Who turned out the lights?

[Cray]

c) Make better use of stellar material using stellar disassembly and stellar husbandry. Taking the sun apart and 'recycling' it's mass through either an artificial white dwarf or black hole gives you potential civilization lifetimes as high as 20,000x the estimated age of the universe.

My comment about proton decay was actually aimed for that. Assuming you have stockpiles of mass, but they're prone to decay over 10^33 year periods, is there something you can do to capture the decay products?

Now that I read the topic, though, it appears that proton decay is unlikely. And star formation runs to 100 trillion years, with the last red dwarfs sputtering out around 120 trillion years from now. So there'll be plenty of usable mass even quadrillions of years from now.

Clearly, we need to start dividing stars into brown dorfs now. Plan for the future, people, prevent Mother Nature from frittering away mass with unplanned fusion.