"Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe."
"I know I'll be long dead and the earth long gone, but it still makes me sad to think the universe will die. That there will arise a time when everything that came before is meaningless. Instead of our universe dying, why can't the vacuum's expansion lead to another Big Bang? [...Can anything] rejuvenate the universe and stop it from dying?"
Current cosmology predicts a thermodynamic end state—heat death—where star formation ceases, the last stars burn out, and galaxies dissolve through gravitational interactions until only supermassive black holes remain. Those black holes will evaporate via Hawking radiation over immense timescales, leaving cold, stable, isolated remnants from which no usable energy can be extracted as dark energy drives accelerating expansion. The result is an ever colder, higher-entropy universe with no processes available to sustain complexity. The prospect raises deep existential questions about finality and meaning. Avoiding this fate would require physics beyond the standard picture, such as vacuum transitions, cyclical cosmologies, or mechanisms that reset cosmic entropy.
Read at Big Think
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