Who will have the final say in the universe?

The end is near, perhaps in 100 billion years.

Is it too early to start freaking out?

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“There will be one last sentient being, there will be one last thought,” said Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College, towards the end of “A Journey to Infinity”a new documentary Netflix Directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.

When I heard this statement during a recent screening of the documentary, my heart broke.

It was the saddest, loneliest thought she had ever contemplated.

I thought he was aware and knowledgeable about our shared cosmic situation:

that is, if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life and intelligence are doomed.

I thought I had intellectually come to terms with that idea.

But this was a point of view he hadn’t thought of before.

At some point in the future there will be a place in the universe where there will be one last sentient being. And one last thought.

And that last word, however profound or trivial, will fade into silence along with the memory of Einstein, Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve,

​ while the remaining fragments of the physical universe will continue to drift apart for billions and billions of lonely and silent years.

Will this last thought be a valuable lesson? A dirty word?

How did we humans get into this mess?

The universe as we know it originated in a ferocious explosion 13.8 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since.

Astronomers have debated for decades whether this expansion would continue. forever or if one day it collapsed again in a “great implosion”.

That all changed in 1998, when astronomers discovered what cosmic expansion was to acceleratedriven by an anti-gravity force that is part of the fabric of space-time.

The larger the universe becomes, the more strongly this “dark energy” separates it.

This new force has a striking resemblance with the cosmological constanta cosmic repulsion that Einstein proposed as a correction factor in his equations to explain why the universe did not collapse, but which he later dismissed as an error.

But the cosmological constant has refused to die and now threatens to destroy physics and the universe.

Eventually, if this dark energy prevails, distant galaxies will eventually recede so fast that we can no longer see them.

The more time passes, the less we will know about the universe.

The stars will die and not be reborn.

It will be like living inside an upside down black hole, sucking matter, energy and information over the horizon, and never coming back.

One might point out that it is too early to prescribe a future for the universe.

New discoveries in physics could provide a way out.

Maybe dark energy isn’t constant; perhaps it will turn around and compress the universe again. AND

In an email, Michael Turner, the University of Chicago cosmologist emeritus who coined the term “dark energyhe said, referring to the Greek letter that symbolizes Einstein’s cosmological constant:

“Lambda would be the least interesting answer to the dark energy riddle!”

But for now, this is what we can expect.

We’ll be fried in a billion years when the sun evaporates the oceans.

A few billion years later, the Sun itself will die, reducing the Earth and all that is left of us to ashes.

There is no way to escape into space.

The galaxies themselves will collapse into black holes in a quintillion years.

Furthermore, black holes will eventually release whatever they have imprisoned as a fine spray of particles and radiation, which will be dispersed in the prevailing wind of dark energy that separates them.

In a variation of the story, known as the big tear(“big tear” or eternal expansion theory), dark energy could eventually become strong enough to shatter the headstones that mark our graves.

That is why, just as there was a first living creature somewhere, at some point, emerging from the brilliant afterglow of the Big Bang, there will be a last creature to die one last thought.

An ultimate conscious being, as Levin pointed out.

That thought was what stopped me in my tracks.

It had never occurred to me that an individual being would have the last word on existence, the last chance to curse or thank.

Part of the pain is that no one will know who, or what, had the final say, or what was thought or said.

Somehow, that idea made the cosmic extinction feel more personal, and I wondered what it would be like.

Rather than lament the end times, most physicists and astronomers I talk to say the idea is a relief.

The death of the future frees them to focus on the magic of the moment.

The late great astrophysicist, philosopher and black hole evangelist John Archibald Wheelerof the princeton universityhe said that the past and future are fiction, that they exist only in the artifacts and imagination of the present.

According to that view, the universe ends with me and, therefore, in a sense, I have the final say.

“Nothing lasts foreveris a maxim that applies as much to the stock market and the stars as it does to our lives and Buddhist sand mandalas.

A breath of eternity can light up a whole life, maybe even mine.

Whatever happens in the endless eons to come, at least we were here to celebrate.

We were here in the brief, bright sliver of eternity, when the universe was teeming with life and light.

We will always have the Milky Way.

c.2023 The New York Times Society