Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars

Isaac Arthur explores ideas like these in his videos / podcasts, I enjoy listening to it. Actually he has a whole series on Civilizations at the End of Time.[0] [0] ▶ this video

> What's the point of interstellar colonization? Ultimately it's to claim matter, which is the ultimate limiting factor in how long a civilization lives. For example, you talk about engrossing digital worlds. Well, those worlds require energy and energy means matter. To be clear we're talking on truly staggering time frames here where a trillion years is a mere blink of an eye [1][2]. [1]: link [2]: ▶ this video

Mandatory Isaar Arthur links: - Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars [1] - Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming [2] - Boltzman Brains and the Anthropic Principle [3] [4] [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link [3]: link [4]: link

My go-to entry point for exploring those kinds of questions was Isaac Arthur. He goes into the Kardashev scale [1], dying Earth [2], dying stars [3], farming black holes [4], and going past iron stars [5]. A Boltzmann Brain's description bears remarkable similarity to the Judeo-Christian concept of God before time begins, and has been fertile ground for ruminations [6], though none with any verifiable claims backing them in our current knowledge of physics [7]. Now if we could only restructure our implementation of capitalism to be pinned to advancements towards resolving physics questions to survive those kinds of timescales and challenges instead of locked down to a single planet's worth of baryonic matter and cognitive capacity... [1] link [2] link [3] link [4] link [5] ▶ this video [6] link [7] link

This brings to my mind Isaac Arthur's lecture "Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars" [1]. He posits that a Kardashev Scale 3 civilization might use a galactic black hole to survive 10^100 entropic years of what he calls the "Black Hole Epoch". Hearing about this possible giant blob of plasma orbiting our galactic black hole makes me wonder if he and his team can come up with plausible explanations that the plasma is actually some construct of such a civilization, like perhaps a "construction site generator" as they're building their "bunker against entropic time" amongst the black hole. The really neat part of the lecture is towards the end, in his description of time winding down into thermodynamic equilibirum, a Boltzmann Brain fluctuating out of the equilibrium's randomness, and restarting the universe with another Big Bang. That's fascinatingly close to universe origin stories in Abrahamic religions, and echoes Hindu religious cosmological cyclicality. One aspect I didn't see touched upon is the possibility that our universe and we are simulations inside that Boltzmann Brain. And then there are the arguments that we do not want Boltzmann Brains [2]. Now if only the religious adherents in all our nations duking it out against other humans for not having the "right" religion could turn their cognitive surplus (poured into their religion) outwards to helping illuminate more upon these near-metaphysical physics challenges, we might actually get somewhere. After all, o

• Vi Hart (Math) link — I'm amazed nobody else listed her. She's my favourite math channel on YouTube (even though 3Blue1Brown is more technically informative, I just love Vi Hart's sense of style). • Isaac Arthur (Space / Futurism / Speculative Science) — link — The graphics are pretty cheeseball, but the some of the topics he explores are fascinating. I recommend starting with ▶ this video • Aerotwist (Frontend / JS) — link — Paul Lewis works (or used to work?) on the Chrome team, and is an alum of the (good) HTTP203 podcast • LunchBox Sessions (Industrial hydraulic systems) — link — The videos are just screencasts of schematic simulations, but the presenter (Carl) has a good level of enthusiasm. (Disclosure — I contributed to these videos as an editor / software dev.)

Life on smaller, faster scales has been posited, but not in anywhere we can currently see. See, for instance, Dragon's Egg [1], which is a science fiction novel that very seriously tries to discuss life on the surface of a neutron star. I know it's fiction, but it's probably still one of the best treatments of the idea out there. Even if such a civilization would have zero interest in our resources we still certainly see no evidence of a star-faring galactic civilization of that type. Life on larger, slower scales rapidly hits the problem that 15 billion years turns out not to be all that long when you start dividing it by thousands or millions at a time. The problem is that if you're spread out that far, you're probably mostly running at the ambient temperature, which is very cold and much slower, so not only do you need to take 3-6ish orders of magnitude of speed off for dispersion in space, you need to take 3ish orders of magnitude off for being very cold and thus chemistry being very slow. And you may need to take another 3-6+ orders of magnitude off for waiting for your very dispersed, very cold molecules to encounter each other at all, in order to do whatever reactions are supposed to be supporting you. The problem you have there is that on that time scale, the galaxy is a very active and violent place, with supernovae popping off and galactic collisions and passages through the arms and all these stars flying about far faster than you can react to them (rather than the