"Benford-TheFarFuture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

atmospheric elements, and we would evolve a climate much like that of Venus.

All this assumes that we don't find wholly new ways of getting around planetary
problems. I suspect that we crafty chimpanzees probably shall, though. We like
to tinker and we like to roam. Though some will stay to fiddle with the Earth,
the sun and the planets, some will move elsewhere.

After all, smaller stars will live longer. The class called M dwarfs, dim and
red and numerous, can burn steady and wan, for up to a hundred billion years,
without any assistance. Then even they will gutter out. Planets around such
stars will have a hard time supporting life, because any world close enough to
the star to stay warm will also be tide locked, one side baked and the other
freezing. Still, they might prove temporary abodes for wandering primates, or
for others.

Eventually, no matter what stellar engine we harness, all the hydrogen gets
burned. Similar pollution problems beset even the artificially aged star, now
completely starved of hydrogen. It seethes, grows hotter, sears its planets,
then swallows them.

There may be other adroit dodges available to advanced lifeforms, such as using
the energy of supernovas. These are brute mechanisms, and later exploding stars
can replenish the interstellar clouds of dust and gas, so that new stars can
form -- but not many. On average, matter gets recycled in about four billion
years in our galaxy. Our own planet's mass is partly recycled stellar debris
from the first galactic supernova generation. This cycle can go on until about
20 billion years pass, when only a ten-thousandth of the interstellar medium
will remain. Dim red stars will glow in the spiral arms, but the great dust
banks will have been trapped into stellar corpses.

So unavoidably, the stars are as mortal as we. They take longer, but they die.

For its first fifty billion years, the universe will brim with light. Gas and
dust will still fold into fresh suns. For an equal span the stars would linger.
Beside reddening suns, planetary life will warm itself by the waning fires that
herald stellar death.

Sheltering closer and closer to stellar warmth, life could take apart whole
solar systems, galaxies, even the entire Virgo cluster of galaxies, all to
capture light. In the long run, life must take everything apart and use it, to
survive.

To ponder futures beyond that era, we must discuss the universe as a whole.

Modern cosmology is quite different from the physics of the Newtonian worldview,
which dreamed uneasily of a universe that extended forever but was always
threatened by collapse. Nothing countered the drawing-in of gravity except
infinity itself. Though angular momentum will keep a galaxy going for a great
while, collisions can cancel that. Objects hit each other and mutually plunge
toward the gravitating center. Physicists of the Newtonian era thought that