The End of Time – Lent 2025: Day 26

Science has no clear answer as to how the Universe (this Universe?) will end. In a Big Crunch (galaxies collapsing into their black holes which then go on to swallow one another in an ever contracting universe that ends up in a singularity)? Or in Heat Death – galaxies flung further and further apart by dark energy at an ever-accelerating pace, over time losing all contact with each other, and then, one by one, their stars go out? And atoms stop spinning until there's nothing with which to measure time? Or in a Big Rip (dark energy becomes stronger and stronger, eventually tearing apart galaxies and indeed all matter)? Or in Vacuum Decay, when the stability of the vacuum of space suddenly decays into a lower energy state, resulting in a bubble of lower-energy vacuum expanding at the speed of light through the universe, destroying everything in its path? We don't know.

Below: Google Gemini Imagen 3.0, prompted to illustrate the four competing theories of how the Universe will end.

And when will this all happen? The first three are due in around 10¹⁰⁰ to 10¹²⁰ years from now, so no immediate worry. Unless it's vacuum decay, which could happen at any time. Though even if it started a billion light years away, it would take a billion years to reach us. And given that we're some  46.5 billion light years in any direction from the edge of the observable universe, we seem to be statistically quite safe.

[Well before then, the Sun's increasing luminosity will make life on Earth impossible somewhere between a billion and 1.2 billion years' time; humanity will need to evolve and move on. This is around 3,000 times longer than Homo sapiens has existed as a species, so there's no great rush.]

But will the end of the Universe (however it happens) mean the beginning of a new one? Certainly, proponents of the Big Crunch theory suggest that after everything comes together in a singularity, it immediately kicks off the next Big Bang. And so on, ad infinitum. Sir Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology posits that once the last atom ceases to vibrate at the universe's heat death, time runs to an end; without time there is no space – and from that begins, yes, the next Big Bang. So two of the models foresee a universe of infinite duration, with new ones arising from the ashes of the previous ones. Two don't. They envisage a total annihilation of all matter.

But what would happen to consciousness, both small-'c' and the large-'C' ,when space-time runs out? Will we be safely gathered in? Will we be saved? I shall speculate on this tomorrow.

Lent 2024: Day 26
Understanding the esoteric
(In which I dream of the Random Number Veneration Generator)

Lent 2023, Day 26
The Ghost in the Machine

Lent 2022: Day 26
The End of Times

Lent 2021: Day 26
Physical Immortality

Lent 2020: Day 26
Intimations of Immortality