When will our universe reach the point of maximum entropy? And what other possibilities exist for our universe in the far future?
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For our Earth around the Sun (or whatever’s left of it), it will take somewhere in the ballpark of 1030 years for us to spiral into the central mass of our Solar System. Over enough time, everything will either collapse into a leftover mass or get ejected so that it’s all by its lonesome in the abyss of empty space.
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[A]fter approximately 10120 years, the heaviest-mass black holes in the Universe finally complete their evaporation process. The Universe, now, is cold, empty, and devoid of bound structures.…
Everything will be cooled down to as close to absolute zero as the laws of quantum physics allow, and that is the state of maximum entropy of the Universe. We will, at long last, have achieved our “heat death,” as there’s no longer any available energy capable of doing work.
The only ways out are if dark energy is something other than a cosmological constant, if black holes actually turn out to be a gateway to another Universe, or there’s new, undiscovered physics that will change this seemingly-inevitable fate.
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If we take the laws of physics and the rules of the Universe at face value, the slow, gradual death of everything in the Universe is our ultimate fate.
Read full, original post: Ask Ethan: How Will Our Universe End?
