UPDATE Centauri Dreams has published this essay here: A View of the Deepest Future
The long-term fate of Life in this Universe is rarely contemplated. A few landmark studies, by Freeman Dyson, then Fred Adams, Peter Bodenheimer & Greg Laughlin, have looked into Deepest Time, long after Matter itself fails and the Void becomes unstable. How far can biological Life extend into the Long Dark? A study by Robin Spivey extends Life’s tenure, in neutrino-annihilation warmed Ocean Planets, to 1025 years – and Beyond. That’s 100 times longer than the 1023 years we’ve reported here previously and some 1,000 trillion times longer than the time the Universe has presently existed. If the current Age of the Universe was a clock tick – a second -, then those 1025 years would be 20 million years.
Spivey discusses his new finding here: Planetary Heating by Neutrinos: Long-Term Habitats for Aquatic Life if Dark Energy Decays Favourably [Open Access article]
Outer-shell electrons of 56Fe (iron) inside the cores of Ocean-Planets become ‘catalyzers’ of Inverse Photo-Neutrino Process (IPP) reactions, annihilating neutrinos and creating a steady heat-flow sufficient to warm the planet at ~0.1 W/m2. This Figure illustrates the flow:
Perhaps coincidentally, the inexorable processing of stellar materials in Type Ia Supernovae leads to a chemical mixture which makes Earth-like planets. Each Type Ia Supernova masses about 1.4 Solar Masses, or about half a million Earths, with the ejecta debris being mostly iron, then oxygen and silicon. Earth-stuff. Thus the ‘ashes’ of stars can produce a multitude of Ocean Planets.
To quote Spivey:
Observations have determined that the ejecta of a typical SNIa are, by mass, 18% oxygen, 15% silicon, 13% iron, and 49% nickel (almost all in the unstable form 56Ni which decays radioactively to 56Fe), along with smaller amounts of carbon, calcium, sulphur and magnesium. Elements emerge from SNIa in strata, with the lightest occupying the outermost layers. This provides the oxygen-rich outermost shell with the best opportunities for reacting with hydrogen in the interstellar medium, resulting in the formation of water molecules. On cooling to temperatures found in deep space, ice XI is obtained, whose ferroelectric self-aggregation may be relevant to comet formation [38-40]. The bombardment of protoplanets with comets would be important to the formation of oceanic planets, deferring the delivery of water to their surfaces.
Notice that the iron component is 62% by mass, thus the very large core in the illustration. Quoting Spivey again:
Based on the composition of type Ia supernova ejecta, a hypothetical oceanic planet of one Earth-mass is projected to consist of a large iron core of radius ~4240 km surrounded by a silicate mantle of thickness ~1300 km through which heat would be transported by advection. External to this inner mantle would be an outer mantle of ice consisting of strongly convective ice VI and VII phases of combined depth ~320 km. A liquid ocean ~50 km in depth covered by a solid crust of ice Ih upwards of 50 m in thickness would overlie the hot ice mantles.
Spivey’s new paper focuses on how the supply of neutrinos can be maintained at the right density to keep planets warm for the maximum amount of time. He posits several, as yet, unobserved processes – the decay of dark energy into neutrinos in less than ~70 billion years and the accelerated decay of black holes, also preferably into neutrinos. Other researchers have posited the existence of ‘sterile’ neutrinos, which Spivey shows improves the characteristics of the neutrino halo surrounding a Galaxy cluster, enabling planets to be warmed in a life-friendly manner in a sphere of 400 thousand light-years radius.
The existence of Dark Matter itself has been called into question by physicists, such as Mordechai Milgrom, who think the evidence for invisible Dark Matter can be equally well explained by modifying Newtonian Gravity to have a minimum gravitational acceleration. This Modification of Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) theory neatly explains the structure of galaxies, but hasn’t been as successful on a cosmological scale. Intriguingly if Galactic haloes are made of sterile neutrinos, then MOND and Dark Matter physics are equivalent in outcomes: Reconciliation of MOND and Dark Matter theory with giant ‘Neutrino Stars’ forming around each large Galaxy. Spivey suggests that a key research priority is determining the properties of neutrinos, to confirm the IPP heating mechanism. Such neutrino studies are important for refining the Standard Model of particle physics – and possibly discovering new physics, such as the masses of the various neutrinos, something not predicted by the Standard Model.
Spivey’s most audacious suggestion is the strategy that Life should adopt in the next few aeons to extend its lifespan. Unfortunately for Life in this Galaxy, our local Group of Galaxies is insufficiently massive to form a large enough neutrino ‘star’ before Dark Energy spreads galaxies too far apart. To survive, Life in our Local Group needs to emigrate to the Virgo Super-Cluster. Although our Milky Way is heading towards Virgo at ~200 km/s, cosmic acceleration, from Dark Energy, is presently pushing us away from Virgo at ~1,000 km/s. Thus we need to launch towards Virgo faster than the Dark Energy pushing us away. Yet the reward is 10 trillion trillion years of Habitable planetary environments, which may well be worth intergalactic migration.
Spivey suggests using antimatter rockets to launch modest payloads. Essentially small Life-seeds, like those proposed by Michael Mautner to seed Life in our own Galaxy, but launched on intergalactic journeys of a hundred or more billennia. Whether the cosmic-ray flux between the Galaxies can be endured for geological epochs is presently unknown and while I wouldn’t rule it out, it seems unlikely at best. A good reference, available online, is still Martyn Fogg’s “The Feasibility of Intergalactic Colonisation and its Relevance to SETI”, which suggests how a mere 5 million year intergalactic voyage might be survived by a bio-nanotech seed-ship.
But we’ve discussed other options in these pages previously. In theory a tight white-dwarf/planet pair can be flung out of the Galactic Core at ~0.05c, which would mean a 2 billion year journey across every 100 million light-years. A white-dwarf habitable zone is good for 8 billion years or so, enough to cross ~400 million light-years. It’d be a ‘starship’ in truth on the Grandest Scale. Perhaps other Intelligences have begun their preparations earlier than us and we should look for very high-velocity stars leaving the Milky Way and Andromeda’s M31. Over the next aeon we might observe many, many stars flinging towards Virgo from the nearby Galactic Core black-holes.
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