[birdyrooster]

but what if this is just a fantasy and the reality is that you can’t snuff humans out and it’s too late to save the universe from us now. We’re not here to stay the heat death, we’re accelerating it. Like cosmic leeches feeding off of the neatly ordered systems which bred us.

[oefrha]

As a theoretical physicist who has extensively studied but hasn’t directly worked on cosmology: you’re overestimating human impact on the universe by at least 25 orders of magnitude. The entire solar system can explode tomorrow and it would be less impactful to the universe than an ant dying on earth. You’re nothing to the universe, read less doomsday crap.

[_yb2s]

I think you’re missing the previous commenters point. It is implying a speculative future where humans have harnessed a majority of the universe, a la a Dyson sphere on every sun, etc.

[ben_w]

Yeah, was going to say the same.

Today's humanity is collectively irrelevant to the universe as a whole. But, there's no obvious thing standing in the way of von Neumann probes eating Mercury into a K1 civ, using that to send a wave of colonisation VN probes to every reachable galaxy at the same time, and only then spreading out to each star within each galaxy, then star-lifting each star, and in cosmologically short timescales every star is a red dwarf surrounded by a K1 Dyson swarm.

I doubt Dyson swarms can avoid being ground into dust over a "mere" million years, so that's a very different and very dark (literally as well as metaphorically) possible future.

[marmadukester39]

Why do you think they’d be ground into dust?

[ben_w]

Micro-meteors; frictional wear and tear from normal use; proton ablation from the solar wind[0].

I'd assume we couldn't even get to that scale without solving vandalism, war, and insanity, but if not, then over the scale of a million years there will be twenty thousand space-Victorians and space-Taliban having space-Jihads against space-Buddha- and space-Baphomet-statues. I dread to think what the K2 version of the deliberate destruction and death of WW1 and WW2 would be like.

Likewise industrial accidents (space Chernobyl?), but if the big ones aren't solved there's a significant chance of a Kessler cascade rather than just, say, small incidents destroying 1% of the habitats every millennia[1].

[0] it doesn't get very deep on geological scales, but Dyson swarms aren't capable of being very deep on geological scales either.

[1] Completely arbitrary percentage of course, but that percentage would destroy half of what remained every 69-ish millennia.

[dekhn]

They mean the heat death of the universe.

[chrischen]

We are either the cancer or will have a cancer end us.

[dekhn]

that's why I'm an entropian. Our core belief is that it's a sin to unnecessarily hasten the heat death of the universe.

[maxbond]

I don't think it's really something we have to worry about, the amount of energy we're able to bring to bear is miniscule at that scale. Nothing we do will meaningfully hasten or prolong the heat death of the universe, our entire energetic history pales in comparison to a single supernova.

Maybe someday that won't be true, but not on a timeline we can really plan for. It probably wouldn't even be humans doing it at that point, but some descendant species (or constellation of many).

I'd propose we expend our energies prolonging the life of our ecosystem and take our challenges one century at a time.