TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)

will profoundly affect the next few thousand years. The only conditions modern humans have ever known so far are changing and changing fast. Nothing stays the same on this planet. Everything changes. The earth is going into one of these jumps and you don't know what is going to be on the other side of those jumps. The earth is always jumping. Things move on this or not still. Everything is turning. As it begins to run out of fuel the sun won't simply fade away to nothing. Its core will collapse and the extra heat this generates will cause its outer layers to expand. The sun is now dead. It's remained slowly cooling in the freezing temperatures of deep space. The fate of the sun is the same as for all stars. One day they must all eventually die and the cosmos will be plunged into eternal night. All stars eventually will run out of fuel. The temperature of the universe drops. The stars one by one in the night sky will turn off. And there'll be no more new stars created. And so that the universe will end not with a bang but with a windburn. heat from its extinguished furnace. Looking at it from where the earth is now it would only generate the same amount of light as the full moon on a clear night. The faint glow of white dwarfs will provide the only illumination in a dark and empty void littered with dead stars and black holes. In some ways it's kind of a ghost universe. It's the corpses, the zombie stars that will take us into the future. A black dwarf will be the final fate of those last stars. White dwarfs that have become so cold that they barely emit any more heat or light. Black dwarfs are dark dense decaying balls of degenerate matter. Little more than the ashes of stars. Their constituent atoms are so severely crushed that black dwarfs are a million times denser than our sun. Stars take so long to reach that's based on really the energy available to us now. You could imagine living conscious systems which have a very different pace and therefore can extend out at least a lot farther than you'd imagine otherwise. You could have a living system where if it had a thought every 10 trillion years that would seem normal. Even if our life dies out one could imagine at some time arbitrarily far in the future a fluctuation occurs which allows intelligent life to exist again for a little while. So you might have islands in time of intelligence. Atomic matter what makes us up can just spontaneously fall apart. Any material that evades the pull of a black hole eventually dies away as its protons disintegrate. The matter inside black dwarfs, the last matter in the universe, will eventually evaporate away and be carried off into the void as radiation leaving absolutely nothing behind. With the black dwarfs gone there won't be a single atom of matter left. All that will remain of our once rich cosmos will be particles of light and black holes. The arrow of time creates a bright window in the universe's adolescence during which life is possible. But it's a window that doesn't stay open for long. As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe, as measured from its beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billionth of a percent. Black holes become the fundamental building block of the universe. A galaxy will basically be a supermassive black hole in the center with smaller black holes orbiting it. Zombie galaxies filled with black holes continue to evolve. They'll eat each other and they'll get bigger and maybe they'll fall into the supermassive black hole and it'll get bigger. The universe will still be an exciting dynamic place it's just that the time scales we're talking about are now trillions of years instead of and they have a very characteristic song. Imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together. At the end of their lives they're going around each other crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second. As they do so they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space an actual wave on space-time. Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe. Those are the gravitational waves they're literally the sounds of space ringing and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning quiet black hole. If you were standing near enough your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space. You would literally hear the sound. Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole. The sound you're hearing is a light black hole banging on space each time it gets close. As it falls in it gets faster and it gets louder. Scientists used to think black holes were immortal but even these will one day die. Time scales of unimaginable length quadrillions of years into the future on that time scale even the black holes begin to evaporate. According to quantum mechanics space is filled with virtual particles and antiparticles that are constantly materializing in pairs, separating, coming together again, and annihilating each other. In the presence of a black hole one member of a pair of virtual particles may fall into the hole leaving the other member without a partner with which to annihilate. The forsaken particle appears to be radiation emitted by the black hole and so black holes are not eternal. They evaporate away at an increasing rate until they vanish in a gigantic explosion. Quantum mechanics has allowed particles and radiation to escape from the ultimate prison We can now give an answer. The latest evidence shows that the universe is not slowing down but it's speeding up out of control and the universe we think will die in ice trillions upon trillions of years from now. Empty space itself has energy in every little cubic centimeter of space whether or not there's stuff whether or not there's particles matter radiation or whatever there is still energy even in the space itself and this energy according to Einstein exerts a push on the universe. What is the weird stuff that's accelerating the universe? We call it dark energy and this stuff is the dominant stuff of the universe. Almost three quarters of the matter energy content of the universe is this dark energy and we don't know what it is. Dark energy unlike matter irradiation does not dilute away as the universe expands. This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. So what will be the future of the universe? Well if the dark energy remains dominant and repulsive the universe will expand forever. Faster and faster and faster with time a runaway universe. Seventy percent of the energy of the universe resides in empty space and we don't understand why. But we do know what will happen if that energy continues to be there the universe will become cold and dark and empty. That's the future as it might be. We don't know because we don't yet understand the nature of dark energy. Until we do we won't know the future. We won't even understand our own origins and that's why we want to know and study this subject. Forecast does seem to be for an ever colder ever empty universe. But then of course we have to ask could that end lead to a new beginning? And there are ideas whereby what actually is the end of our universe could in some sense be linked to the beginning of a new one. We've worked out the mathematics the equations they seem to say that if you have an atom smasher that can concentrate tremendous amounts of energy at a single point you can perhaps open up a gateway a baby universe. Facing the death of everything there is this perhaps is their only possibility of escape. And this also raises a very intriguing possibility sheer speculation of course that perhaps any universe that has intelligent life in it will create baby universes will create life boats and proliferate child universes. So an evolution may take among universes in the multiverse survival of the fittest may take place. So those universes which do not have intelligent life are infertile they have no children but those universes that have mild temperatures stars like us would create civilizations that could open up child universes holes will have evaporated and the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons gradually tending towards the same temperature as the expansion of the universe cools them towards absolute zero. Once the very last remnants of the very last stars have finally decayed away to nothing and everything reaches the same temperature the story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens and it keeps not happening forever.