In 1979 Freeman Dyson peered into his Physics Crystal Ball and discerned the long-term fate of matter, energy and Life in a Universe with an infinite future….
Time Without End – Two Parter I
Time Without End – Two Parter II
A take-away line is that all masses above minute speck size will ultimately collapse into black-holes and vanish in puffs of Hawking radiation, after 10^10^76 years. That’s a double exponential, which is a mind-bogglingly vast number – to represent all the zeroes it needs in decimal format would involve all the atoms in the visible Universe.
Dyson’s maths is clear and lucid, thus this essay’s lasting appeal. The conclusions are challenged if our Universe is eventually dominated by the Cosmological Constant, but no one is too sure if even it will be around in that utterly remote Futurity. One recent caveat is the decay of protons via black-hole states amongst their constituent quarks. Such instability will become manifest after 10^40 to 10^100 years or so. Not as remote, but still vast when measured on a human scale.
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