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There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe
StartsWithABang writes: The heat death of the Universe is the idea that increasing entropy will eventually cause the Universe to arrive at a uniformly, maximally disordered state. Every piece of evidence we have points towards our unfortunate, inevitable trending towards that end, with every burning star, every gravitational merger, and even every breath we, ourselves, take. Yet even while we head towards this fate, it may be possible for intelligence in an artificial form to continue in the Universe for an extraordinarily long time: possibly for as long as a googol years, but not quite indefinitely. Eventually, it all must end.
Eventually, it all must end.
Prove it. What's to say we don't figure out a way to harness cosmic expansion or the other 90% of the universe's energy in the vacuum and create a pocket dimension that traverses a Kerr black hole so that we wave to ourselves leaving before we enter the event horizon in an infinite loop?
Prove (mem)Brane theory is wrong, and we don't discover that dark matter is simply the universe next-door some number of us will be able to hop to, perhaps by constructing duplicates in the neighboring universes, and thus propagating across the megaverse (or true universe, since the brane world would then be considered the universal encapsulation medium).
For fuck's sake we haven't even figured out what happens at the event horizon of a black hole, let alone the singularity. For all we know every single galaxy has a super massive gateway to another universe at its center.
I'm not saying that the heat death won't end all intelligent life in this universe, just that it might not.
Black holes dissipate over time.
Yes, but very slowly. A black hole of one solar mass would take about 2e67 years to evaporate through Hawking radiation. The time to evaporate goes up as the cube of the mass, and some black holes are 10 billion solar masses, so they would take more than 1e97 years to evaporate.
Any current black hole with a mass larger than earth's moon would actually be growing, since the cosmic microwave background being absorbed is more than the Hawking radiation being emitted. They will not start to shrink until the universe cools off and the CMB dissipates, far in the future.