The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

https://nautil.us/issue/104/harmony/the-universe-already-made-almost-all-the-stars-it-will-ever-make

by acconrad • 5 years ago

165 205 5 years ago

nautil.us

amelius• 5 years ago

Until humans start making them.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

“The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.” - Dr. Otto Octavius.

boxed• 5 years ago

The important part is to disassemble stars. They are burning all the hydrogen way too fast.

politician• 5 years ago

It's truly a bigger ecological crime than Bitcoin Proof of Work.

benlivengood• 5 years ago

Or dumping them into supermassive black holes. They'll survive a googol years or so, and feeding matter in will produce plenty of energy.

rbanffy8• 5 years ago

There must be a lot of brown dwarves lying around.

progre• 5 years ago

Good. I have a big investment in a star and sometimes I worry about inflation.

vessel• 5 years ago

well... unfortunately...

devnulll• 5 years ago

Inflation is part of the problem here. It appears to be getting worse. Soon enough, inflation will make strangers of us all...

slickrick2162• 5 years ago

Peak star was a lie spread by the anti solar lobby to get us back on oil.

effingwewt4• 5 years ago

Where can I sign up for starcoin, I've heard it's all the rage on reddit.

digitcatphd• 5 years ago

It is funny, I was just thinking about this myself, the fact that in a determinable amount of time, the observable universe, will be completely unable to sustain any type of life. Really puts things into perspective.

acheron• 5 years ago

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

mormegil• 5 years ago

Collect additional data.

bl0rg2• 5 years ago

https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH for the uninitiated.

philipswood• 5 years ago

See the "last question" for the reference: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

marton782• 5 years ago

No thread about the heat death of the universe in the internet has ever lacked this comment. And justly so. Absolutely stunning short story.

javajosh• 5 years ago

On this time-scale, mountains erode and continents shift in an eye-blink. The end of all is effectively an infinite time in the future - so have fun!

perryizgr8• 5 years ago

Not just life, any sort of chemical reaction will also be impossible. Heat death.

yalogin• 5 years ago

So the universe is just biding it’s time to die? This is it, no more creation, no more new platforms for biological miracles. Interesting, so while humans figure out how to navigate the universe, many planets/stars would simply die and we will not even know.

madmads• 5 years ago

I mean the universe is so incredibly vast that even if we figure out how to travel at the speed of light, we'll only ever get to see a small fraction of it. I don't think we'll have to worry about running out of places to explore.

roberthahn• 5 years ago

So, about that. One of the weird things about General Relativity is that if we COULD travel at or near the speed of light, then time dilation and length contraction will conspire to enable a trio to the end of the observable universe in 30 years.

So we could definitely explore the universe, we just have no way to share what we discover with our friends back home.

meijer• 5 years ago

we'll only ever get to see a small fraction of it

True, but on the other hand, due to relativistic time dilation, a very fast traveller could visit very far away destinations if they get closer and closer to the speed of light.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

Remember, this is from our current understanding. 500 years from now, who knows what we’ll discover. Or maybe our whole theory is wrong.

goldenkey2• 5 years ago

Or the effect of conscious intelligence is so great, we will have to rewrite some of the laws of cosmology. After all, when a human being with a death star can simply change the angle of the beam to destroy one planet instead of another, clearly the impetus is that weakly energetic states (state of the brain) are extremely potent in the evolution of the universe. Normally we think that the magnitude of energy is what matters. However, when it comes to conscious entities, it is the structure that matters. Kinda throws a wrench in just using total energy as a measure of the effect that an object can cause. Brains use hardly any energy and yet cause absurdly strong effects that we still don't know the full extent of.

One peculiarity about quantum mechanics is that even the lowest energy particles still require the universe to compute their paths and wavefunctions. This has commonly been a target of ways to verify if we are living in a simulation - looking for screen door effects in the interference patterns of extremely low energy particles. The hypothesis was that perhaps the universe attempts to save computation on low energy particles. We did not find any screen door phenomena though. So the current stance is that the universe provides full fidelity wavefunctions to particles independent of the magnitude of their energy. A low energy particle or system can have a wavefunction of seemingly limitless quantum complexity.

Cosmology currently revolves around magnitude of energy, not the butterfly effect or intelligence. Expect this to change as we further our understanding.

rightbyte• 5 years ago

Conceptually I have a hard time imagining that the universe could not 'restart' ... otherwise how could it 'start' at all.

goatlover3• 5 years ago

The same way the universe could be finite and there be no boundary or outside.

api3• 5 years ago

Some stars will last a really long time too. If the Sun gets too old, Proxima Centauri will supposedly last for over a trillion years and is within <5 light years distance. It could be reached using nuclear propulsion (e.g. Project Orion or staged nuclear-thermal) within a human life span.

The universe might be concluding its star-forming era but will be capable of sustaining complex life for trillions upon trillions of years. After that we don't know what really happens. Heat death is the depressing but most widely accepted outcome.

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

Ok this trillion number you are talking about makes me feel better about this article.

api3• 5 years ago

Yeah we have a good backup star <5ly away. In hundreds of millions to 1-2 billion years when this becomes a problem we (or more likely whatever descends from us or the AIs we build) will either be able to move easily or will be extinct already.

AI intelligences would have no problem traveling between stars. Who cares if it takes thousands of years even... just turn yourself off. Even better send automated factories to build compute power and robotics and then transmit your minds when the new site is ready.

misthop• 5 years ago

Wikipedia has a page on the Timeline of the far future[1]. It lists a ton of physical and cosmological things that are predicted to happen based on our current understanding of physics. A really fun read that always takes me down a rabbit's hole of phenomena wikipedia pages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

stackbutterflow2• 5 years ago

There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA

This is so weird to think that for most of its life the universe will be empty and cold. Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

webkike• 5 years ago

Super Mario bros is pretty fun

lemonberry2• 5 years ago

"Nothing matters"

This is true in the biggest sense of the word. But it's also false. We all have things that matter to us and the various communities that we belong to. In some ways, to me anyway, it's very liberating: life as a blank canvas to imbue it with the meaning we want on.

That won't resonate with everyone or even most people, but it's motivating for me.

simonh• 5 years ago

It's about the journey, not the destination.

bntyhntr• 5 years ago

(Simplification, I'm happy and "well-adjusted" whatever that means): I've accepted the fact that my body has an urge to survive and it's not worth (and why would I want to) trying to weigh that against the grand nothingness that my life will amount to. I don't think there's a point to it all but if my body's gonna make me live then I'm gonna live it up. But it is kinda weird.

eloff3• 5 years ago

Even on shorter timescales we all die and cease to matter. That doesn't mean life is without meaning. Life is amazing, and terribly short. I wish I could live 1000 more lives, and live them all differently. There's so much I will never do.

kibwen4• 5 years ago

Is there an axiom of your personal philosophy that causes you to conclude that something must persist for infinite time in order to possess meaning?

ansible• 5 years ago

Thinking about this stuff is what prompted my thinking about things like suicide.

The Universe is so vast. So much space, most of it with only the barest wisp of gas. Most of the solar systems we see in the night sky may not have life (we don't know yet). And yet here we are, a rare event in a vast Universe.

In the end it doesn't matter what you do. What you accomplish or did not accomplish. What awards were won or lost, life goals achieved or not.

Everything you can see (including the stars in the sky), everything you have ever heard about will be less than dust at some point in the far future. No statues will survive, no history books, no songs of glory. The stars will wink out, the galaxies red-shift past the point of visibility as they rush away from us. It will eventually be a vast, empty and quiet expanse, as the last of the black holes slowly evaporate.

But right here, right now, you are alive and able to experience the Universe. Yes, you may be in a shitty situation now, but you are still alive and you still have possibilities to experience something wonderful. It won't last, it never lasts, but that isn't the point. We all have to appreciate what we do have, when we have it.

Some people are in truly shitty situations, and legitimately have no way out, with no possible means to create even a little happiness for themselves. But for everyone else thinking of ending things prematurely, I urge you to consider how rare and precious you are. If you can give even a little kindness to someone else, it will have been worth it, because that's all that really matters, on our journey to infinity.

unyttigfjelltol• 5 years ago

I've been enjoying the kurzgesagt collection of videos[1] which discusses the same phenomena, and how we literally can never travel to large swaths of the universe.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM

kubanczyk• 5 years ago

Chances are it is a simulated universe, so no need to be so grim. (No sarcasm.)

majormajor• 5 years ago

If this is all we get, if there's no point of life outside of life, it's all the more important to treat it preciously. If someone ends your life or abuses you, you don't get a second round.

ryandvm• 5 years ago

The Last Question (by Isaac Asimov) is my favorite take on this topic by far.

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf

ud_02• 5 years ago

Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness.

I don't understand this reasoning. If the universe had a different end state, or if it collapsed in on itself only to erupt again, would that make any difference to the meaning of your life or that of our civilization? Probably not, because things still end.

It seems to me that you'd arrive at this conclusion of meaninglessness in any case. The thing is, while the universe may not care, there are many things we as humans do care about. They have meaning because we give them meaning. Isn't that liberating?

falcrist3• 5 years ago

The idea of having some ultimate meaning is (as far as we can tell) an invention of the human mind.

Whether life has meaning, whether it needs to have meaning, or even whether the meaning of life is predicated on influencing the universe is up to you to determine.

If you asked 10 philosophers and religious leaders about the meaning of life, you'd probably get 100 different answers ranging from "seeking knowledge", "enjoying life", "serving [god or supernatural force]", "making others happy", to "there is no meaning".

fumar• 5 years ago

This topic always brings to mind Asimov’s short story, The Last Question. The story spans the life of the knowable universe. https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

The Universe (humans) gained consciousness and asked ‘Who made me?’

breuleux2• 5 years ago

I'd argue that life is its own point. If you organize your metaphysics in such a way that nothing matters unless it leads to a future that matters, then nothing can possibly matter, because by definition value is always postponed to "the future". But you can never get there, because once you do, it becomes "the present".

Basically, you can't say that the value of every moment depends entirely on the value of future moments, that just prevents the actualization of any value. The present has to count for something.

orthecreedence• 5 years ago

There's a really cool movie called Aniara that explores this a bit. It's pretty dark, though.

salt-thrower2• 5 years ago

Super interesting read. Thanks for that. It puts me in a bit of a zen-like state to remember that everything will be dust in the end no matter what we do now.

dheera• 5 years ago

I've read that page before. It's rather depressing at face value.

But I also think we probably don't yet know enough about the universe and it's very possible most of the things in the future of that page are incorrect.

For one thing even our ideas of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics were developed in the last century, and much like Newton's theories have loopholes, it's very possible (I'd say likely) that our understanding of quantum mechanics and GR is grossly incomplete.

I wouldn't even put it out of the question that simple "axioms" like energy+mass conservation are a special case within a grander scheme of things. The big bang itself violates that, and we still haven't the slightest clue what dark matter and dark energy are.

It's also worth noting that red dwarfs last for a VERY long time, i.e. trillions of years. We have one in our cosmic backyard at Proxima Centauri. If we can figure out how to move in the vicinity of one, we'd have a few orders of magnitude more time to figure out the future.

allturtles• 5 years ago

Given the rest of the discussion in this sub-thread, it seems many don't consider this "a really fun read." I would certainly say "thought-provoking," but I would not call it fun either.

zem• 5 years ago

"The Melancholy of Infinite Space" is a beautiful take on this: http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp

lonelyPM• 5 years ago

For anyone interested in this, I recommend the following book: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

platz5• 5 years ago

Whenever you see the word Universe in pop sci, you can just sub in Observable Universe.

SamBam4• 5 years ago

Sure, but scientists have fairly good reasons for assuming that the rest of the universe looks pretty much the same. They could be wrong, of course, but "could be wrong" is always an assumption with these kinds of things anyway.

platz5• 5 years ago

what is 'pretty much the same', and what are the 'fairly good reasons'?

devoutsalsa2• 5 years ago

It's interesting that we can presently see two galaxies that will never be able to see each other. They will drift out of Earth's observable universe before each other's light would have a chance to reach the other. Dark energy & accelerating expansion is weird.

Tepix2• 5 years ago

Chances are you can make a string of thousands (trillions?) of such galaxies. We currently have no way of knowing the size of the non-observable universe.

lelanthran• 5 years ago

Which two galaxies?

haxiomic2• 5 years ago

This dramatic visualization of the timeline for the rest of the universe is well worth a watch to get a feel for what we believe the future of the universe to look like

[TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

However, when you get to the end (which is perhaps a little depressing!), I'd recommend learning a bit about what we think could come 'after' this period, where the universe has become so isotropic and homogenous no clocks or measuring systems of any kind can be developed so the universe loses any sense of size or energy – it's been proposed that this creates opportunity for a new universe to exist

[What Happens After the Universe Ends?]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0

These are fields of study right on the edge of what's testable by science so it's more fun to think about than it is to have certainty (although Penrose has, debatably, claimed evidence for echos of previous universes visible in the CMB!).

marton782• 5 years ago

Obligatory link to Isaac Asimov's wonderful short story "The Last Question" which explores this topic:

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf

haxiomic2• 5 years ago

I have never read this before, thank you :)

sooheon2• 5 years ago

Another great one dealing with this topic is Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Less cosmic, more provincial, but still beautiful.

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

telesilla• 5 years ago

I just watched this and found the ending quite comforting: at the end, entropy stops increasing and nothing happens, forever. After a long week at work, it's pretty much what I'm up for!

NoSorryCannot• 5 years ago

A trillions of years long work week would leave anyone tired!

abrookewood• 5 years ago

It means nothing to my life, but the thought that it all ends in cold dark silence is very depressing. Hopefully we've got the science on dark energy wrong and a big crunch provides the possibility of re-birth.

SamBam4• 5 years ago

I'd be interested to know how people (humanity) would feel if it were known that the universe would just come to a hard-stop in a million years.

In practice, it should make no difference. That's already much, much further than any of us can comprehend. It's a hundred times the length of recorded human history. What would it really matter?

On the other hand, it would seem so short, I think a sense of nihilism would already take hold.

ant6n• 5 years ago

So uh another million year wait for Jesus?

dekken_• 5 years ago

or maybe you're Jesus?

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

We already have so much nihilism, it's hard to imagine it being possible to turn the dial up further.

CDRdude2• 5 years ago

I don’t see this. Many people in my country are religious, and believe that God (the Christian one) has a plan for them—-the exact opposite of nihilism.

awb2• 5 years ago

Tech moves so fast, I can’t think of a termination event that couldn’t be solved with 1M years of exponential growth.

Even with the Big Freeze or Big Crunch of the universe, there’s at least some hope that some currently unknown science, energy source, etc. might be accessible to us in 1M years that could delay or reduce the severity of the event.

But, let’s say there’s a an event that will somehow destroy our entire solar system in 500 years, that would certainly divide people into two camps: one hell bent on escaping the solar system at all costs and another determined to enjoy every last moment before extinction.

stormdennis• 5 years ago

500 years is too long, 100 more like. Live but don't have kids

lordnacho• 5 years ago

On the other hand, 1M years is so far away, everything can be put off to be dealt with later.

There's at least one or two issues that we maybe should think about addressing before it's too late.

bl0rg2• 5 years ago

Tech moves so fast now. While I don't believe we'll be leveling off anytime soon, it's worth considering the possibility of it.

time0ut• 5 years ago

Termination event: this simulation will yield the desired answer after another 1 million years of simulated time and the plug will be pulled.

1270018080• 5 years ago

The total arrogance of people in technology lol. We're still just sentient specs of dust abiding by the laws of the universe on a spec of dust planet. Writing CRUD apps, flying to Mars, or driving an electric car, isn't going to save the universe.

Aperocky2• 5 years ago

That's a bit extreme, but we have a billion years before this planet becomes a slightly bigger Venus, that should be enough time to figure out something.

morpheos1372• 5 years ago

It is highly unlikely the human species as we know it will last a million more years. Why should we worry about what might happen in the far future?

Out_of_Characte• 5 years ago

Its more like the entirety of humanity is frozen in time. 13.7 billion years ago the universe began, life was 3.8 billion years ago, the first telescope was 405 years ago. The only way to see how stars and planets develop is by taking thousands of celestial bodies and figure out the rules of the universe.

eloff3• 5 years ago

If civilization lasts a million years it would be an accomplishment. I think the likely answer to the Fermi paradox is that civilization is but a short lived spark on evolutionary timescales and self destructs.

slickrick2162• 5 years ago

I like to think it’d be something like the planet Kricket https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Krikkit

EMM_386• 5 years ago

I'd be interested to know how people (humanity) would feel if it were known that the universe would just come to a hard-stop in a million years.

I see what you mean by setting a hard stop, it does mean little in the end. The Wikipedia timeline, which makes a lot of assumptions, show galaxy formation stopping at 100 trillion years from now.

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

We're human beings who only came on the scene around 200,000 years ago. It's impressive that we can work out the math and physics to try to comprehend 100 trillion years, but it is impossible to even imagine where conscious life would be at that point, if it exists at all.

divbzero• 5 years ago

I wonder if a hard-stop could actually focus our attention on a concrete goalpost: instead of having an indefinite future, we would have a fixed timespan before us that’s much longer than our current planning horizon.

fghorow• 5 years ago

This edifice of cosmological logic, rooted in dark matter, somehow reminds me of epicycles.

Perhaps Earl of Ockham has a pertinent observation...

(Or, maybe I just woke up grumpy this morning.)

m3kw9• 5 years ago

A question came to mind: where do the photons go if it gets past the end of the observable universe?

jeremyjh• 5 years ago

The observable universe is simply what exists in our light cone - what can reach us before the space between is expanding faster than the speed of light. There is no reason to think there is anything special about us or our light cone and no reason to think things outside it would look different to an observer nearer to them.

Aperocky2• 5 years ago

it can't get there. At least the ones that are emitted from us.

Similarly, the ones that are emitted by stuff beyond that boundary will never get to us. Because the space is stretching faster than the photon.

goldenkey2• 5 years ago

*according to our small little local window of observations of the universe.

The universe is thought to be either infinite or 46 billion light years across. Our passive observations don't give us a whole lot to work with, they just give us a view of 14 billion light years.

It's easy to make interpolation/extrapolations. Harder to know the impact of conscious life, the extent of it, and how anisotropic the universe might really be.

Intelligent life may one day create artificial stars or is already doing so. The evolution of the universe can be highly affected by a Type 5 civilization. Let's not be so certain about these astrophysical phenomena..

The effect of conscious intelligence is so great, we might have to rewrite some of the laws of cosmology. After all, when a human being with a death star can simply change the angle of the beam to destroy one planet instead of another, clearly the impetus is that weakly energetic states (state of the brain) are extremely potent in the evolution of the universe.

Normally we think that the magnitude of energy is what matters. However, when it comes to conscious entities, it is the structure that matters. This potency of structure throws a wrench in just using total energy as a measure of the effect that an object can cause. Brains use hardly any energy and yet cause absurdly strong effects that we still don't know the full extent of.

One hypothesis was that perhaps the universe attempts to save computation on low energy particles. We did not find any screen door phenomena though. So the current stance is that the universe provides full fidelity wavefunctions to particles independent of the magnitude of their energy. A low energy particle or system can have a wavefunction of seemingly limitless quantum complexity.

Cosmology currently revolves around magnitude of energy, not the butterfly effect or intelligence. Expect this to change as we further our understanding.

foxyv• 5 years ago

This makes me wonder, how many sparks of life and ancient civilizations have been wiped from the universe by the birth and death of stars. How many supernovae have violently ripped them from existence. How many rogue stars have cooked them to molten slag. What a small and fragile thing humanity is in the face of these forces.

rbanffy8• 5 years ago

People pointed to Asimov's Last Question, I'll point you to Clarke's The Star:

https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf

rootbear• 5 years ago

I reread this most years over the Holidays.

effingwewt4• 5 years ago

And that's not including the ones whose planets destroyed them, or where they destroyed themselves. Or the ones that became space-faring and were wiped out by others/space/whatever.

The odds of surviving on any scale seem pretty infinitesimal. Common sense would dictate we focus on surviving external forces but instead we hate each other over our differences.

s1artibartfast• 5 years ago

It is important to contextualize what almost all means in this context of a vast and possibly infinite universe. It leaves an incomprehensible number of stars yet to form. It also leaves open a backdoor for a star forming Renaissance if blackhole activity dies down in another 10 billion years.

MAGZine• 5 years ago

It is important. Based on a lot of comments, people seem to think "oh, well, universe dead, I guess."

Which is far from the truth. There are still millions of galaxies forming millions of stars, and that is going to continue into the indefinite future.

This is saying that statistically, the younger the universe, the more stars that are created. And they bright, hot, short-lived stars, that, once dead, will give birth to many new stars (who will also generally be bright and short-lived, just less so).

This means that the universe produces a great deal of young stars shortly after its inception, but that eventually gives way to many more long-lived stars that are actually habitable for life.

The universe is very much in its hayday, right now. We're living evidence of it.

ozim• 5 years ago

If we contextualize 95% of all to created stars were created it is still quite a lot dead.

Then taking our context which is our observable universe which is only a small part of universe that we care about - we can certainly say it is dead.

jjk166• 5 years ago

Created != dead. The most common stars in the universe have lifetimes many times the observable universe's age. Even if all star formation stopped everywhere right this moment, we'd only be about 1% of the way through the era of stars. In reality, there is a long tail to stellar formation meaning we are actually much less far along.

del_operator• 5 years ago

Assuming no quirks in physics that the universe just left out for yet another pathological counter example to our understanding of everything — it could just be the star stuff hanging out and social distancing after a star blazing first act.

gumby• 5 years ago

Oh what a time to be alive. Future generations will have to rely on stories, eyewitness accounts, and gripping tales of stellar formation, and willmonly have access to imported, factory-made stars.

Oh the humanity!

otikik• 5 years ago

Has the author considered K-Pop?

ManuelKiessling• 5 years ago

What is it that I’m late to every party?

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Do we really think that expansion is a constant thing in the far far future? We already have different expansion rates in the theory (Big Bang was explosively fast, and now there is a measured speed of expansion), but is that "constant"?

Does the redshift measurements assume a constant expansion, has someone looked at the redshifts data to show historical expansion rate differences somehow maybe with candles?

And... aren't most stars super-long-lived dwarfs anyway? The headline seems a bit misleading.

f00zz• 5 years ago

I guess this sets an upper cap on economic growth

The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

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