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> The day will come when the last star dies and the universe plunges into eternal darkness. [...] The last star in the cosmos will very likely be a red dwarf. A

• ithkuil 5y ago
  The time scale is so vast that whatever happens, with whatever definition of "optimism", it's hard to imagine our descendents to recognize themselves into us. There is un circumstance: that a group of humans today (or in the near future) just time "travels in the future" (e.g. by moving at relativistic speeds, etc, while in cryogenic sleep or whatever) and just happen to witness the late universe without the time actually ticking for them. In that (unlikely) case the same effect that would prevent the species from diverging is the same that would prevent them from getting extinct (not enough time)
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    > moving at relativistic speeds, etc, while in cryogenic sleep or whatever There’s an interesting way to get to relativistic speeds - to get close enough to a supermassive black hole, steal enough momentum so you get very close to c, then, a subjective week later, you do the same around another black hole in a different galactic core to shed your momentum and get back to a manageable speed. An intergalactic civilisation would use supermassive black holes as train stations.
• adastra22 5y ago
  You're a pessimist. If we can survive long enough to have sustainable settlements away from this planet and moving out to the stars, there will be no stamping out humanity.
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    The time scales are so vast that’s hard to answer that. We also need to be able to expand do other systems as well. At that stage, I wonder what the appeal of being a planet-hugger is - if we can live in city ships in deep space, why would we want to go into a gravity well just to see a planetary surface from up close?
    • adastra22 5y ago
      The appeal of an inner solar system would be the Dyson swarm surrounding the star, powering a Jupiter-sized matryoshka brain. But most of humanity would live in the vastness between the stars: taking a sun with us in the form of portable fusion power, and making a home among the trillions of Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects between the stars. Hopping from rock to rock, sprouting villages, towns, and cities with each step an blossoming humanity into uncountable many descendant civilizations.
• simonh 5y ago
  Our descendants then.
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    Or successors.
• ayngg 5y ago
  It is hard for me to see a future where humanity lasts long enough for that to be a problem, while not possessing the technology required to address it. I would assume that at that point we would be creating universes to escape to or something else that is unimaginable today.
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    A trillion trillion years from now we’ll be as far from human as a god is to a hydrogen atom.
    • pomdapi 5y ago
      Who's to say god isn't (a) hydrogen atom(s) ?
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        I was going for a notional deity, not a specific one.
        • pomdapi 5y ago
          Fair enough.
• BjoernKW 5y ago
  > Call me a pessimist, but I would be extremely surprised if humans are still around then. Why is that? Despite what pessimists - and even the occasional realist - have been saying for decades now, so far humanity has avoided extinction or civilization collapse. Even the arguably most urgent as well as most important problem for decades to come (climate change) isn't an extinction-level event, even in a worst-case scenario. So far, mankind's continued existence depended on a rather fragile foundation. Once mankind develops into a multi-planetary species, which we are on the verge of becoming, simply all bets are off and things might work out either way. Becoming a multi-planetary species might be the Great Filter we seem to be observing. Paradoxically, that we have yet to meet any species that has already passed that filter, makes it more likely for humans to simply be the first ones to do so.
  • frankfrankfrank 5y ago
    Just alone the fact that people like us who are arguably part of humanity’s most advanced people must believe that climate change is the biggest problem is a very good indicator that humanity will not survive, particularly because you and we are unable to identify other far more immediate pressing challenges that make climate change a relatively meaningless concern even if you accept all of its premises and motivations for concerns about it at face value … a totally other large issue. Just alone the fact that people cannot even speak freely without censorship and of certain topics in order to discuss objectively whether they are legitimate or possibly a greater risk than climate change, specifically because the conversation and topics themselves are forced and enforced, is also a very good indicator that things will not go as well as people want to tell themselves. You say we are on the cusp of interplanetary existence? Just alone the realities of that state are likely to cause more problems that could lead to extinction than not. For example, it is far more likely that humans will rather rapidly diverge in evolution between planets for several reasons, which can lead to all kinds of issues not directly related to whether one of the species of human will survive. We are in a global toxic relationship with each other and are not even clear about fundamental questions of agreeing on basic facts or being able to even just examine whether all the basic assumptions are correct. How one could expect that to allow us to face of extinction is beyond me. However, it strikes me that lying to oneself of faking it til you make it will simply not impress a cold and calculated mistress as reality.
• midasuni 5y ago
  If we survive 300 years we will have self sufficient spacecraft (probably asteroids) and power not reliant on the sun (fusion) Once you have that you inevitably have groups heading off into space in different directions, never to return to Earth, but some will survive trips to other stars, and some will multiply and branch out from then At that point humanity or its descendants will inevitably fill the entire galaxy, although it won’t be a single civilisation.
  • buro9 5y ago
    We'll need to improve our collation and storage of the sum of human knowledge. Today if you took the scrapable internet + wikipedia + all academic journals, you still probably lack enough detail and method to reproduce techniques in manufacturing, mining, tooling, medicine, and so on. If the hypothesis is that humans will survive so long as we are off-planet, then the humans leaving the planet need to be able to do everything fully disconnected from the home world to really survive if something happens to the populace on the home world.
    • zdkl 5y ago
      I really like the IPFS solution to this. Basically a torrent where each chunk is addressable, so you get deduplication on each mirror even across unrelated file hierarchies.