The Long View

 I belong to a book club. We decided when we started to alternate between nonfiction and fiction, which has changed my reading pattern, since I mostly read novels before. Sometimes, when a book got a lot of attention, or was about something I was interested in, I would read a work of nonfiction, but mostly novels, and often mystery novels.

Our latest Book Club choice is, "The End of Everything." It is by Katie Mack, and is about the universe. You know, life, the universe, and everything. Except that it only includes life because the cosmologists are alive. Life, its origins, its meaning, and so forth, were not discussed. But the universe was, mostly about how it could end. Several possibilities were covered, including historical context about how that theory of the end was developed, what the data were that supported it, and why, in most cases, it wasn't likely correct, with newer data changing the views of the cosmologists.

One thing I noticed is that the time scales are long. The end of the universe, in most of the scenarios mentioned, is far beyond the time ahead matching the age of the universe. In other words, compared to when cosmologists are predicting the universe to end, we're still in childhood, at best. One of the possible close ends to the universe was not less than 188 billion years, which is more than ten times the estimated age of the universe now. The more likely ends were in the trillions of years.

As a side note, it is also estimated, which much more certainty, that in about 4 billion years, the sun will expand, engulfing Mercury, and burning Venus and Earth to cinders. No life will survive, though the Solar System will continue, with a shift in structure, for perhaps hundreds of billions of years after that, but without life as we know it, and certainly none on Earth, unless something weird happens after the red giant phase of the Sun, and life develops anew when the Sun mostly burns out and becomes a white dwarf.

That means, if we want the human species to survive more than 4 billion years, we will need to get off this rock, and find other places to colonize. I say we start looking and planning now. I mean, have you got something better to do?