How a Civilization Survives the End of Everything

What happens when surviving your planet isn’t enough… and even your star starts to die?

In this episode of Entropy Rising, we explore what it would actually take for a civilization to survive for billions, trillions, and even longer. Not just avoiding extinction, but pushing all the way to the edge of the universe itself.

We break down real, physics-based ideas like restarting a planet’s core, shielding worlds from solar death, harvesting and extending the life of stars, and eventually moving beyond planets entirely. From Dyson swarms to artificial black holes, this is the long-term survival strategy of a civilization that refuses to die.

At some point, the stars go out. After that, things get weird.

Transcript

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if you did for whatever reason, want to keep. Your specific planet alive and you notice your core was cooling. There are options, and at the end of the day, one of them is as simple as literally just pumping in energy. One of the avenues we've talked about for Terraforming Mars, and I think our first or second episode talked about this, is you could effectively. Bore into the core of your planet and just pump energy into it. And you can do that through a bunch of different ways. You could bury things like actual power plants to keep the core of your planet warm. You could, if you had a Dyson swarm just redirect a light from your sun into the core of your planet and use that to keep it warm. Uh, there's some other artificial means you could do that as well. Uh, I know from Mars there's a theory of actually. Drilling around the entire planet and, and basically building in nuclear bomb small ones and citing 'em all off to kickstart the core of the planet. Yeah. There are options to be explored for the civilization that decides that their planet is very important and they do wanna keep it going. Hello and welcome to Entropy Rising, a podcast all about science and futurism. I'm your host, Jacob, and as always joining me is my wonderful co-host Lucas Lucas. How are you doing today? I'm doing wonderful, Jake. Thank you. How are you? Doing great. Doing great. I'm looking forward to today's topic where we're gonna be talking about how civilizations can effectively extend their lifespan and not just the lifespan of the individual. People that make up that civilization, but the actual civilization itself. How do you outlive your planet? How do you outlive your son? How do you outlive the universe? That's gonna be the topic of today's episode and I think there's some interesting implications and just, uh, some fun thought experiments in this type of topic. So I'm looking forward to it. So am I. Let's hop in. Yeah, let's do it. So obviously the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about a civilization ending event is probably. your planet dying in some way, shape or form, right? Mm-hmm. And There are a lot of ways that that can happen. I know Hollywood has drummed up many of their own examples, many of them, catastrophic and amazing. So things like an asteroid impact, something along those lines, which, First of all that is possible, that is always possible, that that's the way that your civilization could be wiped out. Uh, so there is kind of a certain assumption with this topic in this episode is that you. Are going to survive to a point of being able to get into space and prevent the easy events like a, an asteroid strike, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, you, you definitely, you know, you think about the short term like these cataclysms that can happen, asteroid strikes, things like that. Just being able to get off planet and survive a little bit longer. but trying to branch out and survive for millions, billions, and trillions of years is a completely other thing. Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. And those are pretty easy to avoid. Once you have space infrastructure, You can survive things like asteroid strikes very easily. Mm-hmm. Uh, so then you're really looking at like, what's the long-term things that are gonna destroy a planet just through, uh, sheer age. Right. What happens as a planet gets older and older? What makes it fail? And there's a couple of things. For one, planet's cooled down, the earth. For example, most of the heat coming from the core of our earth is through radioactive decay of elements within the planet itself. Mm-hmm. This is why back in, I think around the 15 hundreds, there was a monk. We tried to calculate the age of the Earth, and it wasn't an unreasonable calculation. He made, he basically figured out about how big the earth is, about the average composition, and then some did some basic algebra to say, well, how long would it take for, you know, a ball of magma to cool down to where we are now? And he got a number like 6,000 years and, from his mathematics and from what he understand about the universe, that was absolutely accurate. Mm-hmm. Uh, he unfortunately did not know about radioactive decay, and that's what's actually keeping the mantle of the earth molted now. But eventually that wheel fell and the planet will cool. And this would happen for any planet. Yeah. And, another issue that comes with, this core of a planet cooling is you start to lose your magnetosphere as well. Yeah. So once you lose your magnetosphere, you then have to worry about your atmosphere being stripped by the solar winds. But there are also some other smaller effects you don't think about. Like, uh, there's some upwell of some overturning as continental plates move that generate new nutrients for ocean environments that you're gonna lose. And there's a lot of other, uh, important parts for life that tectonic activity provide. And that would all be lost if your planet cooled down. it would be devastating. with our current technology, it seems unavoidable. Yeah. Eventually our planet's core will cool. There's no way for us to re-start it or restart it or, you know, ignite it. with what we have now or what we could have in the near future. So that that's something that if we wanna survive, and it's just one of many things, if we wanna survive, we will need to branch out and get off the planet. Like that's the first step. Well, again, this, this episode of this whole podcast isn't about current technology. Of course, there are things you could do, of course, to restart a planetary core or to keep a planetary core warm. Mm-hmm. obviously you would need to be in advance civilization. This isn't something we could do today, like you hinted at. But if you did for whatever reason, want to keep. Your specific planet alive and you notice your core was cooling. There are options, and at the end of the day, one of them is as simple as literally just pumping in energy. One of the avenues we've talked about for Terraforming Mars, and I think our first or second episode talked about this, is you could effectively. Bore into the core of your planet and just pump energy into it. And you can do that through a bunch of different ways. You could bury things like actual power plants to keep the core of your planet warm. You could, if you had a Dyson swarm, uh, you don't even need to convert that energy into anything. You can literally just redirect a light from your sun into the core of your planet and use that to keep it warm. Uh, there's some other artificial means you could do that as well. Uh, I know from Mars there's a theory of actually. Drilling around the entire planet and, and basically building in nuclear bomb small ones and citing 'em all off to kickstart the core of the planet. Yeah. There are options to be explored for the civilization that decides that their planet is very important and they do wanna keep it going. No, I mean that's super cool to think about and I know it's a topic that has been explored a lot more recently just with us thinking about like terraforming and restarting Mars in particular because its core is like dormant. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Super cool. Yeah, and it's not even what you have to do. If you decide that restarting your, uh, core of your planet's too tricky. You can, of course just step in with technology and do things like put up A solar shield between your star and your planet, and use that to, you know, reduce the amount of atmospheric stripping that you're gonna see from the solar wind. This is effectively just a gigantic magnetic field generator that you would put between your planet and the star. You could do this in the L one lag point, or you could actually move it closer to the star. So this is actually something that to point out as you move obviously closer and closer and closer, uh, to the star, that means your orbital velocity is gonna be different from your. planet. Mm-hmm. Uh, LaGrange points get around this 'cause they're stable orbits. So you can put something in a LaGrange point and even though it's closer to the, the sun, for example, it'll orbit at the same speed as your planet. But if you want to go closer to the star than that LaGrange point, which you might wanna do, 'cause that gives you, you can use a smaller magnetic field to shield your planet behind it. You can do something called a lag gate. Have I have I talked about these with you before. I've never heard you mention those before. So lag gates are kind of interesting. We've talked about solar sails before, which is the idea that you can use a really thin light, gigantic foil effectively to push off of the solar radiation coming from a star. And you can use that to propel a spaceship, for example. Something you can do also is you can take a kind of hybrid approach. Mm-hmm. Where you effectively use a solar cell on a satellite. Now the solar cell doesn't get enough thrust from the star to actually push it off into interstellar space, but because you're getting this support from the star, it can move slower than its in its orbital path than otherwise would be able to, which is why we call them a lag eye. It's kind of a similar thing as a satellite, and this means you can actually have a satellite. Closer to your star, that still matches the orbital period of the planet. Even if the planet's further away and orbiting slower, has a slower transition around the star, and this way you can put things like. Solar shades or magnetic field generators between your planet and your star, and protect them from things like, you know, the solar radiation from atmospheric stripping if you were to lose your magnetic field. Wow, dude. That's, uh, that's so awesome. I like to think about the precision that would go into making something like that, um, to like, just support, uh, our planet's atmosphere is super cool and, you know, I never really thought about like creating An artificial magnetic field. I was always just like restarting the core of the planet was like the main thing in my mind. So that's a really cool concept. Yeah, that's definitely a, an avenue you can explore it for whatever reason, you don't want to restart your, your planet's magnetic field. Maybe you decide it's too much work, it's too destructive that that is an option for sure. Mm-hmm. Another thing that's going to happen and this kind of transitions from end of planet to end of star, which would kind of be the next thing you would need to do to extend the lifespan of your civilization. But as your star grows old, uh, especially our stunt, right, like we have a yellow dwarf, uh, as it starts to expand, then the habitable zone, that goldilock zone we have to exist in moves further and further and further back, right? So your planet's gonna start heating up, you're gonna lose your atmosphere, eventually lose your water, and you know, effectively earth will turn into Venus. And then, um, right now it's still unknown, but we might even just be swallowed up by the sun entirely. And this would happen for other planets orbiting other stars as well. that is like, the big end of humanity, you know, moment that you would see when I was growing up. At least. It's like eventually the sun's gonna expand and then that's it, you know? Um, but it, it's definitely cool to think about like, first, how, how would we avoid something like that? And of course the big thing that comes to mind is just getting off planet. Yeah. Entirely. And I do wanna reiterate, we're gonna continue talking about saving your own planet and saving your own civilization. but yeah, you are right. You need to get off of planet and I think realistically, by the time you're at the point where. And I think everyone who enjoys the show, any return viewer knows my thought process and probably yours as well. We're mostly gonna be living in orbital habitats by this point. Yeah. Uh, but you still might want to preserve your home planet for a variety of reasons. Maybe just, you know, sentimental reasons, right? Nostalgia. Yeah. And we are gonna talk about how you can extend your civilization beyond planets as well. But if you do wanna save your planet, uh, you do have some options for stopping your sun from expanding. You see again, I've always just thought we need to get away from it. Turn the earth into a ship and fly away. How do you stop a sun from expanding? Well, this is actually Lucas, uh, a topic. We talked about a couple of episodes back we, we reframed it a little bit In our previous episode, we were talking about harvesting energy from a star. Mm-hmm. And I think this was just kinda a byproduct of that. But of course, this is now the reverse. This is a, trying to extend the lifespan of a star and harvesting energy is just the byproduct. But what you can actually do is if you, you take a star, what actually causes it to fail is they effectively get poisoned. You have nuclear fusion going on and these byproducts of these nuclear reaction, these infusible elements, start to build up in the star. And that effectively poisons it. That means that it gets, it needs to get hotter and hotter and hotter to fuse these elements. And then eventually you just run out of elements that can be fused. And for our star. Effectively, what you're gonna see is you're gonna see hydrogen turning into helium, and that's gonna poison the star and cause it to expand and have to get hotter. So what you can do is that you can actually funnel the plasma from the sun up, and then you can split off the hydrogen and helium and other trace elements. Use those for whatever you want. I think in, in that episode, we were talking about how you can get the trace iron helium, all these other elements and use those to build mega structures because there's more. Iron gold, rare metals in the sun than the rest of the solar system combined. Of course, it's in a very small quantity, but it is. There is more of it there, right? But in addition to this, if you pull off these elements and just return the hydrogen back to the star, you actually also extend the lifetime of that star by quite a lot. I, it kind of makes me think of like the way that some, uh, experimental stellar engines would work effectively. Yeah, yeah. It, it pretty much would be, so if we're a civilization at that point, you know, we can dual purpose that. Yeah, exactly. You can harvest energy out of it. You can harvest materials. This is the idea behind mining a star. And a lot of people get like nervous. I've talked about this before on threads, how we can mine our own star and harvest these trace metals to build mega structures. And a lot of people are like, that's a terrible idea. You're gonna mine our stars and they're gonna kill us. But no, it actually extend the lifetime of the star and give you a more stable civilization. You'll be able to live much, much, much longer than you otherwise would be able to if you just allowed the sun to run his normal course of actions. Yeah, and the weird thing about this, or something I think is really fascinating is this obviously has to operate on a huge scale. But it's not any new physics. We already know effectively how to do this. If you've ever used a mass spectrometer, which I actually have, I don't know if you ever did. I have. Yeah. Uh, that's how they work. You have a charge to mass ratio for any element. Uh, you make a plasma out of it, which the sun already makes, and then if you expose those elements to a magnetic field, they're gonna react and deflect in that magnetic field at different rates, depending on their master charge ratio. This isn't any new technology. Most labs have one of these mass spectrometers sitting around somewhere anyways. Oh, it's kind of over exaggeration. They're quite expensive, but a lot of universities are gonna have these, they're not uncommon pieces of equipment, and it's effectively just that on a gigantic scale, and you can use that to extend the lifespan of your sun. Yeah, I hope, uh, I hope theirs is a little bit more reliable, though. Ours was always broken. Yeah. I don't think Beckman Colier is gonna come and fix your, your stellar sized, you know, that would be funny. Do you remember the Expanse TV show? Yeah. There was a, a, a gag scene They were using cargo containers to like assault a ship and they had FedEx logo on 'em. Oh yes. Yeah. So I'm imagining now like some new science fiction movie, but it's like Beckman cult era. They're on engine. It's like walking out the sun as a massive next mass spectrometer flies towards it. Fisher Scientific, all my goodness. We're not sponsored, but Fisher, we will. Yeah. but yeah, no, it's, uh, that, that's really cool to, to think about, you know, because we, it's like you said, we, we kind of are already progressing towards the technology that could be used millions of years in the future. it's just about scale. We understand the base physics and it's nothing new other than just making it a little bigger. Yeah. Well, just a little bit. Yeah. Just, just a touch. Maybe not, not lab scale. that is, that is, great to think about, how we can actually approach the sun and expand its life, so we, we now know how to control our star. We know, how we can control our planet. But the big thing about the universe itself is that, entropy, right? E everything radiates away. So it's like you can control these things at a smaller level, but how do we now progress forward and survive the death of the universe? Yeah, and you know, that's kind of an oxymoron in a sense too. You can't really, of course survive the death of the universe. There will eventually be an end, a living forever in our universe is impossible. There, there will be an end-state, but you can live for a very, very, very long time. So the last examples we gave were extending the lifespan of your star, extending the lifespan of your planet. Uh, you can obviously move your planet as well through something like a gravity tractor. Uh, I think if we're talking about a civilization that is progressing, progressing, progressing, and trying to live longer and longer and longer than normal course of events might be the things we just talked about. Extending your planet, extending your star, and then naturally also of course. Building structures like O'Neill cylinders and and orbital habitats. And those are nice 'cause you can move around other stars. And I think that's kinda like phase one into living into the extreme depths of the universe into extreme age is having a more nomadic civilization and being able to live on these orbital habitats and just move them from star to star to star. Be able to, to adapt as a star grows old, you can move on to another one. Yeah, I mean, it, it definitely makes sense the brighter burning stars are going to die out faster. Luckily, ours. Has a long time to live, but we could survive longer if we went to, let's say, like a brown dwarf. Yeah, for sure. I mean, our son has a lifespan of about 10 billion years. Mm-hmm. We're about in the middle of that right now. It's about 5 billion years old. And in about another billion years it would be, uh, effectively inhabitable, unless we could extend the lifespan. And, but like you said, things like round dwarfs, red dwarfs, the smaller the star, the longer it burns. Mm-hmm. And so trying to harvest the energy of these longer burning stars would be a way, of course, to live longer. Smart civilization actually might go a step further than this and try to redistribute matter. If you are preparing to really live into the long-term age of the universe, you may start pulling matter away from these brighter, hotter, burning stars, right, and cooling them down so they'll last longer and longer and longer. I mean, you can make. Hundreds of thousands to millions of red dwarf stars out of the mass of one of these gigantic blue, uh, stars that are only gonna last for a couple million years. So you could potentially see that as a way to preserve matter and energy, uh, to effectively store it long term until you need it. Maybe even going so far as to take these gases, these hydrogen and helium. And keep them stored in more like gas giants that don't actually burn. And as you go and reach further and further, as all stars start to burn out, you can just add a little more matter to them. And now they have the pressures needed to achieve fusion. And you can basically just create stars and use 'em up as you go. That, uh, that's actually a brilliant concept, right? Because all that you need is enough gravity to hold the mass of gases that you prefer. Like you could just put a solid iron core in there, something that won't degrade on its own. Um, and then just have the gases float around them and then, like you said, just add a little bit more mass and get it to that point to where it just ignites. Yeah, exactly. It's like tending a fire. When you're camping. You don't wanna have this super bright burning fire 'cause it's gonna burn through all your wood too fast. But if you just keep it glowing red and you just add a little more fuel, a little at a time, you can get through the entire night with much less fuel. It's, it's essentially that, except for the night is. Billions to trillions of years old within in the entire universe. And the fuel is raw hydrogen or helium? Man, that would be insane. Uh, it's just, so crazy to think about like you have a civilization and then they just have like this long line of gas giants that they funnel in every time that they need to. New energy source. Yep. And they just ignite it, live off of it. Then when it's done, collect all the iron, bring in the next one. You could even potentially imagine having a. Elements of your civilization, maybe drones, maybe people going out and gathering up these resources from stars, extinguishing them, packaging them up into a nice, gas giant and shipping it back to wherever your civilization wants to continue living. Uh, but timing it in such a way that it's just gonna arrive right as you need. And you're doing this in your whole galaxy, just funneling all these stars and all of this into your, wherever, again, wherever you wanna live. Maybe you've got a centralized civilization at this point. Uh, maybe there's a bunch of different areas and you know, right as the, the star is starting to die down, the more more gas arrives and keeps it going, that's like the, the end game boss of Amazon shipping gas Giant. Yes. Like, like gas giant production and shipping. You know, three day shipping on, on gas giants, 2000 light year guaranteed, or your money back. Customer satisfaction, dude. Oh man. And then of course, the whole time you're doing this, you're probably, whatever stars you're keeping alive to feed your civilization or to harvest energy from, you're probably, again, doing the stellar harvesting, pulling up all the elements, filtering out the ones that are no longer useful, and using them for other, things in your civilization and repoing in the hydrogen. And just keeping it running as clean as possible because again, you don't want, uh, to poison the stars. You don't want 'em to run hotter than absolutely necessary because The time spans we're talking about again, you know, hundreds of billions of years, trillions of years. Uh, add up quick. Yeah. See, I mean, uh, that's, that, that I, I love that for humanity. If we could revert back to like Native American ways, become a nomadic culture again, we use every part of the planet of the universe, really. Of the universe. Yeah. Uh, waste, not whatnot. I guess That's right. But there are ways we can be more efficient. Uh, the human body is actually fairly efficient. We, we run basically a supercomputer on a hundred watts, the same thing. You run a small refrigerator, light bulb. Uh, our brains are amazing, but we could potentially do better. And this is kind of the idea behind something known as the Dyson Eternal Intelligence. And this is, again, this is not a new concept. We, we've talked about matrika brains. Yeah. And I know this is something you were talking about before we recorded, so I'll let you take over if you wanna dive into it. Yeah. I mean, really the concept is, you could do it one of two ways. figuring out how to upload a consciousness, into a massive computer system like that. And then surviving just off of powering that computer system, which of course is going to be a lot less than the production of food. Actually maintaining surviving life forms throughout a civilization. and you know, just being able to create whatever reality you want, you can distort time so that it feels like relative infinity. Yeah. For, for these people. And what you mean by distort time is not to distort the time of the universe, but you can run your civilization at different clock speeds. Exactly. And for the people of course, experiencing that, it wouldn't feel any different. Internally it would not. Yes. But, but we, we can slow it down to last trillions of years. And it's the same way. another concept that I've seen is essentially we maintain our, bodies, but we slow our metabolisms down to essentially like one, 100th of the speed. then, your brain of course, would process things at that slower amount, but you'd also consume that much less energy. Yeah. Um, as you survive. Now that's a less efficient way. It, that's just a way that we can think about if actually uploading a consciousness is not possible. Yeah. Which I think it will be. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be. Yeah. Um, we, we talked about it. There are some questions about it, but I do like the idea of building a Dyson swarm, uh, and effectively using it to run computation, which is all that the a matrika brain is. It's just these orbital computers that harvest energy from their star and they use all that energy, uh, to run computation versus a traditional Dyson swarm, which uses that energy to power a biological civilization. Mm-hmm. Uh, something that I do like also the idea of is that if you do have a Matrika brand, and it's not just one super intelligence, it's a bunch of, civilization. Or even if it is one super intelligence, it really doesn't matter. But you can almost imagine this, Dyson Swarm, right? The Nagios brain existing around a star and then starting to ship off all of its probes to move on to another star as this one's consumed and, and continue harvesting energy, from that one. And it could just move around the whole galaxy really, if it wanted to from star to star, to star, to star, uh, taking advantage of them as they start to burn out. Yeah. But I do still think any entity that recognized that it could potentially live for a long time, and it wanted to. I don't think that's the approach it would necessarily take. I think it would, especially if it found itself being the only intelligent life in the universe, is that it would move from star to star. Probably extinguishing them to save that matter to get through later as the universe gets older. Yeah, no, I mean, that would make sense, right? Because if you're trying to live for as long as you can, you don't wanna jump from star to star to star because there will come a time when the stars die. You wanna live past when the stars die. So you would need storage. And we talked about a couple ways already storing it as a more stable elements that, that aren't, you know, burning off that energy as quickly, like gas giants, things like that. Or storing them in massive unconceivable batteries. Yeah, it, it gets tricky. for anyone who isn't familiar, the, the idea, the timeline on the, on the universe, Uh, we're in the Solaris era right now. So the star forming era and we're gonna be in this for a couple may, maybe about a trillion years. After that, you're going to have, obviously all the faster burning stars are going to all burn out and, and go extinct. And then you're gonna be left with red dwarfs and stellar remnants for a very long time. Uh, but even those will eventually burn out and you're gonna end up with this really long transition period where all of the stars are burnt out and. You aren't yet at a point where black holes are releasing energy through hawking radiation. Mm-hmm. And so you need to plan to survive this really long, cold, dark era of the universe and, you know, hopefully get through this effective energy gap to hopefully make it to the, to the point in time when black holes start releasing energy through hawking radiation. And so that's what any entity that is planning on living for hundreds of trillions of years has to plan for, is how to save energy and matter to make it through this gap. I know we talked about this a little bit before. Um, for me, I, I always had this misconception that the stars would die and then the black holes were there. Yeah. And then we would go there and we would just start harvesting energy from them, to support the civilization. But like you just said, and how you told me before, there's this. massive gap. And when you say massive, you mean how many trillions? A years. Uh, it works out that the time it's gonna take from the beginning of the universe to when the last star burns out, you're gonna have multitudes of that time longer until the first black hole starts to whittle down to the point of actually releasing more energy than it consumes. Because this is an important thing to keep in mind. Black holes right now, the super massive black holes, they still net consume energy. They're still growing. So black holes release so little energy right now through hawking radiation that the cosmic microwave background, just the background energy of our universe is greater than the energy that they release through hawking radiation. So they're still growing. And for a black hole, the bigger it is, the less hawking radiation it puts out. It's kind of an inverse of what you might expect. Smaller black holes emit a lot more radiation than bigger black holes, and so you're gonna have. Hundreds and hundreds of trillions of years that you're gonna have to survive from when the last star burns out to when the first black hole, really starts to release energy, uh, through evaporation. Because what has to happen is that the, the cosmic microwave background of the universe has to get cold enough that black holes start exporting energy instead of importing energy. and then they'll start to shrink. And once they start shrinking, you can actually harvest that hawking radiation. But at the beginning, it's, it's. A tiny amount. I mean, we're talking about maybe one or two protons of energy every couple of billion years, uh, when these first start to evaporate. So it takes a long time for them to release a useful amount of energy, which is just like, like insane that something with so much energy inside of it could only produce that little amount over such a span of time now. But that does make me think. have another storage method, which we've actually talked about before, is like, what if we created our own artificial black holes? Absolutely. That is definitely something that you could do. There is a question, and if you can make micro black holes mm-hmm. But you could definitely make stellar mass black holes pretty easily. Just throw two stars together, works pretty well. Those potentially wouldn't last as long as the super massive black holes. If you could make smaller black holes, that'd be even better because then you could potentially make 'em at will. And that's a way to effectively 100% turn matter into energy. Yeah, I mean that would be perfect. Like, like that. That's really now since we've been talking about it, one of the only conceivable ways that I could think of us surviving that amount of time in between. Harvesting energy from the stars and then harvesting energy from the natural black holes in our universe. Yeah, absolutely. At least through hawking radiation, you can still harvest energy from black holes through other means. You can throw mass into them and harvest the gravitational energy as stuff falls in. Mm-hmm. But of course That means you still need to have mass around to use. Eventually it'll run out. you can also harvest the rotational energy of a black hole, they have this thing called the ergos sphere, which is effectively a spinning black hole, which almost all black holes are spinning black holes. Uh, they actually do something called frame dragging where they drag space time around them and there's a certain amount of energy stored into that that you can take advantage of and take. That still involves dropping some matter into the black hole to harvest it, so you could still eventually run out of matter. And this is all ignoring another elephant in that room that maybe some people are familiar with, which is it's, it's possible that matter itself is not stable over these long periods of time, which is kind of hard to wrap your head around. But there is a theory that protons could decay. Okay. And how would that occur? So, I think we have a very science literate audience, but for people not familiar, of course, atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Mm-hmm. So if you have protons decaying, that means matter itself is not stable. Matter will decay. And what this could potentially mean is if, there's some grand unified theories of the universe that states that over really long periods of time, protons will actually collapse into like a positron and then some other, uh, neutral particle would not matter. And if that happens, you're pretty well screwed. That's, you know, there's, it's hard to imagine unless you just get to God-like levels of physics that you're gonna be able to survive past that. And this would happen faster than before you got to the end of the universe where all that's left is black holes, right? So if this is true, then that's gonna be your time limit. You'll, you'll never make it to this black hole air because all matter would collapse before them. However, you can still, of course, live up until that point. And again, just harvesting energy through black holes like we're talking about before, would be a way to do that. Yeah, I mean it. It makes sense. And it's kind of like poetic in a way because it, the goal is never to survive forever.'cause infinity by definition is unattainable. Right? So us trying to get to that point is, you know, it, it's futile, but surviving unless you can reverse entropy, which as far as we can tell, you can't, the, all of the laws of physics seem to say no. But obviously we're still very early into our understanding of the universe and physics. Yeah, of course. but if we could get to the point to where. The very thing that makes up everything that we know have ever known and never will know, starts falling apart and giving up. I think that we've succeeded. Yeah, absolutely. If proton decay does happen, that's a little tricky 'cause you can't store energy through regular matter. You have to store it through other means. Black holes are a great example of that. anything, even if you throw regular matter into them, it turns into something else. So you can store matter and energy. Through black holes to avoid proton decay. But you yourself are probably still made up of, a material that's consist of protons, uh, unless you find a way to make a computer outta like leptons, which doesn't seem possible. Uh, so you're gonna have to prepare for that. But you could potentially harvest all the, the materials in your, as far out as you can go, whether it's your local galaxy. Then use that to keep sustaining yourself by as protons decay, harvesting material to keep your material civilization going, and then throwing anything left over into black holes to save that energy for later. That's about all you can do. And eventually all the protons will decay. Maybe that's a theory, right? We don't know if that's true, but if that is true, it's, it's crazy to think about, right? Because with our current understanding, we believe that all matter in the universe should be the same age. Right. Because yeah, it was all made at the same time. Yeah. Right. So that means that just at a certain moment, all of them should react in the same way after the same amount of time. Be it that, you know, the universe itself is a controlled environment on a larger scale and everything would just turn into nothing at once. No. That's not how that would work. No. Okay. So how would that work? Well, it's like a half life. So it's the same thing as like radiation decay. Okay. Where you have a half life of a certain amount of time. So by the time you reach that half life, you would expect half of all protons to have decayed. I see. And then once you double that half, half life. Out of the remaining half of the matter that that remained, half of that again would've decayed, but the half life is really long. I can't remember the exact amount of time, but it's like 10 to the 30th, something. It's, it's a very long period of time. For context, we're at like 10 to the 12th right now in terms of how old the universe is, where in the billions of years this is gonna be. Trillions and trillions of year. So it's a long, long, long time away. Right. But it's much closer than when black holes are gonna start releasing useful amount of energy. It's gonna be like 10 to the 60, 10 to the 70 years, which is, you know, uh, an insanely long period of time away. It is. But now running off of that concept, do you think like our future civilizations at some point first able to realize how old the protons are within matter and then start separating. Matter that they think will decay first or last and start using that as like food sources to replenish again. It doesn't work like that. You can't just look at matter and be like, this is older. This is gonna decay. It's not how half-lifes work. It's a statistical phenomena. It's like you just know that of any lump of matter you have. Same thing with radiation decay, half of it's gonna decay within a certain amount of time. You just measure that decay rate. And you make a statistical determination off of it, but you can't look at any one piece of matter and say, ah, it's, it's this close to the half life it decay.'cause that one could be the one that goes through 20 half lifes before it finally decays. It's completely statistical and so meaningless on an individual scale. It's just a way to talk about large properties like, hundreds of millions of trillions of atoms together. You know, half of them will be gone in x amount of time. So there's no way to, to filter the matter by when this one's gonna decay and when this one's gonna decay. It's just an all or nothing type thing. Insane. That's awesome to think about though. Well, in a, in a crazy way. Yeah. If it happens, and it might not. That's just, that's something that comes up with some of the grand unified theories of the universe. Uh, that's not something that everyone believes in. There is no real evidence for it. This is all theoretical. but there are some models that say it could happen. If that doesn't happen effectively, what happens is. The end of the universe is gonna be, all stars will eventually turn to iron. Uh, iron's the most stable form of matter. It's what ends the, the fusion chain. Once you reach iron, you can no longer gain energy from fusion. Mm-hmm. And, uh, going the other way, fission. Once you reach iron, there's no more energy to be gained that way either. so effectively you would end up with all these iron stars, uh, and then those themselves would collapse in the black holes because over very, very, very long periods of time through quantum fluctuation, uh, the density could just change just enough to collapse into a black hole. And of course over quantum fluctuations is, the odds of that happening are extremely small. But when you have infinity, no matter how small your statistical odds of something happening are multiplied by infinity are 100% right? Mm-hmm. So, uh, yeah. Uh, eventually the idea is all these iron stars would eventually collapse into black coals. You enter the black hole era and then eventually all these black holes would evaporate to nothingness through hawking radiation. And that's when you reach something called the heat death of the universe. Everything is in the lowest form of energy It possibly could be. Effectively just heat energy. Yeah. Just a true 100% dissipation. Yep. Of everything. That's, that's the goal of entropy. And if we wanna live to that era, we want to try to prevent that as much as we can by storing matter in the most stable forms we can think of. And then harvesting those black holes. Yeah. But you know, as far as we know right now, entropy is unavoidable and it's always rising. Yeah. Nice little. It's like, uh, the joke on the, when the movie says its name, that's right. Entropy rising. We broke the fourth wall. But yeah, so that's kind of what we have to look forward to at the end of the universe. Uh, I do think, I do like the idea of the dice and eternal intelligence uploading minds because you can be more efficient with your energy. Doing everything you can to preserve that energy and then potentially turning into useful batteries in the form of like black holes and harvest them over long periods of time. So that is possible. And you know, we could be around for hundreds of billions to trillions of years doing that. And this is just, these are the extreme examples. Of course, even just living a couple million years would be pretty crazy in terms of like a civilization scale. So the question is, could a civilization even be stable over that long period of time? Yeah, I mean, I, I mean, ju jumping into like the. Socioeconomic side of it would be like a whole nother thing. Yeah. We definitely don't have time to do that on this episode. Yeah. But it is a whole other question and it probably wouldn't even be a civilization at that point, and probably not even, uh, the same species over these long periods of time. Yeah. it's just really cool to speculate about because it's one of the. What I see as like humanity's true end goals. Like, what are we building up to is just like surviving as long as possible to experience the universe for as long as possible. Yeah, absolutely. Well, do you have anything else to add on surviving till the end of time? No, I mean it is been really cool topic. I actually learned a lot of super cool stuff. and I think it was a really fun episode. I think so too. And if you enjoy this episode, please consider joining us next week or we're gonna be talking about. The Fury paradox. Again, a topic that seems to be much appreciated, and we're gonna be exploring the idea of greedy aliens, which if you haven't heard that theory, we will, uh, basically just talk about the topic, uh, or the idea that we are early in the universe, and that if you're not early in the universe, you never get to exist. That's effectively that topic in a nutshell, and I think it'll be a fun one next week. Absolutely. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.