What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

[clon]

Isaac Arthur made a compendium called Civilizations at the End of Time [1] that goes into this territory. This guy, in my opinion, goes above and beyond even your typical hard scifi. Can't recommend highly enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58yFf7aZsM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

[newsbinator]

I just gave this a go. It's amazing, thank you for putting it on my radar.

At first his speech impediment makes it harder to follow, but 5 minutes in you're used to it and you're just riveted by the content and the clear communication style.

This is quality stuff.

[e40]

Interesting. What's up with his pronunciation of the words earth and stars? Everything else is perfectly pronounced.

[OscarCunningham]

This goes together nicely with the Aestivation Hypothesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394).

If a civilisation puts itself on hold for a trillion years, just waiting around doing nothing, then when it wakes up the universe is much colder and it can do computations 10^30 times more efficiently. If the civilization consists of minds running on computers then they've increased their own lifespans by the same factor.

[phkahler]

You might enjoy "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

[enkid]

It's not like entropy will halt in that time. Worrying about efficiency of each individual calculation is a little ridiculous when you are wasting billions of years for the ambient temperature to drop.

[nabla9]

The background temperature of the universe now an trillion years from now is not significantly different. It's 2.73 Kelvins today. Even if it goes very close to zero, that's not a big difference.

[visarga]

Here's my take on the future: We'll upload ourselves and use much less energy. As uploaded agents we'll have all the advantages of software - forking multiple instances of ourselves, backup for assured immortality, plugins and upgrades, changing our appearance at will, slowing down or speeding up, becoming part of a collective - everything. It will be Life 2.0, very different from our life.

We've already "uploaded" parts of the brain - visual processing, voice, simple communication and some interaction skills like playing game, moving about and handling objects.

Our age is the first where massive storage, worldwide communication and cheap cameras exist. So we will be an interesting case for the future uploaded agents - we'll be revived based on our digital traces in order to study the origins of Life 2.0 - digital archeology.

[amelius]

Yeah, and we could set the clock speed really low and we wouldn't even notice the difference ;)

[l33tbro]

I'm finding it difficult to understand what you mean by 'uploading'. Do you mean in some kind of Mixed Reality scenario where we are interacting with virtual assets?

[Eliezer]

To accelerate stars, you squeeze them until a jet of matter comes out in the opposing direction. For ideas on getting matter out of stars, see "star lifting".

Furthermore, most of the useful energy in stars is not their nuclear binding energy, it is their potential as gravitational fuel, for example when added into a black hole via the Penrose process. It makes sense to accelerate stars toward the central dwelling place of intelligent life, even if the stars have burned out by the time they get there.

[maxerickson]

How silly. Saying we don't know how to move a star is exactly the same as saying "you just squeeze it", right up until the point you actually go out there and actually fucking squeeze it.

[_ph_]

These are really mind-blowing szenarios. While they might appear as rather theoretical in nature, as they are in such a far distant future, the most striking part was the one of direct practical consequence: based on the theoretical models we can now and today watch for any indication of other civilizations preparing for the far future. And that is pretty cool, even if we might just not see anything interesting.

[readhn]

There simply is no way to predict what life will be like in 1 trillion years. We are still riding horses in many parts of the world, we are still killing each other..

its like asking a caveman what the next update to windows will look like.

We simply have no capacity to think yet.

[a3n]

I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was.

[some_account]

> I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was.

We will be lucky to still be here in 100 years.

[thorum]

Have we ruled out the possibility that a future civilization could slow or stop the expansion of the universe before all the stars disappear from view forever?

[duxup]

For all we know expansion is their plan to eliminate the competition.

[Malic]

Kurzgesagt had some nice summaries of: 1) Why white dwarves might be the last home for life in the universe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsN1LglrX9s 2) ...or maybe it will be black holes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY

[gaius]

all stars outside the Local Group of galaxies will no be accessible to us since they will be receding away faster than the speed of light.

Can anyone explain what this means?

[db48x]

Space is expanding, pushing all the stuff in the universe apart. But "pushing" is not really the right word, because the objects aren't actually being accelerated.

Instead, new space is being created between all objects. This can cause the distance between two objects to increase "faster" than the speed of light, without either of the objects actually moving.

[ithkuil]

The first few paragraphs of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe do a reasonably good job at describing what I assume is the source of your puzzlement (namely how can something recede faster than the speed of light)

[wavedingo]

Due to the big bang the universe is expanding... but you’d expect the expansion to be slowing down due to the drag of gravity. However, since the 1990s we’ve observed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating - the theory is that a force called “dark energy” is causing this acceleration. If the acceleration continues, there will be a point where distant galaxies will be accelerating away from each other at the speed of light. Since light is the universe’s “speed limit”, we would not be able to travel to these galaxies with known physics because even traveling at light-speed the galaxy we’re going to would be stretching away faster. Locally, however, due to gravity, it sounds like the paper is saying we would have regions of dense galaxies that stay closer together. Islands of matter in a sea of dark energy.

[user5994461]

There is a theory that the universe is expanding faster and faster. At some point in the future, stars would be moving away faster than the speed of light and we couldn't ever see them again or reach them.

[mlevental]

the universe is expanding and the expansion is accelerating

[novalis78]

How would this scenario change, if there was a Big Bounce? And how would we potentially recognize alien civilizations preparing for that? And finally: in order to find out which of the two cosmological models is actually the correct one, we just set up SETI to find signs as to which of those two hyper-engineering projects have been undertaken - by civilizations that are a bit further in their cosmological understanding ;-)

[viach]

Then, there will be a post on HN about it, marked [2018 FE (First Era)]. "Ancients knew all this would happen [2018 FE]"

[dmh2000]

this assumes that civilizations will be able to use energy from sources other then their own star (or galaxy) or that it will be possible to get a significant number of their individuals to other stars. unlikely. just hang on until your own star dies then its over.

[tomrod]

By this time in the future I hope we have worked out wormholes.

[ganzuul]

Something wrong with that site. Crashed my browser.

[gigatexal]

What a fascinating read. Thanks for posting this.

[oooooof]

Errr. I think by 2400 we’ve got every chance of living in the ruins of a past grand human civilization.

Trillion is nice sci fi. 10,000 years in the future with any recognizable civilization is even more of a stretch.

[BjoernKW]

A stretch indeed but interesting to think about nonetheless:

10,000 years in the future is the premise of Frank Herbert‘s Dune.

The novel (or rather the series) depicts a mankind that on one hand in some ways has evolved way beyond humanity’s current capabilities.

On the other hand, society has devolved into a feudal state.

Some technologies are shunned and outlawed for their destructive potential, most notably nuclear weapons and “thinking machines” (there’s some room for interpretation if this just means AI or computers in general), which have been replaced by “mentats” (basically human computers).

[akie]

400 years is nothing. I mean, climate change is real and could be very damaging, but what aside from that and war - why do you think we’ll be living amongst ruins? That seems overly pessimistic to me.

[ekianjo]

Thats a pretty pessimistic view to have when we live in an era of ongoing progress in almost every area.

[alf-pogz]

I don't get it. I mean this is the premise of many sci-fi stories, but humanity has made pretty steady civilized progress since its inferred inception. There isn't much of a reason to believe this pessimism.

[phkahler]

I started reading this and then thought "what a waste of time". This pertains in no way to my life or the life of anyone for the foreseeable future. I read it just after the one about taking pictures preventing people from experiencing things and remembering them. Putting these together reminded me that reading some of these things on HN is preventing me from living. And with that, I'm gonna close this laptop and go do something rather than worry what people a trillion years hence will be doing.

[dwaltrip]

The people who actually take humanity to the stars (if it happens) will likely be motivated, in part at least, by this and other grand, cosmic ideas. I personally find it motivating and invigorating in a certain sense.

But, of course, if it is bumming you out, then definitely go do something else :)

[spiritcat]

I mean, it's at least plausible that the first immortal has already been born. Whether that immortality is physical or digital, I'll leave up to the Westworld writers.

Alternate Westworld themed hypothesis: It's already a trillion years in the future, we're all living in the valley beyond and don't realize it.

[throwaway37585]

What you find boring, other people find interesting, and thus not a waste of time. I’m curious about why you bothered to post a rant about how these discussions are “preventing you from living”, followed by a public announcement of how you’re “gonna close this laptop and go do something”. It comes across as bizarre and a bit narcissistic.

[Ensorceled]

There is a lot of weird downvoting in these threads, can anybody explain what is going on?

[sctb]

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but could you please email [email protected] with details so we can take a look instead of posting a meta comment?