Click to viewAs far as cosmic questions go , it ’s as ripe a one as any : When will our great universe cease to be , and shuffle our great^10 ^ 75 - grandchild off the mortal curlicue ? This concern give out beyond the last of the Sun in 5 billion geezerhood , or even the theorized crash of the whitish Way into the Andromeda galaxy in 7 billion . No , the death of the existence is truly elephantine on every scale – inescapable , and fascinating . As Neil DeGrasse Tyson puts it in his book Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries :
With or without warp campaign , the recollective - terminus fate of the world can not be postponed or avoided . No matter where you hide , you will be part of a universe that inexorably marches toward a special oblivion .
Yikes . So what are the peculiar oblivions that we can expect ? 1 . full heat expiry If you ’re like me , chances are your thermodynamics class turn back being pure playfulness right around the time you learned about the second law . The second law introduces the concept of entropy , often report as a measuring rod of disorder in a system , but really a measure of the system ’s inaccessibility to do employment — the evenness with which energy is distributed . Once an ice cube melts in a trash of water , for example , there ’s no way that frappe regular hexahedron will ever be able to go back and do any more work . It ’s finito . The same goes for most of the physical process in the universe . The second law of thermodynamics severalise us that any process , when it go on , can either increase the entropy of the universe or leave it unaltered ; it ca n’t ever decrease the S . So when you think about it that way , it ’s only a matter of time until the entropy in the existence is at its maximum , and there ’s no elbow room for any more processes to come about — including any kind of living . 2 . The big halt As theBig Bangwas occur , the temperature of all the affair in the population was uttermost , on the rules of order of trillions of degrees . In the just about 14 - billion - twelvemonth story that ’s followed , however , the world has continue to bit by bit expand , and so its intermediate temperature has decreased along with it . Today astrophysicist count on it to be about 2.7 degrees Kelvin . Astrophysicists , however , will also tell you that the universe ’s expanding upon has n’t turn back . And aperient mandate that with expanding upon comes cooling . Eventually , the average temperature of the universe will get all the way down to absolute zero ; no matter how fantastic parka technology gets by that time , life will have to turn back . In case 2.7 degrees sound to you like it ’s pretty close to zero , here ’s a gracious matter to remember : Experts in the subject area agree that the passion in the creation should last us at least 10 ^ 10 ^ 26 more years . 3 . A bad crunch / braggy bound Our existence started with a big bang , did n’t it ? Well , perhaps that big bang was just the close of a late universe ’s big compaction — it existed for some amount of time , happy and innocent , and then start to slowly shrink into itself until it collapsed . Collapsed , mind you , with a bang . If this theory is true , it could signify that we ’re live on in an oscillatory universe ; whenever one clump of galaxies has incline its trend , it contracts and explodes to form another . The major difficulty astrophysicists have had back this possibility is that it does n’t excuse how a recur universe like this would avoid full oestrus last . There ’s also theincreasing grounds that the universal expansion will extend indefinitely , but our universe has certainly storm us before . 4 . The big rip So the universe is continually expanding . Some postulate that it ’s expanding with increased velocity toward a minute where everything in the universe will tear itself apart . First , sombreness will become too weak equate to the overwhelming cosmological forces pulling everything out , and galaxies themselves would class . Then , individual ace and satellite would unbind ; in the final end , every molecule in the population would lose that essential gravitative imperative holding their elements together , and all of creation would separate into total destruction . Forthis , my friend , we ’ve got about 50 billion years to go . Honestly , though , despair is not the proper chemical reaction to these theories . If you feel like consider quantum mechanics ( and who does n’t ? ) , there are enough more exciting ways to look at the fate of our existence — you could be the one with the next great proposal for what will bump when we miss into a humiliated energy body politic , or what exactly we can look from the supremely mysterious dark energy that occupies 73 % of our population . And if you ’ve been reading io9 , you have a go at it we ’ve draw your back : we ’re fans ofthe multiverse theory , and not just because it mean that Doctor Who ’s Billie Piper is have her way with David Tennant in another woodworking plane of existence . All of this is a problem for your distant future relative anyway . sour your brain on and give it your all , but you know these cosmic solution will really rule their answer when the kids are listening to the 10 ^ 10 ^ 75 offspring of the Jonas Brothers . Image fromWikipedia .

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