![\"heat](\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/375\/2016\/05\/Creeping-darkness-1024x686.jpg\")
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The Lifeboat Foundation includes the heat death of the universe<\/a> on its list of top existential threats to humanity. This creeping darkness\u00a0may be certain, or it may never happen. Should our civilization prepare for this? Should “we”\u00a0expect to exist at that time?\u00a0Should you\u00a0<\/em>be worried?<\/strong><\/p>\n The theory of the heat death of the universe refers to entropy. In a closed system, we reach “thermodynamic equilibrium”, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Simply put, over\u00a0a great enough time all\u00a0things will collapse into rubble, and eventually everything will go cold and stop doing doing anything. It will all have just run out of energy.<\/p>\n One scientific source cited over Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0puts the heat death of the universe at 10100\u00a0<\/sup> years from now. That’s a number almost beyond comprehension, we are talking\u00a0of one googol, or\u00a0“ten thousand sexdecillion”. Yes, those are actually real numbers.<\/p>\n The Earth will have ceased to exist,\u00a0destroyed a long time\u00a0ago, by then. We have about 7-8 billion years left before the sun goes nova, barely a blink in time compared with how long the universe has left. But what if there are still people or their descendants\u00a0fighting to survive\u00a0such events? How will they eventually deal with the heat death of the universe?<\/p>\n Well, it is unlikely they would be “human”, at least not in the sense we understand at this point in history. Having fully comprehended and later stripped down\u00a0their bodies and minds into pure data that can be uploaded to machines, they would be post-humans in the perfect sense. This means\u00a0preserved human intelligences, maintained by\u00a0machines, as predicted by experts on the technological Singularity like Ray Kurzweil. They would already have done much to escape the “heat death” already at this stage, just by existing. They would be far more resilient than us, with augmented creative brainpower beyond even the greatest scientists the world has known.<\/p>\n Such\u00a0post-human\u00a0beings,\u00a0living beyond the Earth\u00a0and\u00a0capable of\u00a0“uploading” themselves away from any dangers through\u00a0vast\u00a0interplanetary communication networks, would be\u00a0virtually immortal. Their\u00a0ancient\u00a0minds, regulated and kept active since the very\u00a0era when they once had human eyes, would possess\u00a0lifespans with no limit. Even a billion\u00a0years would seem trivial to them, so\u00a0they might choose to sleep through many millions or billions of years\u00a0in order to cross and explore\u00a0interstellar space.<\/p>\n Humanity’s “uploaded”\u00a0descendants would still require energy for nourishment, just like us. Their first place of interest would be our own sun, but when it explodes 7-8 billion years from now, they would have fled long before the danger emerged. As stars went cold\u00a0and the\u00a0power requirements of humanity’s super\u00a0space children increased, it is likely they would migrate towards the galactic core over time, where the greatest amount of energy can be found but\u00a0the gravitational forces are also strongest.<\/p>\n A supermassive black hole is believed to be at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. As it would be without reward for any being to cross the unfathomable gap\u00a0between galaxies at any point during the lifespan of the universe, I would hypothesize it is towards the center of our own\u00a0galaxy that intelligent life would migrate, and eventually make its\u00a0last stand against the heat death of the universe.<\/p>\n Supposing their scientific knowledge was great enough, these super-beings might invest the energy of the galactic core to learn a way to escape and transcend even the heat death of the universe. As even the particle collider experiments\u00a0of our\u00a0times have shed much light on the origins of our universe, it would be child’s play for those ultimate beings to learn how the universe was created. And, with that knowledge, and the remaining power of the galactic core at their disposal, those beings might set in motion a plan to either migrate to another universe or even create another universe.<\/p>\n As strange as my last paragraph may seem, French philosopher\u00a0Cl\u00e9ment Vidal has argued exactly that in his book The Beginning and the End<\/a><\/em>. You can also read some of the reactions of transhumanists (people who believe future technology holds the key to ultimately transcending all suffering and death) to the heat-death of the universe at an interesting Singularity Reddit post here from a couple of years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, to blow your mind even more, let’s ask: if humanity’s destiny is<\/em> to create another universe by “artificial cosmogeny”, might this be something\u00a0another\u00a0creator already did, a long time ago?<\/p>\n Heat death is\u00a0the point at which all energy in the universe is “used” and nothing can happen. Everything goes\u00a0dark again – forever? The Lifeboat Foundation includes the heat death of the universe on its list of top existential threats to humanity. This creeping darkness\u00a0may be certain, or it may never happen. Should our civilization prepare…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,3,61,99,45,44],"tags":[1475,1472,1371,557,1474,1473,1488,1454,326,1471,1435],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism-2","category-religious-studies","category-science","category-science-fiction","category-techno-progressivism","category-transhumanism","tag-clement-vidal","tag-cosmology","tag-existential-threat","tag-lifeboat-foundation","tag-post-human","tag-ray-kurzweil","tag-science","tag-singularity","tag-space-2","tag-technological-singularity","tag-universe"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"hjb](\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/375\/2015\/09\/hjb-signature-new-transparent-300x86.png\")
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