Even if we don't self-destruct, we will likely have evolved into something else completely different by then. Or maybe a million years from now they will keep some humans (based on present-day DNA) in a museum exhibit somewhere. Or maybe that's us.

If you look at who supports this theory, it's all ego-driven software engineers who believe they can solve physics from first principles, ignoring hundreds of years of evidence that these laws do apply.

Highly recommend reading this book for how these sci-fi theories are being used to promote eugenics, climate destruction, and pseudoscience: https://www.amazon.com/More-Everything-Forever-Overlords-Hum...

Edit: nevermind, I agree I misunderstood the parent comment.

It's a common response to any interest in the destiny of humanity: "what's so special about humanity? What about bacteria, huh?"

I don't know, I'm human and humans tend to be social and interested in their own species? Is that weird? Does that not apply to you? Do you consider it petty and parochial to be more interested in one's own species? Are you "above" that?

If any bacteria or humans are interested in projecting the future of bacteria and their probability of surviving humanity, they should absolutely go for it.

Humans are the only species in the known* universe to have deliberately left their home planet. We may not be fully capable of it, but we are indeed more capable of transcending extinction than any other known species.

* - which is certainly a small sample

Not to mention the existence fallacy - the human tendency to think that it's BETTER for the species to exist forever. I'm not sure that's true.

I've had plans for a sci-fi book I plan to never write that takes place in the ultra far future. The chapters' numbers would be the time dilation scale in a base 10 logarithm. The book would be made up of a series of short stories told from the point of view of a "time coast guard" rescuing idiots who refuse to time dilate from their creaking space hulks.

A later (set?) of chapters might just be in the 90+ scale; at that regime the characters can flit around the universe in the notional blink of an eye, even though their nanoships' velocity is only a few km/s. In my mind it'd be just a nuts-and-bolts 30's-style hard boiled detective story; but, set in the year 10^110.

Oh! Oh! And Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.

Due to the expansion of the universe, we're also going to lose access to the rest of the universe in that time.

  Time - Galaxies lost to us forever 
  1 million years ~ 0.02%
  10 million years ~ 0.2%
  100 million years ~ 2%
  1 billion years ~ 20%
  10 billion years ~ 80%
  150 billion years ~ 99.9999997%

That's all assuming we can't "break physics" and nucleate something new, find a tear in our current manifold, etc. Our peon brains are too small to reason about this and any claims that we're stuck are insufficiently computed.

Given our limited sensing capabilities and tiny time sample, I'm skeptical of our current understanding. Claims of current model predictions feel premature.

As soon as the article mentioned Ray Kurzweil, I knew there was no scientific basis for the claim.

They evolved for pretty strong reasons that have been around a lot longer than a blink of an eye. Namely, collaboration and creativity are extremely good survival strategies.

>> gravity, which is often described as an anti-entropic force

I don’t know about that but it’s also sometimes described as an entropic force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Entropy also has units of measure: Joules per Kelvin.

Just as soon as you figure out what dark energy is and how to extract work from it. Easy, right?

Black holes are perpetual motion machines.

dark energy is the ultimate free lunch. it's like the more you spread butter on your toast, the more toast you get and the more butter gets spread out.

“From Eternity To Here” by Sean Carroll has some nice discussions of it. He can be a bit much at times and could stand to have better editing (the book is 25% too long), but he does have some of the most approachable modern writing on physics out there. Lots of videos on YouTube as well.

I've not read this particular book but I like Arieh Ben-Naim's approach:

Four Laws That Do Not Drive The Universe, The: Elements Of Thermodynamics For The Curious And Intelligent

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10531

Honestly, this is the type of stuff ChatGPT is really good at. Explaining overviews of a field, avoiding math if you want, focusing on concepts and explaining different schools of thought.

As long as you're sticking to the well-established stuff, it tends to be quite factually accurate. I think it's really underrated as a resource for good high-level overviews of fields where those overviews otherwise don't exist at all, are overly technical, or the existing overviews have a lot of author bias.