Transitioning from the Stelliferous Era to the Degenerate Era

willbell

Approximately 100 trillion years hence the process of new stars being created will end, and slowly the remaining stars will start to peter out, until eventually all stars disappear leading into the black hole era. But what interests me is the transition, undoubtedly during the late Stelliferous Era there will still be some life in the universe. I am hoping even our distant descendants however unrecognizable they may be could be part of this crowded universe. What will happen as we realize stars are dying and not being replaced? How long will it take to see the universe go from a presumably prosperous Stelliferous Era to a Degenerated Universe? Will we see an organic transition or will a crowded universe lead to large conflicts for what little is left over a shorter time period?

I guess what I'm asking is how long could such a transition be and how rough could/will it be for a universe that I'm assuming for the story is overpopulated and has faster than light technology and advanced technology?

mfb

If our distant descendants still live in trillions of years, we have no idea how their technology would look like. Interstellar travel is a minimal requirement, but everything is possible, including the generation of new universes.

Assuming no intelligent life messes around with the evolution of the universe, the transition between those eras is very slow, at the timescale of tens of trillions of years itself. The rate of star formation will just continue to drop.

willbell

Certainly at some point an alien race might start to feel crowded without new stars?

mfb

Crowded in which way?
And why shouldn't it feel so long before, due to reproduction?

I would not expect that the typical timescale increases in the future - so trillions of years are an extremely long timescale, and any change in the life will occur much quicker than that. There is no "oh crap, we are running out of stars soon!"-moment.

willbell

Crowded as in any habitable planet is going to be settled and most people will want kids. Something that will continue when people have to be evacuated when there star gets old. Eventually when people move to the few habitable planets that remain, assuming they don't kill refugees or enact some sort of one child policy there will be overpopulation. Even if the period over which this happens will be several trillion years eventually the population will be staying constant while the planets that population can live on decreases.
I understand what you are saying but people aren't just going to decide "hey when we start running low on planets we aren't going to be able to support this population, lets start culling excess population" because it will seem like trillions of years until the high population becomes a liability (that is until it isn't trillions of years) and that would be obviously not acceptable. (I realize I am assuming that we are going to have certain cultural rules like we have now; and that populations will be big in that era, etc)

mfb

Even a rate of 0.00001% population growth per year gives an overpopulation problem long before the universe runs out of stars - it corresponds to doubling every ~7 million years, or settling every star in the whole observable universe in less than a billion years (that needs FTL travel, obviously).
At this timescale, expect technologies which will change the definition of "population" - is an accurate computer simulation of a mind a person? And if the computer simulates 1000 different minds? What about minds which are stored on a hard drive, but not executed at the moment?

In addition, black holes can be used as very effective power source, and release much more energy per fuel than stars. Why would you want stars at all? It might be efficient to disturb the formation of stars to use the interstellar gas as fuel in black hole power plants instead.

Ryan_m_b

Homo sapiens won't be around in 100 trillion years. For discussions why see this thread asking about half a billion years http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=563914

The idea of overpopulating the universe strikes me as a very odd one, long before that gets an issue something as simple over population is likely to be a solved problem. If we don't sort it out on Earth in the next century we're in for trouble but the demographic transition fueled by changes in modern society (from medical technologies to women's rights) seems to point to a way put.

As MFB points out if there is some far future civilisation which considers this a problem then their technology is going to be so vastly ahead of what we can understand that there's little point discussing it. It will certainly make for very hard fiction to write.

willbell

I realize humanity will be around in several trillion years, that is why I said our *descendants* I believe humans will be able to branch off Earth and begin to settle the universe and then it will nearly be impossible to kill us off, we will evolve over several million years into other forms, and that is part of the advantage of this concept, you can imagine that it will be anything, and as we know from some good science fiction writers it is possible to write an alien species.

willbell

I've not known Earth-like planets to orbit blackholes.
EDIT: at least not for long. :)

mfb

Every earth-like planet around a massive star and far away enough to survive the supernova will orbit a black hole afterwards. And if you have planet-moving equipment, you can even design its parameters.

Orbits around black holes are like orbits around stars.
Neglecting the gravitational influence of other planets, they are stable for every reasonable timescale.

Planets orbiting a black hole are a poor method to harvest its potential anyway. I would go for a Dyson sphere/swarm or even a Matrioshka brain.
This is "just" an engineering problem - it is feasible with current physics. It might be possible some centuries in the future. A trillion years has 10 billion centuries.

Humans influence evolution in a significant way - we massively change local ecosystems and even the global climate. We can add completely new properties to existing species and even create completely new species with genetic engineering. Our culture and contraception reversed natural selection (humans more successful in society tend to have less children), and we might be able to mess around with our own genes in a controlled way in a few decades. We could completely control our own evolution within 100 years.

Computing power has increased exponentially for ~50 years - if that trend continues for ~15-30 years, computers have enough capacity to simulate a human brain. With the right software and a good brain scanning software (both are not easy), it might be possible to load a brain in such a computer. Imagine the consequences...


Short version: Every hard science fiction for humans after 2200 needs a catastrophic event which seriously reduced (or inverted) scientific progress, otherwise it is pure speculation.