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52 points hhs | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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PaulHoule ◴[] No.45076441[source]
Practically stars are mostly burned out in another 50 billion years and radioisotopes that produce a heat gradient will also be mostly decayed by then. Eventually good tidal energy situations like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating_of_Io

will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase for a long time -- for instance, black holes will be slowly inspiralling and crashing into each other resulting in huge entropy increases on paper.

replies(2): >>45076591 #>>45077145 #
1. echelon ◴[] No.45077145[source]
Due to the expansion of the universe, we're also going to lose access to the rest of the universe in that time.

  Time - Galaxies lost to us forever 
  1 million years ~ 0.02%
  10 million years ~ 0.2%
  100 million years ~ 2%
  1 billion years ~ 20%
  10 billion years ~ 80%
  150 billion years ~ 99.9999997%
So we'll have to find somewhere to hunker down for the last forty billion years or so as we wait for all energy to dissipate.

That's all assuming we can't "break physics" and nucleate something new, find a tear in our current manifold, etc. Our peon brains are too small to reason about this and any claims that we're stuck are insufficiently computed.

Given our limited sensing capabilities and tiny time sample, I'm skeptical of our current understanding. Claims of current model predictions feel premature.