look different to an observer nearer to them.
- Aperocky 5y agoit can't get there. At least the ones that are emitted from us. Similarly, the ones that are emitted by stuff beyond that boundary will never get to us. Because the space is stretching faster than the photon.
- goldenkey 5y ago*according to our small little local window of observations of the universe. The universe is thought to be either infinite or 46 billion light years across. Our passive observations don't give us a whole lot to work with, they just give us a view of 14 billion light years. It's easy to make interpolation/extrapolations. Harder to know the impact of conscious life, the extent of it, and how anisotropic the universe might really be. Intelligent life may one day create artificial stars or is already doing so. The evolution of the universe can be highly affected by a Type 5 civilization. Let's not be so certain about these astrophysical phenomena.. The effect of conscious intelligence is so great, we might have to rewrite some of the laws of cosmology. After all, when a human being with a death star can simply change the angle of the beam to destroy one planet instead of another, clearly the impetus is that weakly energetic states (state of the brain) are extremely potent in the evolution of the universe. Normally we think that the magnitude of energy is what matters. However, when it comes to conscious entities, it is the structure that matters. This potency of structure throws a wrench in just using total energy as a measure of the effect that an object can cause. Brains use hardly any energy and yet cause absurdly strong effects that we still don't know the full extent of. One peculiarity about quantum mechanics is that even the lowest energy particles still require the universe to compute their paths and wavefunctions. This has commonly been a target of ways to verify if we are living in a simulation - looking for screen door effects in the interference patterns of extremely low energy particles. One hypothesis was that perhaps the universe attempts to save computation on low energy particles. We did not find any screen door phenomena though. So the current stance is that the universe provides full fidelity wavefunctions to particles independent of the magnitude of their energy. A low energy particle or system can have a wavefunction of seemingly limitless quantum complexity. Cosmology currently revolves around magnitude of energy, not the butterfly effect or intelligence. Expect this to change as we further our understanding.
- foxyv 5y agoThis makes me wonder, how many sparks of life and ancient civilizations have been wiped from the universe by the birth and death of stars. How many supernovae have violently ripped them from existence. How many rogue stars have cooked them to molten slag. What a small and fragile thing humanity is in the face of these forces.
- rbanffy 5y agoPeople pointed to Asimov's Last Question, I'll point you to Clarke's The Star: https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf
- effingwewt 5y agoAnd that's not including the ones whose planets destroyed them, or where they destroyed themselves. Or the ones that became space-faring and were wiped out by others/space/whatever. The odds of surviving on any scale seem pretty infinitesimal. Common sense would dictate we focus on surviving external forces but instead we hate each other over our differences.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoIt is important to contextualize what almost all means in this context of a vast and possibly infinite universe. It leaves an incomprehensible number of stars yet to form. It also leaves open a backdoor for a star forming Renaissance if blackhole activity dies down in another 10 billion years.
- MAGZine 5y agoIt is important. Based on a lot of comments, people seem to think "oh, well, universe dead, I guess." Which is far from the truth. There are still millions of galaxies forming millions of stars, and that is going to continue into the indefinite future. This is saying that statistically, the younger the universe, the more stars that are created. And they bright, hot, short-lived stars, that, once dead, will give birth to many new stars (who will also generally be bright and short-lived, just less so). This means that the universe produces a great deal of young stars shortly after its inception, but that eventually gives way to many more long-lived stars that are actually habitable for life. The universe is very much in its hayday, right now. We're living evidence of it.
- ozim 5y agoIf we contextualize 95% of all to created stars were created it is still quite a lot dead. Then taking our context which is our observable universe which is only a small part of universe that we care about - we can certainly say it is dead.
- jjk166 5y agoCreated != dead. The most common stars in the universe have lifetimes many times the observable universe's age. Even if all star formation stopped everywhere right this moment, we'd only be about 1% of the way through the era of stars. In reality, there is a long tail to stellar formation meaning we are actually much less far along.
- del_operator 5y agoAssuming no quirks in physics that the universe just left out for yet another pathological counter example to our understanding of everything — it could just be the star stuff hanging out and social distancing after a star blazing first act.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gumby 5y agoOh what a time to be alive. Future generations will have to rely on stories, eyewitness accounts, and gripping tales of stellar formation, and willmonly have access to imported, factory-made stars. Oh the humanity!
- otikik 5y agoHas the author considered K-Pop?
- ManuelKiessling 5y agoWhat is it that I’m late to every party?
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoDo we really think that expansion is a constant thing in the far far future? We already have different expansion rates in the theory (Big Bang was explosively fast, and now there is a measured speed of expansion), but is that "constant"? Does the redshift measurements assume a constant expansion, has someone looked at the redshifts data to show historical expansion rate differences somehow maybe with candles? And... aren't most stars super-long-lived dwarfs anyway? The headline seems a bit misleading.
- f00zz 5y agoI guess this sets an upper cap on economic growth
- joelbondurant 5y agoDemocrats could vote for more star production, but they're anti-Science.