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.

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.

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.