What The Universe Will Look Like 100 Quadrillion Years From Now

Tonight we walk one hundred quadrillion years into the future of the cosmos and look around at what will be there. The number is ten to the seventeenth power. The cosmos today is approximately ten to the tenth years old. The future moment we are visiting is seven million times older than the cosmos is now. Five things the cosmos will look like at this future epoch, deep within the Degenerate Era of Adams and Laughlin's Five Ages framework. The sky will be almost completely dark, with all main-sequence stars long dead. Our cosmic neighborhood will be alone, with every other galaxy carried beyond the cosmic event horizon. The remaining objects will all be stellar corpses, with white dwarfs, neutron stars, brown dwarfs, and black holes populating Milkomeda in trillions. The cosmos will still produce rare events through brown dwarf collisions that occasionally ignite new hydrogen-burning stars. And the cosmos will be poised at an early phase of the Degenerate Era, with the eventual Black Hole Era still extraordinarily far in the future. A slow, sleep-friendly three-hour journey through the Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin 1997 framework, the Milky Way-Andromeda merger into Milkomeda, the physics of white dwarf cooling and eventual black dwarf formation, the rare brown dwarf collision events that produce new stars, and the Hawking radiation evaporation timescales of black holes. Spotify Episode Description (SEO-optimised) A long-form sleep documentary on the deep cosmic future. We unpack the Adams and Laughlin Five Ages of the Universe framework, the Stelliferous Era ending at 10^14 years, the Degenerate Era populated by stellar remnants, the Milky Way-Andromeda merger into Milkomeda, white dwarf cooling to black dwarf temperatures, brown dwarf collisions producing rare new stars, Hawking radiation black hole evaporation, the cosmic event horizon and the eventual isolation of any observer in the bound Local Group, and what comes after at the Black Hole Era and Dark Era. Topics covered: Fred Adams, Gregory Laughlin, Freeman Dyson, dark energy implications, electron degeneracy pressure, proton decay timescales, Chandrasekhar limit, Type Ia supernovae, tidal disruption events. If your mind quietens as the cosmos expands around you, subscribe so the next sleep-doc finds you again. Sources Adams F C, Laughlin G 1997 - A dying universe the long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects, Reviews of Modern Physics - University of Michigan and Lick Observatory Adams F C, Laughlin G 1999 - The Five Ages of the Universe inside the physics of eternity, Free Press Dyson F J 1979 - Time without end physics and biology in an open universe, Reviews of Modern Physics - Institute for Advanced Study Hawking S W 1974 - Black hole explosions, Nature - University of Cambridge Riess A G, et al. 1998 - Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe, Astronomical Journal - High-Z Supernova Search Team Perlmutter S, et al. 1999 - Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 high redshift supernovae, Astrophysical Journal - Supernova Cosmology Project Cox T J, Loeb A 2008 - The collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda, MNRAS - Harvard CfA van der Marel R P, et al. 2012 - The M31 velocity vector III future Milky Way M31 Triangulum collision and merger, Astrophysical Journal - Space Telescope Science Institute Althaus L G, Corsico A H, Isern J, Garcia-Berro E 2010 - Evolutionary and pulsational properties of white dwarf stars, Astronomy and Astrophysics Review - University of La Plata Winget D E, Kepler S O 2008 - Pulsating white dwarf stars and precision asteroseismology, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics - University of Texas at Austin Kroupa P, Tout C A, Gilmore G 1990 - The low luminosity stellar mass function, MNRAS - Cambridge University Page D N 1976 - Particle emission rates from a black hole massless particles from an uncharged nonrotating hole, Physical Review D - Caltech Page D N 2005 - Hawking radiation and black hole thermodynamics, New Journal of Physics - University of Alberta Coleman S 1977 - Fate of the false vacuum, Physical Review D - Harvard University