Who turned out the lights?

[Cray]

Star creation is dropping, so the universe is getting dimmer. Puts a perspective on the deep future, don't it?
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33846857

So, if protons decay, is there some way to trap and capture their radiation / mass after the decay?

[Bear]

I'm wondering if there's any force, any metric engineering, anything at all that doesn't take as long as Hawking Radiation - that can turn black holes inside out and restore that matter/energy to the universe. Entropy being what it is, it's not looking optimistic.

[Drashner1]

Various ways have been suggested to address this issue (survival in deep time). These include:

a) Use a strategy of hibernation and ever slower clock rates to live for a subjective eternity.

b) Store a bunch of energy earlier in the universe's lifetime and then use it in a gradually reducing manner while simultaneously operating every more slowly. Again, it's possible to achieve a subjective eternity of existence. IIRC the amount of energy works out to an amount you could get in a reasonable amount of time from an average star.

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.

d) Create a new universe and move in, leaving this one behind.

I've got some articles/papers on this floating around somewhere if folks want to get into this in more depth.

Todd

[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.

[Matterplay1]

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

Somebody somewhere in the OA setting, maybe even somebody among the Terragens, will have taken this quite seriously:

"Yeah, too bad about your sun, but it was wasteful. We can't have that."

[Drashner1]

Re proton decay...

While not a complete fix, one way to reduce this might be dropping matter into close grazing orbits around large black holes.

Time slows down near the hole and so should proton decay. Each orbit could jump the matter some large amount into the future before rising up where a civ could access it for use.

Just a thought,

Todd

[Drashner1]

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

Somebody somewhere in the OA setting, maybe even somebody among the Terragens, will have taken this quite seriously:

"Yeah, too bad about your sun, but it was wasteful. We can't have that."

The Negentropists and especially the Paradigm might go in for this or even more extreme options.

Todd

[Matterplay1]

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

Somebody somewhere in the OA setting, maybe even somebody among the Terragens, will have taken this quite seriously:

"Yeah, too bad about your sun, but it was wasteful. We can't have that."

The Negentropists and especially the Paradigm might go in for this or even more extreme options.

The Paradigm might go right ahead, but Negentropist factions that tried this would likely be opposed by others who would defend some of the other Negentropist principles (diversity and particularity are also valued by Negentropists...). Those internal conflicts could be more sharply and passionately fought than any dispute with outsiders.

[PortalHunter]

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

Red Globular Galaxies -- those xenosophonts have plans. And all that mass could be recycled after they burn out, too. Klemperer rosette orbit-powered, brown dwarf-fed SMBHs, anyone?

[Tachyon]

So, if protons decay, is there some way to trap and capture their radiation / mass after the decay?

Proton decay is a consequence of the first Grand Unified Theory, SU(5).

Experiment has ruled out the predicted proton lifetime; thus SU(5) proton decay.

Monopoles induce the same baryon decay; thus Conversion drive technology should be able to capture most of the results (e.g. everything but the neutrinos).