You're wrong

like I said, we have a few billion years to figure it out.

Hell, we don't even know the size of the universe, so I wouldn't worry about the ultimate fate of it, until we understand things better.

All this dieing/reborn bs. The universe recycles itself and is constantly creating/dieing/being born again. It would make no sense for a universe to “die” or reach a point of no activity. Eventually it gets consumed and recycled. We really know nothing about how vast the entire universe is and big picture stuff is just theories nothing else

Big rip or big crunch is unlikely for the available data now

you are getting a lot of 'no' but here is a yes.

there could be another Big Bang, and an entire and new universe created. Maybe we'll figure out how to make one ourselves, and create a lot of them, forever.

and don't worry about time, we'll have a few billion years to figure it out.

The total quantity of energy is fixed, space is expanding, and entropy always increases on average, so the heat death of the universe is inevitable according to all accepted theories of physics.

There may be some fun hypotheses around with new universes spawning, multiverses, and other oddities, but they're just that - hypotheses, not accepted theories.

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Yeah, isn't this the hypothesis about giving enough time, anything that is possible will happen? And even though it's astronomically unlikely to happen, a new universe bubbling up from a Quantum fluctuation and into an entirely new and separate universe could theoretically happen.

Short answer is that life as we know it could be sustained by the universe for a very long time -- even longer than the universe has existed so far -- but not forever.

The reality is that we just don't know. Our observations (and projections) are based on what has happened, and that might change over the billions of years. Our definition of what is "alive" will certainly change over time.

Check this out. TL,DR: no, but it's going to take an unfathomable amount of time.

https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA

One possibility- the last stars run out of fuel and die off.

Another possibility- the expansion of space continues, to the point everything gets torn apart and reduced to elementary particles

Yet another- the expansion slows down to the point gravity can take over, collapsing the entire universe back to what it was before the Big Bang. (Maybe starting a new big bang?)

The Ultimate Evil is an ancient cosmic force that has for thousands of years tried to destroy Earth and all planets that contain life. After its emergence through a celestial alignment of three planets and one sun which happens every 5,000 years, but each time has been thwarted by the Fifth Element.

-- 5th Element --

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The budget to look for ELEs is still rather tiny. Which means the vast majority of telescope-time is ground-based, which means we can basically only look at the sky that's the half that is away from the sun. So anything that takes the trip through the inner solar system in under 1 year can easily sneak past our telescope efforts. We won't even be looking in its direction. Its the planetary version of a scary movie where the baddie walks up behind the character.

And even after the 1.2 billion dollar space based telescope that NASA is working on making, we will still be blind behind the sun and a few other narrow but many billions of directions on the sky (difficult to tell if a tiny light right next to a bright star or nebula is a rock, without massive computing power and individual light-spectrum analysis of every single light source on the night sky).

We likely won't have really good coverage before we get two or three or four such 1.2 billion dollar space telescopes going. Then they can take pictures with all of them directed at the same place at the same time and we'd only need to analyse pictures that differ between each telescope because everything outside our solar system has very low parallax.

Until then we're just holding our eyes closed on Earth going 67 000 miles per hour around the sun, hoping nothing hits us or vice versa. And the planet is a big gravity-well that sucks everything towards it.

Life, as we know it, requires an energy gradient (i.e. a way to do usable work).

The currently most likely, theorized end-of-universe scenario doesn't have that ("Heat death").

The...erm...more 'exciting' end-of-universe scenarios (Big rip, Big crunch, Big bounce, False vacuum decay, ....) are even more certain to end any life that managed to hang around until then.

But, hey, we don't know everything about the universe yet. So there may be ways of sidestepping the problem.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CNSA|Chinese National Space Administration| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |SLS|Space Launch System heavy-lift|

^(3 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 14 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8496 for this sub, first seen 30th Jan 2023, 13:45]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

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>we were way behind the Soviets

That is a myth that somehow keeps getting wilder as the years go on.

The States were, on a purely tech basis, either even or slightly ahead of the Soviets the entire time.

The Soviets had three huge advantages though. They had Korolev, they had a great spy network, and they had a system that let them put safety a bit lower in the priority list.

This let them try stuff earlier. The usual game plan was to figure out when America planned to do something and then throw everything into doing it first. Korolev was an absolute genius at making it work. All in all, it was a strategy that seemed to bear fruit.

The problem with this strategy was exposed with the race to the moon. This was not something you could just throw together at the last minute. Even worse, Korolev died, leaving the program without the guy who somehow always figured out how to make it happen.

Even the Soviets realized the futility of it all. After a half-hearted attempt to continue with the program after the U.S. got to the moon, the Soviets had to give up completely on that.

They did develop some pretty cool engines and had a decent LEO program that went on up until the Soviet Union fell.

But the idea that the U.S. was behind or *way* behind the Soviets at any point is simply not consistent with the facts.

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Now what about crazy stuff like assembling a nuclear engine to be only used in space and get it into space via a regular rocket? Don't we have nuclear powered boats floating around aka the carriers and subs with nuclear engines? Granted idk how in gods name they work but I feel like toss it in space it'll be fine

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The heat death of the universe eventually leads to a minimally entropic state. The stretching of spacetime is the only way to reset entropy. And you're not even really resetting it, just dumping it in other causally disconnected universes.

Roger Penrose theory is that the universe does not last, but does spawn a new universe as the last dying gasp of the previous one in a forward "pop".

Energy from the universe will eventually cool and disapate, including energy collected in black holes, which means all life will be long gone.

Assuming the new epoch universe is able to sustain life, then it will form organically.

This is a layman's description of Penrose theory.

We don't know. So far the only place we know life exists is here on earth. We have no evidence of life anywhere else and even if we find life on a body in our solar system there is no guarantee life exists anywhere else.

No. The red dwarfs will live for a trillion years. So in the deep deep future, there may be red dwarfs that form in the dead shell of galaxies that some future life could use as an energy source to an unimaginably long time.

But those will come to an end. And over the very longest of time frames the acceleration of dark energy will likely make any kind of structure impossible.

This is very simplified to aid understanding rather than be a comprehensive answer.