Galactic Civilization’s End

If a technological civilization manages to survive itself, how will it fare against the larger challenges of a changing and hostile universe? If humanity ascends the Kardashev scale, how will our unrecognizable and godlike descendants cope with the end of the universe itself? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick for an exploration of the cosmic end times. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And today we're going to be looking at a question
about the future a sort of today will be a

(00:23):
speculative out ing. So the question that we want to
start with today is the broad one, and then we'll
break it down into specific, specific ways of looking at
this question. The question is how long could a technological
civilization last? And notice that I just used the word
civilization and technological not necessarily human civilization, since time and

(00:46):
space scales the kind we're talking about could really blur
the lines of what it means for a civilization to
be human or consistently any one biological species. So for now,
I'd say, let's just define civilization as something like a
continue this tradition of intelligent behavior. Uh, if you've got
something like that, Assume a civilization like ours leaves Earth

(01:07):
and spreads out to colonize other star systems and becomes
a presence on the galactic stage. How long could a
civilization like that actually survive into the future. You kind
of have to think of of civilization as a virus
spreading through this uh, this galactic and ultimately I as
a universal host. How how far could it spread? How

(01:29):
long could it maintain the infection? Um? And it's it
is challenging at times just to think about it because
we we can't help but extrapolate what we have now
and what we know, and we have to do that
in order to to sort of scale up the model
of what a galactic civilization might look like. Um. And
at the because I think back to Star Trek for instance.

(01:52):
You know, Star Trek is essentially a show about clipper ships.
It's about seafaring individuals. It's just extrapolated into space and
then uh, you know, with a lot of cool science
science and science fictional elements explored within it, exploring the
planets of potted plants. Yeah. But but ultimately it is
it is based on the model of the president in

(02:15):
the past. Um. And then then there's also this this
element too of just um you know, uh, grandiose pride
and human accomplishment to to wonder where will we be
uh in this distant age. It reminds me of of
a quote from J. M. Coats. He's waiting for the barbarians,
and which he writes, quote one thought alone preoccupies the

(02:38):
submerged mind of empire, how not to end, how not
to die, how to prolong its era. I think that's
quite true, though, I mean the conception of empire that
we have is so time limited. I mean people who
are trying to prolong the empires that were used to
thinking about, say Cotsy probably has in mind something like

(02:59):
the British Empire um. That is an empire that, even
though it existed for a long period of time, was
on the scale of you know, people's recognizable descendants. You know,
you would be saying, I want to hand on my
empire to my child, or my grandchild or my great grandchild.
Do you do you want to hand on your empire

(03:19):
to something that is maybe not even recognizably the same
species as you a million years down the road. Yeah.
It kind of becomes the situation where one is, say
passing on a typewriter or or some other piece of technology,
where you're like, this has been in our family for years,
and then you're like, well, thanks, but it's and it
is now obsolete. It is it is kind of useless.

(03:41):
It's it's actually of more value perhaps now as a
mere museum piece or just as a metal to be recycled.
That's true, I guess it. Also it sort of works
out how you don't have to care about that thing
that's a million years down the road, whether or not
you think of that as your direct descendant or not,
because you care about next generation, and that generation will

(04:02):
always care about the next generation. It's just an echo
through through time and space. Yeah. I think one of
the important things to deep in mind and all of
this is just to what extent to things UH scale up,
you know, because we think about the empires and the
technology we have today and UH, I think is what
As we proceed through this discussion, it will be reminded

(04:24):
time and time again that that that human life, human empires,
they don't really scale up when you start applying them
to even even at the interplanetary stage, things begin to
get a little difficult. But certainly when you get beyond
beyond that, when you talk about UH, an empire that
spans solar systems or or or manages to spread throughout

(04:45):
an entire galaxy and human life as well, there are challenges. Obviously,
there are challenges when we think of of what we
have now, and even if you achieve some sort of
biological or digital immortality, um, it's it's difficult to put
that in context. Yeah. Now, one of the first questions
that you might ask is, well, how long would it take?
How long is it gonna take for a galactic civilization

(05:08):
to emerge? Okay, we gotta get there before we can
ask how long it will exist or survive? Right, Yeah,
And this is something that science fiction and authors often
kind of hatch you out, depending on how into you
know defining a timeline they are. Now. In his book Cosmos,
Carl Sagan commented on the Drake equation. Right. So, the
Drake equation we we've talked about on the show before,

(05:29):
but if you'll recall, it's essentially an equation put together
to come up with a rough estimate based on some
some variables where you can plug in your assumptions for
the answers UH to figure out how many technological civilizations
you would expect to find in a galaxy. So basically,
the short version is you take the number of planets

(05:50):
that there could be life on and then multiply that
by some probabilities like the fraction of planets where life emerges,
the fraction of the is where intelligent life evolves, the
fraction that's capable of interstellar communication, and the years a
civilization tends to remain detectable before for whatever reason, uh

(06:11):
disappearing right. And Sagan pointed out that civilizations might tend
to destroy themselves soon after reaching the technological phase, but
that at least some civilizations might learn to live with
high technology. He figured that, using the Drake equation, if
just one percent of all emergent technological civilization survived this
technological adolescence, then there could be millions of civilizations out there. Now,

(06:34):
there don't appear to be millions of civilizations out there
well as far as we know, as far as we know.
But but here's the thing. Sagan and William Newman calculated
that if a mill that if a million years ago
a space faring civilization emerged two hundred light years away
from us and spread outward, survey ships would only just
now be entering our solar system. And then what would

(06:55):
that even look like? What would a million year old
civilization uh, you know manifest as uh? I mean, our
current and only model outside of sci fi dreams is
our civilization. It's me. And it's a mere you know,
tens of thousands of years old, and we've only been
a technological civilization for a few centuries. So what would
these presumed immortals even be interested in when it comes

(07:17):
to exploring and colonizing new worlds? Would they have would
would they be interested in that at all? Would they
sort of would they perhaps give up on their colonization efforts,
uh after they realize that they need to perhaps extend
their their energy and other directions. It's a good question.
I mean, I think that it helps, um it helps
when trying to imagine the future behavior of civilizations, whether

(07:40):
alien or ours, to try to have as few assumptions
baked in as possible. And so you can make assumptions
maybe about what alien psychology might be, like, what their
their directives are an exploration, but all of those are
somewhat fallible. One of the things I think we can
bank on as an assumption about future your civilizations is

(08:01):
that they will need energy. That that's that's a that's
a kind of ground level assumption that just you can
count on that. But then how how might their goals change?
Like they have energy, they could have all the energy,
certainly in a world, in a solar system, in across
multiple systems. But then what do they really want to
do with it? And and indeed do they want to

(08:21):
survive the long term challenges of life in our universe
with their goals understanding? And even experience of time and
space differ from what we humans value and experience today. Uh,
it could be, but once you get into those scenarios,
it's just hard to it's hard to predict anything with
any confidence. Yeah, I mean so, yeah, this is where
you get into the really the domain of science fiction. Um,

(08:43):
I don't Oh, and there's plenty of great science fiction
along these lines. Yeah. I'm reminded of the various advanced
Elder civilizations in Ian Ebanks culture books. Um, because beyond
the the high level involved civilizations that engage with other
galactic civilizations in these books, there are what's known as
the sublime. The sublime these are advanced civilizations that basically,

(09:06):
at some point they just left all of their their
works behind because they've left the known dimensions of space
time behind to take up residents in several higher dimensions
higher dimensions. Now, does this what assumes string theory or
something like that, in which they're they're tiny higher dimensions
where you can somehow bacond your consciousness into some kind

(09:27):
of substrate that can transcend into those hidden dimensions. Well,
that's where my mind goes to, especially since we've we've
very recently spoken about dimensions and string theory. Uh. Now
I haven't I haven't read some of at least one
of the key books that deals with the sublime in
the culture A series. But it's basically the idea that
that suddenly that this particular group has reached a level

(09:50):
of technological and cultural advancement where they're not even playing
the same game as we are, that they are perhaps
not even really experiencing the universe in the same way
as we are, and they just kind of leave it behind.
Uh indeed, like a like like like something emerging from
a chrysalis and uh in taking off into a new
realm of being. And but in doing this, at the

(10:12):
same time, it's possible that sublimation uh might actually protect
them from the truly long term environmental risks of living
in our universe. So maybe it accomplishes the same go
But of course that is that is the benefit afforded
by playing in the realm of imagination. We don't know
if anything like that is possible or not. So let's
get into some of the long term environmental challenges of

(10:33):
of life in a hostile universe. Well, I guess first
we should look just the planetary level. Yeah, let's start
with with Earth itself, right, So there are a number
of factors to consider here, the most obvious being threats
from within and threats from beyond. So we certainly have
the ability to drastically damage the life sustaining properties of
planet Earth. In fact, we are we are currently doing that. Yes, yes,

(10:55):
with with say greenhouse gas emissions leading to global climate change,
we are verely hampering the Earth's ability to sustain a
civilization like ours far into the future. Yeah, the results
can be catastrophic. Now, could we actually wipe out all
life on the planet if such an evil aim possessed us?
I think we would probably have a hard time doing that.

(11:17):
I mean, life is pretty resilient, but we could come
frighteningly close. I've seen some estimates for how a large
enough nuclear war uh could could severely damage and wipe out,
you know, a significant number of of life forms on
our planet. I also read get this, um how even
even an extremely powerful detonation in the Mariana Trench could

(11:41):
collapse the food chain and wipe out most plant and
animal life specifically. And this is according to uh x
k c D s Randall Monroe uh x k c
d as a science blog and comic series online. Uh He,
according to his calculations, a fifty three million in megatun
explosion down in the trench might just do the trick.

(12:03):
This would be equal to the chicks Aloop impact that
occurred roughly sixty six million years ago, which led to
the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event, and that killed sev of
all animal and plant species. That was the size of
a city, and it had the power of a billion
nuclear bombs. And this brings us to the extinction events
that can occur due to unchecked space collisions. Yeah, now

(12:27):
there's there's actually been some evidence to support the idea
that there's a a twenty six million year cycle linking
comet showers and global die offs. Yeah, there are people
who pause it all kinds of like like periods of
space impacts and what the causes of those might be.
But one thing we can say is that space impacts
are just a statistics game. I mean, you're it's just

(12:48):
a waiting game. Like you know, every so many years,
you're you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to get X number
of powerful storms that hit a certain part of the world.
Space impacts are the same way. There are a bunch
of objects out there, they're flying around, and you can
just calculate it out over certain periods of time, statistically
you're going to be hit by X number of objects

(13:10):
above a certain mass. So when you're we're talking about
a human civilization, uh, surviving however many you know, thousands
upon thousands upon thousands of years, certainly reaching like the
million or two million. Your point. If you want life
to continue on Earth, then you have to do something
about the potential impacts. Because defense, Yeah, you gotta have

(13:34):
planetary defense, which is something that uh that people are
working on. Uh we've discussed it on the show before.
It's still not as much of a priority as it
should be. You have all of these uh, these politicians
out there, you know, making campaign promises and talking about
what they're gonna do for for for to improve everyone's life,

(13:55):
and it always floors me that this is not something
that people take up because this is one of the
This is perhaps the only, or at least one of
the very few causes where we can say this is
something we can do to save the world. This is
something we can do to protect the planet. Yeah, what
what if there? That was like a what if that
was a campaign platform? It was basically civilization level defense.

(14:18):
So your your campaign platform is fight climate change, protect
the planet from space object impacts, and let's say the
other big one would be prepared for the next superflu
It makes sense to me, I mean, I guess the
the the the counter argument here is that most these
are these are generally longer term threats. Uh, so people

(14:40):
are going to be less inclined to let it impact
their voting behavior. It's frustrating. But anyway, uh some other
problems that, of course so be as we've discussed before.
Venus offers an example of this of a sort of
worst case runaway greenhouse effect that could leave a planet,
even a planet like Earth, uninhabitable, And there are also

(15:01):
various long term scenarios involving the world's oceans, the magnetosphere,
which if you listen to the show, you know that
the magnetosphere plays a vital role in protecting our planet
from silver and cosmic radiation, and if something were to
happen to that, then we're unprotected. There are also biological
threats from within Earth's biosphere. That's right. You have to

(15:23):
consider the likes of Peter Ward's media hYP hypothesis. I
was actually not familiar with this. This is a kind
of an opposite of the Gaia hypothesis and uh, the
Medeia hypothesis is that multicellular life is a suicidal superorganism
leading to microbial triggered mass extinctions. I mean, whether you

(15:44):
buy the framing is a suicidal superorganism, it is clear
that there have been times in the past where life
on Earth caused massive extinctions of other types of life
on Earth. I mean, we think about the oxygenation of
our atmosphere that we are now adapted to was initially
tragedy that killed killed off tons of life, and then
of course we've seen this this particular primate species rise

(16:06):
up and uh and and alter the atmosphere from a
very early time. And then of course there are the
outside context problems to consider, which, of course is a
term that was coined by Ian M. Banks but has
been used since then by various other authors and even scientists.
You call them outside context problems to consider, but sort

(16:27):
of the nature of them means that what you can't
consider the right right. Yeah. Banks said that an outside
context problem is the sort of thing most civilizations encounter
just once, in which they tend to encounter rather in
the same way as sentence encounters a full stop. Um.
So yeah, if we could. The classic example, of course
is um, if you have a primitive terrestrial society and

(16:49):
then uh, a colonial force shows up with advanced technology,
you know, and then to extrapolate that into space, an
alien civilization shows up with it with advanced head ology.
But of course, when the thing about the the alien
consideration is that a lot of very intelligent folks have
thought about this problem. There are even some rudimentary plans

(17:10):
in place to deal with it when it occurs, you know,
people who think about first contact. So it's not really
a completely outside contact problem. Yeah. You could look at
a lot of science fiction as us doing our very
best to use our imaginations to prepare for this potential conflict. Right.
But one of the big hard limits for life on

(17:30):
Earth uh and in our solar system itself, concerns the
life cycle of our son. Now maybe we should take
a quick break and then come back to UH to
discuss and weep in anguish over the death of the Sun.
Than alright, we're back. So we we've talked about the
life cycle of the Sun before on this show, but
just to refresh, this is basically how it it works.

(17:54):
So our son has been going strong for four point
five billion years and it has another five billion years
left in the town. When the courts roughly speaking, roughly speaking, now,
when the core runs out of hydrogen fuel, it's going
to contract under the weight of gravity. Some hydrogen fusion
will occur in the upper layers at this point. But
as a depleted core contracts, it heats up, and this
heats the upper layers of the Sun, causing them to expand.

(18:16):
And as the outer layers expand, the radius of the
Sun will increase and it will become a red giant.
And the radius of the of a red giant son,
our red giant son would be a hundred times what
it is now. It's not good. Now, that's that's not
good for anybody, because this would this would put the
put the the the the outside of the Sun just

(18:36):
beyond the Earth's orbit, and some scientists have estimated that
this would just vaporize our planet, but there's also a
good chance it would push Earth and its moon outward
after consuming mercury and venus. In any case, whatever it does,
it does not sound like a survivable event for the
inhabitants of Earth. That's right, It's just it's it's bad news.
And long before this happens, say in a mirror one

(18:57):
to two billion years, the Earth is gonna go hot
enough to to boil away its oceans as well. And
if we're looking really long term, um, here's how it'll
it'll all play out. According to Ethan Seagull, who wrote
how our Solar System will end in the Far Future
for Forbes. Uh. He says that in nine point five
billion years, the sunile collapse into a white dwarf, and

(19:19):
the remaining dead worlds will continue to orbit it, and
eventually the white dwarf will go dark in the inevitable
collision between it and another black dwarf will blast apart
the remnants of our solar system. So all that and
the Sun doesn't even get to turn into a black hole.
That's right, the Sun will never get to turn into
a black it's not massive enough. Uh, and yet it

(19:39):
will wreak havoc. Nonetheless, So what's our fight or flight
response here? Well, it obviously means if our civilization is
going to survive into the realm of say billions of years,
if you're on the billions order of magnitude for the future,
we can't stay here, that's right. We've got to build ships,
We've got to build colonies. We've got to estab colonies

(20:00):
on other worlds and other systems as well. Or perhaps
we do something to just move the Earth itself, because
as we ascend the Kardashian scale, such things do theoretically
become possible. Sure, at least in theory. For instance, we
can harness comments and asteroids so they gravitationally slingshot past
Earth and move us into a wider orbit away from
the Sun. We could build planetary sunshades that have the

(20:24):
same effect, or or very or even just sort of
turn the Earth into a spaceship of sorts, you know,
just take it with us. Well, there are versions, like,
for example, there is one idea that's not for moving
planets so much as it is for moving stars. But
I wonder if similar principles could be applied to planets,

(20:44):
where it's known as the Scatoff thruster if you're read
about the Yeah, so this is for stars. But what
it would do would be would be sort of a
large reflective encasement for part of a star that would
cause a positive radi asian pressure in one direction back
against the star. And by reflecting all of this radiation

(21:06):
back in the direction of the star, you could actually
steer the movement of a star. One wonders if you
could create some kind of similar solar sale like thing
for a planet. Then again, the planet is not emitting
radiation the way a star is, So I don't know,
maybe maybe possible, maybe not, Yeah, or ultimately we could
just leave it behind, move on to better worlds, make
better worlds. Exodus from an uninhabitable Earth has been a

(21:28):
sci fi staple for decades, going back at least to
the nineteen thirties. That's when British sci fi author Olaf
Stapleton wrote about it and uh during the events of
Frank Herbert's Dune, Old Earth is said to be an
uninhabited waste. Oh yeah, do they ever go there? I
don't not. In the the original books that they might

(21:48):
have something that takes place in the more recent Dune
franchise books, but I have not read them, so I
would love to hear from from hardcore Dune readers on that. Now.
When it comes to moving the planet, though, we also
see some work there in science fiction. Sci fi writer
Stanley Schmidt explored it in nineteen and Ian M. Banks

(22:09):
also wrote about it. So we're kind of climbing a
Kardashian scale of destruction here. So planetary power and the
ability to save one's planet in some sense, then solar
system power and the ability to save oneself or roll
with the changes to a single star system. But what
about beyond that? What about the fate of galaxies in
the universe itself. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. I

(22:31):
guess that's where we have to go next. Now, before
we do that, we should pause for the reality check
and and not ignore the much much nearer, more salient
threats facing our species right now. We mentioned some of
those earlier, primarily things like climate change in all of
its myriad downstream effects, killer pandemics like the next super flu,
the threat of space impacts, nuclear war. Maybe some people

(22:54):
would throw artificial intelligence in there. I don't know. That's
that seems like a much bigger question mark to me.
But I think the big ones we really know to
be concerned about, based on the most solid science, would
be things like climate change in pandemics. We know those
are real threats right now. We have to be fighting
and preparing today if we want to thrive in the future. Uh.
And of course we've discussed those in the past and

(23:15):
we will revisit them in the future. But to continue
today's thought experiment, let's let's go that next step. So
we imagine our technological behaviors can be changed, and we
beat back global climate change, we survive all these other
threats in the near term, We expand our space exploration
and colonization ability. We spread out our civilization so that

(23:37):
no one local event in any individual solar system can
bring it to an end. When do much bigger concerns
like the space, time, and energy dynamics of the larger
universe start to actually become a threat to our survival, Well,
not anytime soon, right, but but as far as we know,
as far as we know, but there are predictions for

(23:58):
how it might go down. The sort of universal apocalypse.
In fact, they're there at least four main models here.
We're gonna start with the two older models. One is
the Big Freeze. Uh. And this has to do with
just an eternally expanding universe. Uh. And we know the
universe is expanding. Uh. So the idea here is that

(24:21):
everything expands to the point where there's just heat death
across the universe, the triumph of entropy in your life
with just a cold, dead universe. According to some of
the models. One thing that can often be misleading about
the idea of the heat death of the universe is
that if you if you're not familiar with this term,
it sounds like that might be hot. It's not hot.
It's the opposite. It means it means usable energy gets

(24:42):
converted into heat, which is entropy energy you can't use,
and everything is just this cold bath of slightly above
absolute zero radiation. Now, the the other side of that,
of course, is the idea that what if things expand
to the point and then they retract uh in a
collapsing mechanism. This was this would lead to what is

(25:05):
considered the big crunch. So the universe stops expanding, crunches
back down over time into the reverse of the Big Bang.
That doesn't sound good for you know, but yeah, but
this would be this would be a hot death as
a cold as opposed to a cold death. Now, back
in nineteen seventy nine, physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson is still

(25:26):
with us as of this recording. He was born in
But he pondered just how these two possibilities would impact
humanity or whatever humanity becomes over the course of time,
and he was he was pretty optimistic. Yeah, we should
know that this paper we're gonna be talking about is
fantastically readable. But Dyson was working with the knowledge available

(25:48):
to him at the time in nineteen seventy nine. So,
for example, this predates the discoveries that seemed to indicate
that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Dyson didn't
know that at the time. At the time, he vote, quote,
the prevailing view holds the future of open and closed
universe versus this being the idea that to a closed
universe is one that will eventually collapse into the Big crunch,

(26:11):
and an open universe is one that will just continue
to expand towards this big freeze. He said, uh uh,
quote the future of open and closed universe is to
be equally dismal. According to this view, we have only
the choice of being fried in a closed universe or
frozen in an open one. And he can He goes
on regrettably, I have to concur with es verdict that

(26:33):
in the case, in this case, we have no escape
from frying. No matter how deep we burrow into the
earth to shield ourselves from the ever increasing fury of
the blue shifted background radiation, we can only postpone by
a few million years. Are miserable? End? Oh wow, I
was just thinking. So the blue shifting of radiation means
that if radiation sources are accelerating towards you, the radiation

(26:55):
they emit gets uped in frequency, gets blue shifted up higher.
So does that mean like radio waves, the cosmic microwave
background radiation and all that as it closes in towards
you gets blue shifted up and turned into gamma rays.
I get something like that. That's that's That's what I'm
getting from this. But this is with the closed universe model, right,

(27:16):
and and he he largely avoids the quote unquote claustrophobic
nature of the closed universe in this paper, but he
does offer this. Uh, this idea, he says, supposing that
we discover the universe to be naturally closed and doomed
to collapse, is it conceivable that by intelligent intervention converting
matter into radiation and causing energy to flow purposefully on
a cosmic scale, we could break open a closed universe

(27:39):
and change the topology of space time so that only
a part of it would collapse, in another part of
it would expand forever. Uh. Yeah, I would call that optimistic. Yeah,
but I mean he's he's basically throwing it out here
and saying, look, I'm not sure how this would work exactly,
but if we're talking about a significantly advanced civilization, this

(28:00):
sounds like the kind of thing such a civilization would
be into doing and maybe maybe have the ability to
do it. Yeah. Uh. One thing I like about Dyson's
attitude here is that he he's essentially saying, you know, physicists,
you should explore extreme implications. Uh. He starts off his
paper by talking about Stephen Weinberg, the Stephen Weinberg quote

(28:22):
that the problem with physicists is not that they take
their theories too seriously, but that they don't take them
seriously enough. You know that they scoff at some of
the discussing some of the more outlandish implications of theories
that we know to be good theories and are confirmed
by evidence. Uh, and Dyson's like, no, let's get into
the weirdness. Okay, we've got a theory. We think it's
a good theory because it predicts all the stuff we see.

(28:45):
What does it imply? What are the weirdest things that implies? Again,
this paper is uh is really readable, very accessible, especially
for a paper that has so many equations in it.
But but he also has some some very helpful timetable
scale els. For instance, he has his table one summary
of time scales, and he he holds it in a

(29:05):
closed universe, you'd have a total duration for the universe
of ten to the eleventh power years or a hundred
billion years. And and then when he looks at the
open universe, he basically takes it by by order of magnitude.
So he taught this is what he says, quote, it
takes about ten to the six or one million years
to evolve a new species tend to the seventh power,

(29:28):
or ten million years to evolve a genus tend to
the eighth power or a hundred million years to evolve
a class ten to the ninth power, or one billion
years to evolve a phylum in less than ten to
the tenth power years, or ten billion years to evolve
all the way from the primeval slime to Homo sapience.
I'm not sure if his taxonomic organization of of time

(29:51):
scales of evolution is exactly right, but I mean he's
working essentially with orders of magnetzya. He's definitely rounding up.
He's so, for example, he says, you know, less than
ten billion years, I guess that's actually that's a fair
number to work with if you're just trying to estimate
galactic evolution, right, because you're ultimately trying You're you're dealing

(30:12):
with with life and life on Earth, which is just
a pin drop in the in in terms of cosmic history.
But you're you're, so you have to work with these
exceedingly large orders of magnitude, right, But but playing with
rough orders of magnitude gives you more, essentially more room
to play around. So life on Earth has not been
around for ten billion years, but it's been around for

(30:33):
more than one billion years, So you can essentially just
round up or down to the nearest order of magnitude.
Now ultimately for an open universe scenario. He does say
that he does think it's pretty hopeful. He says, quote,
so far as we can imagine into the future, things
continue to happen in the open cosmology, history has no
heir and his in this paper. His basic breakdown in

(30:56):
this paper is that consciousness is not bound to biology
of it is structural. Then we can move beyond the body.
We can become digital machines, we can become uh, you know,
black clouds of particles. That intelligence doesn't necessarily have to
be confined to flesh beings anymore. And he had There's

(31:16):
also an interesting point in this where he talks about
immortal computing, which I hadn't really thought about. He says, quote,
a society with finite material resources can never build a
digital memory beyond a certain finite capacity. Therefore, digital memory
cannot be adequate to the needs of a life form
planning to survive indefinitely. Fortunately, there is no limited principle

(31:39):
to the capacity of an analog memory built out of
a fixed number of components in an expanding universe. For example,
a physical quantity such as the angle between two stars
and the sky can be used as an analog memory unit.
The capacity of this memory unit is equal to the
number of significant binary digits to which the angle can

(31:59):
be measured. As the universe expands and the stars recede,
the number of significant digits in this angle will increase
logarithmically with time. Measurements of atomic frequencies and energy levels
can also, in principle be measured with a number of
significant figures proportional too, and then he refers to an
equation log T. Therefore, an immortal civilization should ultimately find

(32:22):
ways to code its archives in an analog memory with
capacity growing like log T. Such a memory will put
severe constraints on the rate of acquisition of permanent new knowledge,
but at least it is not forbid it altogether. WHOA,
So I love that because he's he's really thinking big
about about how even you know, memory and recorded history

(32:44):
would work with a civilization that is this far advanced
beyond what we have now. Again, what we have now
does not scale up well, So ultimately Dyson is taking
a very optimistic view of the ways that intelligence civilization
could adapt to the changing physical environment of the universe.
At large, right, but again this was this was We've

(33:08):
had some some some changes since then. And in fact
BBC writer Adam Becker reached out to Dyson in um
on the matter of of of the expansion in our
universe seeming to accelerate, which which puts a new spin
on everything that we've discussed thus far. And uh, and
so he reached out to Dyson, and Dyson said that

(33:29):
he's he's far less optimistic, and that the most optimistic
view is that perhaps the acceleration will slow down on
its own, because he points out, we we don't know
what's accelerating it, so it's still possible that it could
stop um or slow down. Otherwise, Uh, he says, our
descendants will lose touch with most galaxies, drastically limiting the

(33:50):
available energy that he's discussing in these models. And that
sets us up in a pretty key way to talk
about one of the papers we wanted to discuss today,
a new paper from the physicist Dan Hooper. But first, Robert,
did you want to mention a couple of other hypothesized
ways that the universe could end? Yeah, yeah, they we'll
throw these out here. The first one is the big change.

(34:12):
This is in this a bubble of new lower temperature
vacuum emerges in our own universe and expands at the
speed of light, converting everything in our universe. As Adam
Becker wrote in that BBCO in his BBC article how
will the universe end? And could anything survive? Um quote,
the properties of fundamental particles like electrons and quarks could

(34:36):
be entirely different inside the bubble, radically rewriting the rules
of chemistry and perhaps preventing atoms from forming. Plus a
dark energy inside the bubble might behave in a different matter,
perhaps causing collapse rather than expansion. So um this this
sounds like a very problematic scenario if it where to
come to pass. It almost is love craft Ian and

(34:59):
it's uh and it's a scope right, the idea that
suddenly here is an emergence of a part of our
space that is not bound by the same rules. Yeah.
Nice laws of physics you've got. There be a shame
if something happened to them. Now. Another another apocalyptic scenario
for the universe is the Big Rip and this one

(35:22):
was presented by Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College in two
thousand three based on the idea of phantom dark energy,
in which the intensity of dark energy increases as the
universe expands. So it's the density of of dark energy
right now, as we understand it is pretty low, but
if it builds up, it would rip the universe to shreds.

(35:44):
So maybe overcoming the other forces, Like right now we
see dark energy increasing the distance between the galaxies out there.
But things that are gravitationally bound to each other, or
say bound by the nuclear force that holds atoms together, Uh,
that stuff is pretty safe from dark energy. If dark
energy said no, I'm going to overcome your gravity, overcome

(36:05):
your nuclear force, that would be a problem. Yeah, this
is This is how Caldwell described it in his in
his presentation quote, the positive phantom energy density becomes infinite
in finite time, overcoming all other forms of matters, such
as that of gravitational repulsion, rapidly bringing our brief epoch
of cosmic structure to a close. The phantom energy rips

(36:27):
apart the Milky Way solar system, Earth, and ultimately the molecules, adams,
nuclei and nucleons of which we are composed before the
death of the universe in a big rip. Who gives
a rip. So so that sounds that sounds terrifying as well.
And on that note, let's take one more quick break
and then we'll return to the discussion. Thank you, all right,

(36:49):
we're back. Okay. So what spurred this whole conversation was
that we wanted to talk about a highly speculative but
very fun paper that just was just published online by
the physicist Dan Hooper, in which Hooper tries to imagine
and scientifically characterize a survival strategy for a galactic civilization

(37:10):
that sees the writing on the wall about the long
term fate of the universe and decides it wants to
survive as long as possible, because it turns out, if
you are a galactic civilization, you don't need to wait
until the cold death of the entire universe to have
a problem. You just have to discover that usable energy
is becoming scarce where you live. Hooper's paper is called

(37:33):
Life versus Dark Energy, How an advanced civilization could resist
the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Uh. And we should
point out that this has not been published in a
peer of view journal yet or anything. This is just
something he put out on the internet ahead of publications
so people could comment on it and talk about it.
I think it may eventually come out in the Journal
of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, but we'll pay attention there.

(37:55):
But as always with anything that hasn't been uh been
put through peer of view yet, grain assault. So who
is Dan Hooper? He is an associate professor of astronomy
and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and he's a
senior scientist and the head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group
at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. And a lot of his

(38:15):
work focuses on the intersection between particle physics and the
evolution of the universe at large. So he's interested on
where the biggest stuff we know about in the smallest
stuff we know about effect one another. So what's what's
Hooper's argument about the future survival of a galactic civilization. Well,
he turns his attention to dark energy what we've just

(38:35):
been talking about, So on the scale of the universe
at large, not necessarily in our own local neighborhood, but
averaged across the entire observable sky, we've discovered that the
energy that dominates the vacuum of space is not gravity,
not electromagnetism, not any of the normal forces that govern
our lives and our solar system, but a poorly understood

(38:56):
form of energy that we call dark energy, which drives
expansion of the universe. So mass and gravitation attract objects
to one another, dark energy drives them apart. It's the
energy that causes the space between galaxies to spread, meaning
that the whole universe is growing larger and all the
stuff within it is growing farther apart, and the galaxy

(39:18):
is farthest away from us are receding from us the fastest.
So as far as we know right now, dark energy
might not have any practical applications for life bound to
Planet Earth outside of scientific research, that is. But then again,
we should know better than to dismiss the usefulness of
any scientific discovery ahead of time. I'm always reminded of
the English physicists who is credited as one of the

(39:40):
discoveries of the electron, J. J. Thompson, who originally thought
that the electron, which he was calling it the corpuscles uh.
He thought this particle he had discovered would not be
very useful outside of the lab, had no idea had
anything to do with electricity. But Hooper points out how
once a civilization expands to a S and scale and

(40:01):
its energy needs scale with that expansion, dark energy becomes
a pressing concern for the future of that civilization. And
this is because dark energy presents us the future of
an encroaching cosmic horizon. So we are unable to interact
with anything beyond what's known as our cosmic horizon. This

(40:21):
is the distance beyond which it is impossible to see
because light from beyond this distance will never have time
to reach us. Beyond that distance, everything is causally cut
off from us. We can't see it, we can't talk
to it or travel to it. Uh. You can think
about it this way with an analogy. Imagine that the

(40:42):
city or the neighborhood you live in is expanding. Are
you there, Robert, Yeah, I'm there. It seems to be
the case. Actually no, no, no no, no. What you're thinking
of is the increasing density of the city you live in.
More stuff is filling it. But instead you actually need
to think of exactly the opposite. The distance between your
house and other buildings is steadily increasing at an accelerating rate,

(41:07):
so at normal walking speed. You say, used to be
able to walk to the post office or the grocery
store and then back to your house in what half
an hour something like that, But as the distance between
your house and these locations expands, the trip starts to
take forty five minutes than an hour, then longer and
longer at normal walking speed. Now you could try to

(41:30):
walk faster, you could run, ride a bike, drive a car,
and this would help. But eventually, as the space between
the locations keeps expanding faster and faster, even these more
powerful vehicles and methods of travel will take longer and
longer to get you between locations, until eventually you reach
a point where no vehicle you can get can make

(41:52):
the trip because the distance between the two points expands
faster than you can travel. You could travel toward the
grocery store at maximum speed for the rest of your
life and never get there, and this would mean that
the grocery store has crossed beyond your cosmic horizon from
your house. Uh So, now, beyond the cosmic horizon of
the real universe, there might be lots of other stuff

(42:14):
we can only see to our cosmic horizon, and beyond
that it's possible there are other galaxies, stars, planets, but
because the interaction, our ability to interact with all that
stuff is cut off by the speed of light, we
will never be able to touch it. We can't land
on those planets, we can't send messages to those civilizations
or get messages from them. We're just cut off by

(42:35):
the universal speed limit of the speed of light and
a vacuum. So, for instance, if you had this vast
galaxy spanning uh Empire where everything everything is kind of compartmentalized.
You have all these different divisions of the empire, and
maybe they're they're not even in direct communication anymore. They
just kind of have periodic updates about what culture and
life is like in these distant places. But eventually you

(42:58):
reach the point where they're just too far from each
other for there to ever be contact again. Well, it
would depend on how far away from each other they are,
because if they're within a galaxy or even within nearby galaxies,
within what's known as the local group. The local group
is a cluster of roughly fifty something nearby galaxies, they
will probably one day merge into the same big old clump.

(43:20):
The local group is gravitationally bound, so we're going to
pretty much stick together with the other stuff in the
local group. So it's the galaxies far far away we
have to worry about. Right. So if if, for instance,
if Star Wars films were actually made in a galaxy
far far away beyond the local group, and they have
to be shipped back to us, there would reach a
point where we could receive no more new Star Wars films.

(43:43):
It would be a tragedy, wouldn't it. That's why we're
stockpiling them now. We're getting as many per year as possible,
because eventually it's going to pass beyond the cosmic horizon.
Oh no, wait, I don't want to be misinterpreted, because
I know there are actually people who like hate the
last Jedi. I am not one of those. I liked
it too. Um, but yeah, I've seen this all over
the internet. People are like, people are like pulling their

(44:04):
hair out about how much they hated. I don't understand. Yeah,
I mean they're talking about making a Boba Fett movie, Like,
do not disappoint like five year old Robert lamb and
and and and ruin the possibility of a boa Fett
movie for because I know that that he really wants
to see it now. We'll come back to the cosmic
horizon and the universal speed limit in just a minute,
but uh to to shift our attention to another issue.

(44:27):
It's often supposed that far far future civilization can keep
itself alive and create usable energy by harvesting the energy
from stars, and this is a good strategy. We we
often think about future energy sources. We think about what like, oh,
cold fusion or something like that, but these are paltry
energy sources. Any kind of like human made reactor that

(44:50):
we can can feasibly think of right now would be
a very paltry energy source compared to what's already out there,
which is the Sun right that. I mean, that is
the energy source for everything that we hold dear. I mean,
there's there's a reason that we we have worshiped it
as a god in in previous ages because it it
essentially is the almighty in our solar system. It is

(45:13):
our creator. It is everything you know. I mean, it
is a thing I used to say that I haven't
thought of in a while, but I still stand by.
Is that when you think about energy sources, really it's
with a few caveats, it's all solar Yeah, Like if
you're eating a steak or or a Caesar salad, what
have you, you were eating uh, converted sunlight, Like this

(45:34):
is sunlight you were eating. That's where the energy came from.
It's just you're getting it downstream coal or oil or
something like that that you would burn. Fossil fuels that
you burn have chemical energy baked into them that was
created when ancient organisms photosynthesized with the with the energy
of sunlight. They took carbon out of the air, used
the energy from sunlight to make that into sugar that

(45:55):
turned into chemicals later down the road that you're now
burning to power your car. And this is why Kardaschef
Scale level two is to simply master a sign to
say all this energy that is uh, it's maintaining the
solar system. This is now all mine, right uh, And
so how would you do that? I mean to come
back to Freeman Dyson. We've discussed on the show before

(46:16):
the idea of the Dyson's Fear. The Dyson's Fear comes
to us from Freeman Dyson, and he basically says, you know,
a civilization in the future that has a lot of
technological power and wants to get the most bang for
its buck will just completely surround its star with the
equivalent of solar panels, right. And this brings me back

(46:37):
to Star Trek, because I earlier was talking about Star
Trek and you know, scaling up of our current models
of life and all I do have to point out
that Star Trek the next Generation is the first place
I saw any mention or depiction of a Dycen sphere.
And it blew me away then, and it still blows
me away now. Yeah. I mean, it's fantastic to think about. Uh.

(46:57):
And one of the ways that it's actually relevant to us.
I mean, obviously it could be relevant in the far
future if we wanted to try to build something like this.
It's not technologically relevant to us today, except in the
sense that if we're doing say CT and we want
to look for ways of detecting alien civilizations out there
that maybe aren't beaming us radio signals on purpose or

(47:20):
anything like that. One thing that Dyson proposed is, hey,
you know, we could look for Dyson's fears out there.
I don't think he called them dycens fears, but I
don't know Dycen spears Dyson clouds, but I don't know,
I'm not true to what extent he referred to them
with his own name somehow I doubt it. I don't remember,
but uh, if he did, that kind of be awesome anyway. No,

(47:42):
but I mean he was like, you know, you could
look for this kind of thing, and so people people
have looked for this kind of thing. It would have
a certain kind of signature. One of the things that
we could observe about a Dicen sphere is that if
it completely surrounded a star and turned all of the
stars solar radiation into usable in gy that could be
used by the civilization somehow to survive after all, that,

(48:04):
it would have to have a waste product, which would
be heat, which we would be able to see as
infrared radiation, like submillimeter infrared radiation. And so if you
see like darkened stars out there that are not producing
any kind of light you can see, but are producing
infrared radiation and the certain kind of with a certain
kind of band, you've gotta wondering, is this just a

(48:26):
giant hot ball that's taken everything a son's got, using
it and then spitting some heat into space. Now, because
sons and stars are already plentiful and they're already a
great source of energy. I think it is a fairly
safe assumption to think that if there is a galactic
civilization anywhere, will try to make use of something like

(48:46):
a dicensephere, maybe not exactly the original design, but he
will try to use stars as an energy source to
sustain the civilization and feed its people and power its
machines and do all that kind of stuff. And they're
gonna need more than one. Yeah, and as the civilization
scales up, it will need more and more energy needs
scale up with population increasing. So what if your galaxy

(49:10):
runs short on stars? You've got them all sphered up,
all the usable ones, and you're getting all the energy
you need from them, but your population is still growing.
What do you do then? Yeah? I mean you're essentially
using all of your farmland here to produce the crops
that are necessary for life, or that the model of
life that you've built. And uh, yeah, what what do

(49:32):
you do when you maxed out? And then what do
you do when say one of the stars blinks out
on you? Uh, You're gonna have to scale back on
what you can do as an empire. Stars also have
finite lifespans. You eventually are going to need new stars
to replace the old ones that are that are running
down their fuel. Now, one thing you could do is
just continually keep expanding, right, You could expand other galaxies.

(49:53):
I mean, this is this is very crazy and very
far future, because we don't have anything like the ability
to travel to another gal see today. But if you
imagine one of these Cardashev three type civilizations that has
mastered in an entire galaxy, it could spread to other galaxies.
It could keep on expanding. But we're limited to our
local group right now. Because if you imagine just trying

(50:14):
to continue expanding to other galaxies beyond into the far future,
you would eventually come up against the problem we were
mentioning earlier, the cosmological horizon problem. That's right, because even
if you imagine and that releast is what I'm imagining,
is that you know, just cosmic marauders. And this is
something that is Hawking has has touched on himself. Uh,
and to a certain extent I think was touched on

(50:36):
and that uh in the film Chronicles of Riddic and
that it's kind of what the necromongers were doing, right.
I don't think they're doing it with stars. But you know,
they had the whole kind of like life sucking undead um,
you know, ravager kind of thing going on. I mean
I never saw Chronicles. Well, yeah, you've got to see it.
I've seen Pitch Black at your recommendation. Well, that's the

(50:57):
necessary precursor to Chronicles of Riddic. You should see it.
Is Keith David in it? Yes, okay, yeah, it's it's
it's fun. It's fun. But yeah, I'm picturing a marauding
um interstellar civilization. It just goes from one system to
the next, using up sons and then spitting them out again.
But eventually they're going to reach that point where there
are no new sons to conquer. And Alexander wept where

(51:20):
there were no worlds to conquer. Yeah, and then you're
just left to uh just stew in the in the
cosmic darkness. Uh So, if we're gonna keep expanding, we
need stars, and if we run out of local stars,
we're gonna have to get him from somewhere else. And
Hooper writes, quote over the next approximately one billion years,
so basically times the age of the Earth. He writes,

(51:45):
all stars residing beyond the local group will fall beyond
the cosmic horizon and become not only unobservable but entirely inaccessible.
So he's saying, like, we're going to run out of
time if if you know, a civilization doesn't do something
early on, it's going to run out of time to
get at all those extra stars to give them, to

(52:06):
give them more energy. So you've got stars speeding away,
how do you make use of them for the future.
Hooper has an idea. What if you go out to
those stars, you go snag them, and then you use
the Dyson's fears that you build around them as a drive.
We talked earlier about the idea of scattow thrusters and

(52:26):
things like that. What if you used a Dyson sphere
to steer and drive a star back home to where
your civilization is, so that you can hoard stars from
the entire universe at large and keep them nearby to
use them for the future before they go beyond your
cosmic reach. I think we should call this star jacking.

(52:49):
That's what it sounds like to me. It's star hoarding.
And so the the emitted radiation from a star could
provide some thrust which could be used at least in theory,
to steer a star are and it s Dyson's fear
in a particular direction, meaning that you know, this civilization
could gather stars close together and keep them from expanding
out of reach and great leaks in the lifespan of

(53:11):
their civilization. But there are limits on this, and a
lot of Hooper's paper is used to calculate types of
stars that would be fruitful for this. Only certain types
of stars would work, mainly stars somewhat within the range
of the mass of our Sun, because stars that are
much bigger tend to be older or tend to not

(53:31):
have as much life left in them. Yeah, you don't
want to go to the trouble of Jack and those
stars if they're just going to burn out or collapse
before you can make use of them exactly. So this
is a problem. The bigger stars would not have enough
life left in them to survive the journey back to
the home base, and so they're not really worth hoarding.
On the other hand, stars much smaller than our Sun

(53:52):
would not provide enough energy to drive the star to
its central star Hoarde fast enough before it passed beyond
the cosmic horizon, and so there is kind of a
Goldilocks star. You know, a Goldilocks star that you want
that that is big enough to give you enough energy,
that's small enough that it's still going to have plenty
of life left in it by the time you get

(54:12):
at home, And that's the kind you want to bring home. Interestingly,
Hooper points out that if alien civilizations anywhere out there
are doing this quote, this would not be a subtle activity,
so we should be able to detect it. Kind of
like the original idea of the Dicen sphere. If anybody
out there is doing anything like this, you've got a

(54:33):
galactic civilization in one of those galaxies far out there,
and it's making these kinds of preparations for the future.
This could give us a new path to setty observation.
Can we look out at galaxies out there and detect
the removal, transport, and hoarding of certain kinds of stars? Yeah,
I mean it makes it makes sense. Like you said,
this would not be a subtle act. This would be

(54:54):
the kind of thing that we would conceive will be
able to observe. Yeah, and so Hooper writes, quote, such
a civilization could pier as a region up to tens
of mega par sex and radius in which most or
all of the stars lighter than about two solar masses
are surrounded by Dyson's fears. Now that's a cool image. Yes,
the star hoarde, the star hoard Yeah, there the empire

(55:16):
of the star hoarders or star jackers, which whichever one,
whichever one you want to use. Star jacking is the verb,
the star hoarde is the Now the star jackers work
for the star hoarders. Yeah, and then our only hope
is to just, I guess, somehow present a case that
we're we're worth keeping around, like we're culturally interesting enough,
or maybe they have rules. Maybe they don't take stars

(55:37):
from systems with the inhabited worlds. I don't know, I
could go virtually anyway. Yeah, maybe they only use stars
from inhabited worlds. Now, of course, with an idea this
far out there, you at least want to hear what
some other scientists in the field have to say. Fortunately,
there was a right of this in Science News that
got some quotes from some other astrophysicists, for example, the

(56:00):
theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack of North Carolina State University. They
asked her opinion and She pointed out that, you know,
one thing is that you might have an easier time
surviving if you just uproot your civilization and move it
to a different galaxy cluster that's got a bunch of
different stars you could use. So instead of bringing all
the stars to you, you just go where they're already are,

(56:23):
a whole bunch of already untapped stars the Marauder model, Yeah,
and settle in there. But then again, you know, maybe
they maybe there are reasons they want to stay where
they are. It might be easier to send out autonomous
star collection, you know, robots that would build Dyson's fears
around stars and bring them home than it would be
to move the conscious inhabitants of a place. Maybe they

(56:46):
like where they are and the movement would be stressful. Yeah,
I mean, ultimately, who's going to argue with them? Right? Right?
Because they would be where would they be on the
Kardashi of scale, they would be between two and three,
Perhaps they would be threes. I don't know, three, it's
pretty lofty. Oh yeah, I think we're talking about a
level three cardship civilization right here. You're you're controlling a galaxy.

(57:08):
If you're going out to other galaxies to get stars
to bring home. Yeah, yeah, you would be Yeah, so
I guess you would be a little beyond three. You
would be up towards us. You would be moving towards four. Whatever.
Four would be like if we can even comprehend such
a thing, a mastery of the local group or something.
The physicist Avy Loeb of Harvard University also points out

(57:29):
the same issue that you know, it might not be
necessary to go get stars from other places, because he says, quote,
nature did it for us. You've already got There are
places in the universe where they're huge clusters of galaxies
that are all sort of near by each other, and
maybe it would be better to go to one of
those galaxy clusters that's got lots of stars already there.
I mean, it's it's a relative lots of stars, because

(57:53):
there are lots of stars in our galaxy. But if
you're talking about this Cardassian you know, three point five
or four type civilization and it's got ridiculous energy needs,
then there are places you could go that would have
more stars nearby already. Right. And again this is assuming
they don't say, you know, guys, this is a bit nach.
We don't need this much energy, let's scale back a bit. Yeah,
But then again, our tribal ancestors could have said that

(58:14):
about our world today and now here we are and
we need the energy. True though there we do, see,
I mean, there obviously is a movement to cut back
on energy to find more sustainable ways. Uh you know,
whether that will that argument will win out in the end,
uh you know, remains an open question. But um, well,

(58:34):
I would say, I don't know. Maybe maybe you can
make the case to me, I don't know if any
good reason that we need to cut back on energy
itself is just like types of energy, you know, certain
types of energy are more destructive than others. And if
we had a truly I mean, I think there is
no such thing as a perfect energy source, because even
the most benign forms of energy maybe solar, wind power,

(58:57):
whatever you have, have some kinds of construction and costs
and stuff to build the panels. Um. But but there
are relatively benign forms of energy that I don't I
don't know. Is there an argument that we shouldn't even
be trying to maximize our collection of solar energy or something? No?
I mean it kind of comes down to though, to
like how much energy can we conceivably harvest? And then

(59:22):
how are we living our lives in accordance to it?
You know? Um? So I yeah, I don't see anybody
as saying let's stop harvesting energy, but but also asking
the question, is our consumption lining up with our current
and even near future ability to harvest it? Maybe the
answer to that is no, right, yeah, but but it's

(59:44):
certainly based on our own model of intelligent um technological behavior,
it makes sense that uh, an alien species, we just
continue to jack as many stars as as as possible
to sustain itself. I mean, I I like I was
saying earlier, I think we want to avoid making too
many assumptions about future civilizations or alien life, because there's

(01:00:07):
a lot we just can't know about their minds, about
their culture and all that. But one thing we pretty
much know no matter what is they need energy. Yes,
but I'm saying they could scale back if they if
they really wanted to. I mean, it's I think that
is a possibility. And certainly if they see the writing
on the wall, you know that that energy is going
to become less abundant, and then it's about survival. Now,

(01:00:31):
speaking of survival, um, I do have one last survival
scheme dimension here, and this one was exploring in that
Adam Becker BBC article their referenced earlier. Alan Gooth of
m I T contends that the laws of physics might
imply that that this is possible, uh, that you could
essentially escape into a universe of your own making. Yeah. Now,

(01:00:52):
it would require vast amounts of energy, which of course
is we're discussing the players in this kind of game
would have have. But it might go down like this.
First of all, you need to create an incredibly dense
form of matter, so dense that it barely avoids collapsing
into a black hole, and you quickly clear the matter
out of the way, forcing the region of space to

(01:01:14):
start expanding, and this would jump start, in theory a
new universe. Quote. As the space in the region expanded,
the boundary would shrink, creating a bubble of warped space
where the inside was bigger than the outside, which is
kind of like it reminds me of the bag of
holding from Dungeons and Dragons. The Gooth actually compared it

(01:01:34):
to the tartest dr who looked it looks bigger on
the inside. Yeah, yeah, and they on the outside it's
what a phone phone booth, and then on the inside
it's this large, expensive room and so forth. So eventually
the new universe would pinch off from the old doomed universe.
But he stresses that this might not be possible at all. Sure,
it depends on a lot of assumptions that could be true,

(01:01:56):
but we don't know for sure. But then also the
other way of looking at things, he says, is it, Uh,
you know, if if the multiverse model holds true, then
that's probably our best bet. The universe may end, but
the multiverse continues eternally. No way that that might mean
though we can't get there, just some other version of us. Yeah,
and but that might be the best we can you know,

(01:02:16):
for in the end is just to realize, all right,
we've we've we've jacked a thousand stars, we've hoarded them,
we've done what we can. But hey, the writings on
the wall, we're gonna blink out. But somewhere out there
in the multiverse, Uh, this thing called life is still going.
I believe in the thing called technological civilization. One final
note is a side tangent. Well, one thing I loved

(01:02:38):
about the Freeman diys in paper we talked about earlier
from seventy nine, is that at the end he invokes holdings, uh,
quoting of of G. K. Chesterton on the role of
human intellect in the future of of of civilization quoting
from the Ballot of the White Horse by Chesterton, where
he writes, so rides my soul upon the sea that

(01:02:59):
drinks the howling ships, though in black jest at bows
and nods under the moons with silver rods. I know
it is roaring at the gods waiting the last eclipse.
Oh that's nice. So maybe find peaceful ways to survive
that last eclipse. All right, So there you have it.
If you want to hear more episodes like this dealing

(01:03:19):
with the the long term future of humanity and this
universe of change and hostility, uh, then you can check
out all the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind
at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the
mother ship. That's where you'll also find social media links
to our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. Huge things
as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and

(01:03:43):
Tary Harrison. If you want to get in touch with
us to let us know feedback on this episode or
any other, or to suggest a topic for future episodes,
or just to say hi, let us know where you
listen from. You can email us at blow the Mind
at how Stuff Works dot com. And I want to
close out here with a really cool tray guy came
across from the group We Plants Are Happy Plants, titled

(01:04:05):
an Incredible Pearl, which makes use of a passage from
American writer philosopher in ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna, who who we
discussed on the show in the past. Kind of a
wizard figure. Yeah yeah, so, uh so check this out.
If you want to hear more from We Plants Are
Happy Plants to simply look them up on Spotify or iTunes,
wherever you get your music. You can also go to

(01:04:26):
YouTube dot com, slash w P a h P. We're
going to have to make a decision about human nature
to wit. Is this our home to be cherished and nurtured,
an incredible pearl flung out in a universe of ashes
and darkness? Or is this a hell world, a tiny,

(01:04:52):
confining prison at the edge of a dying universe from
which it is our destiny to break free and recover
our higher and hidden nature from which we have become separated.
You know, this is a choice which as a culture
we face. Are we to go into the divine imagination

(01:05:14):
and create you know, starships the size of Manitoba that
will apply between here and Andrama and exist in a
world of our complete syntactical self expression. Or is man's
place humbler than that? Is that grandiose steeped with megalomania,

(01:05:37):
touched with the kind of political taint that's had this
raping and pillaging ever since we got out of those
miserable ice bound villages in Jutland or wherever it was.
Is it that? Or is it our challenge and our destiny?
It's really a choice about human nature.