Practically stars are mostly burned out in another 50 billion years and radioisotopes that produce a heat gradient will also be mostly decayed by then. Eventually good tidal energy situations like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating_of_Io

will end as well since this kind of situation changes the orbits. So energy for life and usable thermal gradients will disappear even if entropy will continue to increase for a long time -- for instance, black holes will be slowly inspiralling and crashing into each other resulting in huge entropy increases on paper.

▲ thechao 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks.

A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at that regime the characters can flit around the universe in the notional blink of an eye, even though their nanoships' velocity is only a few km/s. In my mind it'd be just a nuts-and-bolts 30's-style hard boiled detective story; but, set in the year 10^110.

Oh! Oh! And Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.

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le-mark 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

For anyone interested, Vernor Vinge does something like this but minus the massive scale, in Marooned in Realtime. Set 50 million years in the future. My all time favorite sci-fi fwiw.

	▲	PaulHoule 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In my mind his work was the best of the 1980s and that's a decade that produced some pretty powerful stuff like Ender's Game and Forge of God. Vinge coined the term "The Singularity" which is now almost a given to be a future event in some circles. His then wife also wrote some pretty good sci-fi such as The Outcasts of Heaven Belt I liked Vernor's A Fire Upon the Deep a lot but not his later books.
	▲	UltraSane 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is good and the bobbles are a cool idea but A Fire Upon the Deep is a better book. The end where a character asks why the sun is dimming and the hero casually says "Something has to power this thing" is so awesome.

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UltraSane 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You will like this shorty story from Stephen Baxter

https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/gravitymine.htm

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delecti 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's quite a bit different from that description, but Diaspora by Greg Egan deals with some impressive scales of time and space. The tone is nothing like you're describing, but the ideas and scale in it totally changed how I think about about im/mortality.

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brfox 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your comment reminded me of this Asimov short story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

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grues-dinner 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.

Sounds like Stephen Baxter's cup of tea. Hell, the detective could even be Reid Malenfant himself (maybe a cameo for Sheena 5 in a later book in the series?)

Then again, if there was an ultradeep-time Saturn's Children book, I'll place the preorder so fast it'll be blueshifted.

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PaulHoule 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If it could be the Charlie Stross who wrote Accelerando and the Iron Sunrise than yeah but I feel like he went downhill after that.

	▲	thechao 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		He's changed the focus of his stories, for sure; I get that it's not everyone's cup-of-tea. But, his prose & storytelling is still just as strong. (I agree, though.)

▲ echelon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Due to the expansion of the universe, we're also going to lose access to the rest of the universe in that time.

  Time - Galaxies lost to us forever 
  1 million years ~ 0.02%
  10 million years ~ 0.2%
  100 million years ~ 2%
  1 billion years ~ 20%
  10 billion years ~ 80%
  150 billion years ~ 99.9999997%

So we'll have to find somewhere to hunker down for the last forty billion years or so as we wait for all energy to dissipate.

That's all assuming we can't "break physics" and nucleate something new, find a tear in our current manifold, etc. Our peon brains are too small to reason about this and any claims that we're stuck are insufficiently computed.

Given our limited sensing capabilities and tiny time sample, I'm skeptical of our current understanding. Claims of current model predictions feel premature.