[HN Gopher] Universe expected to decay in 1078 years, much soone...
___________________________________________________________________
Universe expected to decay in 1078 years, much sooner than
previously thought
Author : pseudolus
Score : 155 points
Date : 2025-05-12 09:46 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| get your affairs in order.
| coolcase wrote:
| Another 10^3 would be good for humanity
| lordfrito wrote:
| The exponent going 1100 to 78 is pretty large error... huge 93%
| reduction... hopefully they have high confidence in the new
| value, otherwise humanity might be looking at 1 more big
| problem this century.
| immibis wrote:
| It's actually a 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
| 9999999% reduction and yes that is the correct number of 9's.
| stirlo wrote:
| Yep the difference between 10^78 and 10^1100 is
| approximately 10^1100...
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| Despite it being quite a way out it's still a little sad to think
| the end is coming.
| rswail wrote:
| "quite a way out"... is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...
| tobias_irmer wrote:
| To me that still sounds like forever.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I hope they're working on finding a way to massively decrease the
| net entropy in the universe after this.
| andreareina wrote:
| Unfortunately there is as yet insufficient data for a
| meaningful answer
| watt wrote:
| Crack on with it and don't keep us in the dark!
| coolcase wrote:
| The way to do that is to do the most unlikely things
| dvh wrote:
| > 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
| vijaybritto wrote:
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| There's a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars too.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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.
|
| You'd like this book:
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547222/an-infinity-of-worlds...
| hinkley wrote:
| The trouble would be that even if we sensed other universes we
| might not be able to go there unless we can create our own
| pocket universes. There's no guarantee that an adjacent
| universe has the same rules of physics.
|
| All of the enzymes in your body might stop working if you
| stepped into even a slightly different universe. You could just
| turn into a gas, and not in a good way.
| m1117 wrote:
| AI is going to take over anyways
| coolcase wrote:
| It'll be 42'd like everything else
| Aetheridon wrote:
| so i wonder what comes after?
| willis936 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://youtu.be/mht-1c4wc0Q
| voidUpdate wrote:
| The Credits
| Lerc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is a theory out there that once heat death is done
| distance is meaningless, therefore zero, therefore big bang
| again.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
| laxd wrote:
| Conformal cyclic cosmology, by Roger Penrose
| coolcase wrote:
| I think that's it. Ad a layman I don't understand how the
| final transition (final hawking radiation) then tells the
| rest of the universe "I'm done" similar to a sprint
| retro!
| mr_toad wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 :) )
| kergonath wrote:
| > having read Brief History Of Time a long time ago :)
|
| It pains me to say this, because it is a masterpiece of
| vulgarisation, putting arcane physics and cosmology within
| reach of (still decently-educated) normal people, but it is
| very outdated in a lot of respects. It badly needs something
| else.
|
| I found some of Carlo Rovelli's books to be quite compelling,
| but they are more focused on the topic of time and space-
| time. Not really the universe in the same way as Hawking's
| were.
| blueflow wrote:
| 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.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxVssUb0MsA
| leptons wrote:
| Hawking never knew "what really is going on". He wrote some
| nice hypotheses, but he never knew for sure, and was not
| ever close to knowing.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| But he did know the simplification was wrong.
| mr_toad wrote:
| No, all objects with non-zero temperature radiate heat. Stars,
| white dwarfs, black holes, even the universe itself.
| blueflow wrote:
| I said inert rock at background temperature
|
| so radiated and absorbed heat should already be accounted
| for, right?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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?
| cvoss wrote:
| The whole point of Hawking radiation is that a thing which
| famously shouldn't have a decay process (a black hole) in fact
| does have a decay process due to the interaction of gravity and
| quantum mechanics.
| terabytest wrote:
| 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?
| saberience wrote:
| See The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov:
|
| https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They'll exist because of Wan-To.
|
| The World at the End of Time by Frederick Pohl.
| rswail wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| it won't be humanity, but it should hopefully be some
| sort of intelligence
| diego898 wrote:
| Very strongly suggest you check out Isaac Asimov's "The Last
| Question"
|
| https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
| brazzy wrote:
| Or, for an alternative and rather more in depth treatment,
| Stephen Baxter's "Manifold: Time"
| krapp wrote:
| The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an immutable characteristic
| of our universe. Entropy in a closed system (like the universe)
| is irreversible.
| exe34 wrote:
| It was set to zero once, so somebody somewhere/somewhen
| figured it out before.
| WhatsName wrote:
| Or rather we are a fork/thread somewhere is spacetime.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| git branch
| krapp wrote:
| lolwut?
| felipeerias wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The origami of petal unfolding implies the rose blooms
| forever says all bugkind dwelling on the bud.
| AnonC wrote:
| 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If the big bang created space and time, "before the big
| bang" is not really well-defined.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Unless you believe that this universe is just playing out
| holographic on the event horizon of an N+1d black hole in
| our parent universe. The Big Bang was just the
| singularity birth of that one object.
| generic92034 wrote:
| From inside that universe there still was no "before".
| Are you looking into our universe from the outside? ;)
| glenstein wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is a good reason not to throw away your old textbooks.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Is that right? Only 5 billion years until noone sees the
| background radiation and other galaxies?!
|
| That's... awe inspiring.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| That seems relatively soon! I know it's a huge number, but
| on universal scales, that's crazy
| Strilanc wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/49248/inte
| rpre...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
| xdennis wrote:
| > Can you provide the source for that quote? 5 billion
| years seems way too soon.
|
| Yeah, seems off. According to Wikipedia it's 2 trillion
| years[1] until galaxies outside the Local Supercluster
| become undetectable.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_u
| nivers...
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Which leads one to wonder what phenomena we were too late to
| observe and which of our assumptions are therefore faulty
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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!
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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.
| TOGoS wrote:
| This is a wacky, seemingly out-of-place philosophical
| comment, yet I have had similar thoughts, so I give you an
| irreverent upvote.
| thatguymike wrote:
| There's a very entertaining Dwarkesh podcast with Adam Brown
| about this: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Humans are the universe contemplating this.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The only serious answer is that we have absolutely no way of
| knowing that.
| Extropy_ wrote:
| This is the original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14734
|
| They say their findings set "a general upper limit for the
| lifetime of matter in the universe."
| fsiefken wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I suspect we have more immediate problems than "can we survive
| the next n billion years".
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| There have already been close calls with nukes. No way in
| hell we last another hundred.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If only it was nukes. I'm afraid we're more likely to go
| out with a whimper. The fertility rates have plummeted and
| there's no reason to believe those will rise back to
| replacement level.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| What values do you think we should optimize for?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Good. Maybe now they can prove Hawking radiation in something
| that isn't a bath tub. Or an oven.
| Ekaros wrote:
| One more argument not to do anything about climate change. After
| all universe is going decay shortly...
| thom wrote:
| Ah, just time for another bath. Pass me the sponge somebody, will
| you?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| How can the universe come from an infinite point and have no
| Centre.
| acuozzo wrote:
| The center is everywhere.
| laxd wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh no! What are we going to do about this?
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rswail wrote:
| People will be gathering at the Restaurant At The End Of the
| Universe with Douglas Adams as the host.
| chasing wrote:
| Probably on a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
| octocop wrote:
| the term "sooner" in this case is, you know, relative
| jmclnx wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Bad news for Boltzmann brains
| matheusd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Does this mean such an event could produce, say, an entire
| universe?
|
| If so, does this theoretically mean that a cyclic universe
| is possible in this way, and that if one were to go far
| enough - impossibly, unfathomably far - you might find the
| remnants of other universes?
| immibis wrote:
| The theory of Boltzmann brains is that you're way more
| likely to get just a brain (including false memories of a
| planet earth and a whole visibile universe around it),
| than to get a brain, a planet earth, and a whole visible
| universe around it. So the chance that any of that is
| real, given that a brain exists to perceive it, is
| infinitesimal. We are probably just floating human brains
| that popped into the vastness of space three microseconds
| ago, complete with false memories of the distant past.
|
| To dispel a misconception: They're not some hypothetical
| type of brain that exists as pure quantum fluctuations
| (though those are _even more_ likely). Boltzmann was
| talking about the probability of actual flesh-and-blood
| human brains arising spontaneously out of the vacuum.
| simonh wrote:
| Wouldn't the vast majority of those be incoherent broken
| messes, of various levels of inconsistency? Only a teeny
| tiny fraction would be coherent. So the expected
| experience fir any arbitrary Boltzmann brain would be all
| over the place.
| x1000 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| They may not actually happen:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.02780
| dan_can_code wrote:
| Damn. That ruins my retirement plans
| bdangubic wrote:
| just in time for your 401k to recover :)
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| One of my favorite Wikipedia pages
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
| lattalayta wrote:
| In video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
| tarsius wrote:
| For dramatic effect, my monitor turned off right after "By
| this point, distant galaxies and starts are receding so fast
| that their light has become undetectable."
| rwoerz wrote:
| My favourite sleep aid video.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Here's my favorite youtube version of this:
|
| https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA
| thih9 wrote:
| > in 10k years (...) the average length of a solar day will be
| 1/30 of an SI second longer than it is today.
|
| Looks like a new test case scenario for libraries that handle
| time/date.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Am I misreading something, or isn't that already in 1,000
| years?
| thih9 wrote:
| You are correct, I made a typo in the grandparent comment -
| it should have been 1k years. Unfortunately I can no longer
| edit.
| timewizard wrote:
| Insertion of a leap second every month.
| slicktux wrote:
| Great wiki page! It even mentions Boltzmann Brains! " This
| infinite future could allow for the occurrence of massively
| improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains."
| paulpauper wrote:
| So given these finding, that page will need to be overhauled a
| lot
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| To survive beyond 1 Gy from now, life will need to move
| underground where the water is and hopefully much cooler than
| the eventual surface. Also, such life may/will become necessary
| to relocate to Mars, hopefully taking resources with them. (I
| don't say "us" because of likely dramatic evolution.)
| evtothedev wrote:
| I feel like you could build an entire meditation practice
| around reading this article.
| azemetre wrote:
| That or existential dread.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| It pairs well with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
| grues-dinner wrote:
| If Reid Malenfant or Jim Bolder aren't involved, this isn't the
| deep time future I'm interested in.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| so many years - and how many miles?
| belter wrote:
| Did Broadcom acquire this Universe?
| IamLoading wrote:
| If humans end up existing at 10^77 years. You would hope and
| imagine that they would be prepared for the decay?
| recursive wrote:
| Well, that's only 10% of the way there, so they'd still have
| most of the time left.
| hinkley wrote:
| Let the grandkids worry about it. Now would you be a pal and
| hand me another another atomic mimosa?
| recursive wrote:
| It would be the great-great-great-... Actually, there
| aren't enough electrons in this system to encode all the
| great-s needed to express the name of the generation.
|
| I'm all for thinking of the children, but planning at that
| range is probably impossible.
| hathym wrote:
| with what's going on, not sure if human will exist in the next
| 10 years
| foobarkey wrote:
| 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 :)
| ewzimm wrote:
| You're in good company. Something similar, minus the hydrogen
| phase, is proposed by Roger Penrose:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Apparently time ceases when absolutely all mass is gone,
| because mass is required for a clock.
|
| This of course requires the decay of protons.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Why would time cease because all the measuring devices were
| gone?
| sourdoughness wrote:
| My understanding of this idea is that once the universe
| reaches a state of maximum entropy (this is the "heath
| death" of the universe, where everything is a uniform,
| undifferentiated cloud of photons, then time stops being
| meaningful because there can be no change from moment to
| moment. In a sense, time _is_ the change from low to high
| entropy - if you don't have any entropy gradient, you
| can't have any time either.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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!
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The big bang happened at the center of the universe and every
| point of space is the center of the universe at all times.
| You could argue that the center of spacetime is
| definitionally the Big Bang since that's when time is
| believed to have started to exist in the first place but we
| don't have a good grasp of how to define the center of a 4D
| physical structure where one dimension is time which doesn't
| seem to really act like the other dimensions.
| hinkley wrote:
| Are you saying you're the center of the universe?
| layer8 wrote:
| The evidence about the accelerating expansion of the universe
| would seem to contradict that theory.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Not necessarily.
|
| A) We don't know if all derivatives are >= 0. e.g. if the
| jerk rate is < 0, then you'd expect contraction eventually.
| Similarly, if the derivative of the jerk rate is < 0 & so on.
| So even accelerating expansion could eventually lead to
| contraction.
|
| B) We don't have a lot of very highly compelling evidence
| that the universe is actually accelerating (at least nowhere
| like we do for the Big Bang). For example, alternate models
| have proposed that our apparent perception of the expansion
| is simply as a result of the effect of non-uniform gravity
| throughout the universe & that the vaccuum of space between
| galaxies has even less time dilation and that's what make it
| look like things are expanding.
|
| In other words, I'd put the model of a permanently expanding
| universe as less likely to actually match reality.
| chasil wrote:
| The proton itself that forms the hydrogen atom might decay (we
| don't know yet; we do know that neutrons decay after 15
| minutes).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay
| hinkley wrote:
| Neutron decay is one of those things that I forgot between
| college physics classes and today and it was sort of
| surprising to rediscover it.
|
| We also know that electrons eventually decay but it's
| something like 10^26 years, which is long enough to say that
| probably not many electrons in the solar system have decayed
| since the universe was born but the universe is really
| stupidly big, so it absolute numbers that could still be a
| lot of dead electrons. Maybe a solar system's worth.
|
| Surprisingly there is no wikipedia page for this. Just rando
| articles.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Iron is the most stable atomic nucleus (at least if we don't
| consider Nickel-62).
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Heat death is just so depressing.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Maybe we should siphon off hydrogen and helium from the Sun
| for storage elsewhere in the Solar System to reduce the burn
| rate to prolong the usable lifetime of its fuel? And build a
| Dyson sphere. ;D
| hinkley wrote:
| I've watched enough Doctor Who to know that being the last
| one alive at the end of time is pretty goddamned lonely.
| And dark.
|
| You can have all of my poptarts, I'm likely to check out.
| amelius wrote:
| But will the sequence of events be exactly the same in each
| loop iteration?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| It's nonsense.
|
| 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| * 2 [?] 1_ (where 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The authors wrote a reply to that comment
|
| 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,.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| There's _a lot_ wrong with that reply -- it mostly just
| shifts the goalposts without answering the central objections
| raised in the comment.
|
| Much of the reply revolves around whether the mixed invariant
| G=E[?]B appears at leading or higher order in the QED
| Schwinger result. But the comment's critique used the
| constant-field Schwinger problem only as a check that the
| authors' master formula fails against a case with an _exact_
| answer; the real complaint is that the same failure occurs
| for curved-spacetime examples where the exact result is known
| to vanish. Debating G is fine, but you can 't ignore the
| gravitational case either.
|
| The reply repeatedly says the comment is "outside the realm
| of applicability" of the formula -- as though that were the
| comment's fault! But if the formula cannot survive the very
| checks the authors themselves hold up (Schwinger with B[?]0,
| Ricci-flat space), the burden is on the authors to (severely)
| restrict their own claims, not on critics to ignore the
| failure modes.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Naively speaking, these predictions seem like they should be
| very sensitive to all sorts of effects, some better understood
| than others. It's odd how many commenters here treat headlines
| like these as settled fact, instead of one team's calculations
| based on assumptions that may be wildly off.
| lawlessone wrote:
| i'll have to move that meeting forward.
| jeff_carr wrote:
| /remindme in 10^60 years
| wwilim wrote:
| Better get around to painting those Warhammer minis soon
| hinkley wrote:
| I gotta start working on my reading backlog. Luckily I already
| returned all my library books.
| tsumnia wrote:
| Glad to see my Collapsing Universe Theory is starting to happen
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Upgrade to Universe 2.0 before our EOL date of 1078 and receive a
| free 108 month trial of Universe+ with cosmic karma monitoring
| and additional features such as dark mode.
| usui wrote:
| I... I thought we already had dark mode..
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| No. The CMBR of the current universe gives a nice comforting
| grey. Upgrade today for VantaBlack cosmos, guaranteed no EM
| at all!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Thermodynamic purists hate this thing!
| eGQjxkKF6fif wrote:
| _cranks up music to 999999 dB_
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| ugh, no zero-point energy? What a regression.
| JRCharney wrote:
| I wish the universe would give me the option not to restart and
| apply this update right in the middle of a project! It's not
| like I was working on something or had my browser tabs the way
| that I like them.
| speckx wrote:
| Time to dig into that game backlog on Steam.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| It's the first time I see unicode exponent numbers actually get
| used
| foreigner wrote:
| My HN reader displays this topic as "Universe expected to decay
| in 10 years, much sooner than previously thought".
|
| And it's not wrong, that _is_ much sooner than previously
| thought!
| munificent wrote:
| I mean, it's already decaying. So it will be decaying in 10
| years too.
|
| It's really a question of when it will _stop_ decaying.
| Bluestein wrote:
| There go my vacations! :)
| nkrisc wrote:
| It used to be decaying. It's still decaying, but it used to,
| too.
| wpasc wrote:
| The Universe asked me, "Guess what? I'm decaying"
|
| I said, "Dude, you've gotta give me time to guess"
| isk517 wrote:
| Considering 10^1100 years was the previously postulated time to
| decay then, assuming the Netherlands Research School for
| Astronomy is correct in their 10^78 years calculation, 10 years
| is still significantly closer to the correct date.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Firefox displays 10^78 with boxes for superscript. Chrome
| doesn't have any problem.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| It could either be your fonts and/or your particular
| platform. I've seen this sort of thing before elsewhere, I
| think on Windows with certain fonts IIRC. I opened it on
| Firefox 138.0.1 on aarch64 for mac and there weren't any
| artifacts.
| anticensor wrote:
| Windows has limited font substitution support, that's
| probably why.
| deepsun wrote:
| I'm on Firefox -- no problems. Both on Android and Linux.
| graypegg wrote:
| Damn... got to adjust the roadmap. Universe heat death milestone
| just got moved up.
| seydor wrote:
| Bad news for my proton decay stocks
| feverzsj wrote:
| That's really bad news for immortals.
| hinkley wrote:
| Better make friends with the creation immortals so you get
| invited to their parties.
| cozzyd wrote:
| good news, we'll never need more than a 512 bit time_t
| divbzero wrote:
| Relative to that time scale we are still, at ~1010 years, in the
| opening moments of the universe.
| hinkley wrote:
| If an age of the universe passed for every year the universe
| has already existed, we'd still have some time left at the end.
| unzadunza wrote:
| According to The End of Everything
| (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52767659-the-end-of-ever...)
| decay is only one of the ways it all ends. Unfortunately most
| (all?) the other ways happen way earlier.
| fuzzer371 wrote:
| So... Who cares. No one is going to be around even 10^3 years
| from now. It doesn't help anyone to know, and there's nothing we
| can do about it.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I am suspicious this attitude is responsible for much personal
| and environmental destruction. I wonder how we can remove it
| from humanity; it is one of the most dangerous pervasive
| mindsets for our, and the biosphere's survival.
| JesseTG wrote:
| If anyone here happens to be immortal, how will you plan around
| this?
| nottorp wrote:
| In the long run we're all dead aren't we?
| vasco wrote:
| And taxes
| nottorp wrote:
| I believe most jurisdictions stop taxing you when you're
| dead.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| You were dead before. On average you've been dead the whole
| time.
| deadbabe wrote:
| When we're dead, I know we don't feel anything, but when the
| universe also becomes dead I wonder if we'll not feel anything to
| a degree that we didn't even know possible, a death beyond death,
| if that makes sense. It's like not only are we dead and gone, but
| our entire life is gone so thoroughly that it's like it never
| even happened, and if it never even happened, what the hell is
| this moment we experience now? Just a passing illusion as a
| universe explodes?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| That is about within a factor of 1000 of the number of atoms in
| the universe. So divide the universe into 1000 compartments of
| equal atom count, and there is about 1 year left for each atom in
| there.
|
| To put this in perspective, a drop of water is about 1 trillion
| groups of 100 billion atoms (or 100 sextillion atoms).
|
| So, we got some time left.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I was thinking that since apparently Hawking radiation applies to
| all objects (I thought it was just black holes), maybe it would
| be interesting to try to actually observe it on the moon. But
| then I ran the numbers and, if the authors are correct, the moon
| is losing about 1 electron mass to Hawking radiation every 10^37
| years!
| BlandDuck wrote:
| "Estimate of the remaining time before universe decays expected
| to be revised 10^76 times before its finally over"
|
| (conservatively assuming the estimate will be revised about once
| every hundred years as we learn more).
| jpease wrote:
| Accepting table reservations now, you won't want to miss this.
| hinkley wrote:
| Sorry I'm busy that day. Can we schedule for the following...
| oh. How about the previous Tuesday?
| Vasniktel wrote:
| OMG, the economy
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