Outlasting the Universe

(soft music) - We are in what you would call the future. The deep future. How many years has it been now? It's been so long. Trillions, quadrillion years? No, much, much more. It is said that humanity once lived on a beautiful world, one that orbited a dormant star but typical, at least, typical of its time. Over time, we left that home and spread among the stars, seeking new places to live, new wonders to discover, and new towns to visit. Sadly, much of that history has been lost, but the absence of other intelligences is thought to have come as a big surprise.

No matter how far we looked, it was just us. Unless you like talking to germs. One of the strangest facts we know about ancient humans is that they died. They became ill, injured, and aged in soft, fragile bodies. The idea of ​​death is abhorrent to us. The notion that one's existence could somehow simply cease is something we have drawn upon our will and technological prowess to resolve. We experimented with many ways to prolong life, but eventually we all moved into the virtual realm, uploading our minds to machines and living much of our existence in the digital paradise.

There you can do anything, be anyone. I have lived countless different lives. You just can't understand what I've seen. I have experienced the full, simulated life of every human being who has ever existed. I have been Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King and even Marilyn Monroe. I have been a Victorian shoeshine boy, an Egyptian pharaoh, a beggar in Delhi and an oil magnate in Dubai. And of course, countless fictional experiences also coming from stories, games and alternative stories. But you know, over time existence wears out. It is increasingly difficult to find something new or interesting to try.

Many times my digital mind has been partially erased, reset, modified and updated to try to avoid those feelings of depression. But more and more I question the meaning of my existence, of any existence. In the real world outside our digital lives, our machines have designed the galaxy to our will. We have extended the lives of stars through artificial mass loss. We have built giant structures to capture its light. And we have built enormous computers to support our vast digital

universe

. The human brain uses approximately 12 watts of power, but our machines harvest the power of entire galaxies, from 10 to 36 watts, enough to sustain an immense population of digital beings.

We had become a Kardashev Type III civilization. Oh, how I wish you could have seen us at our best. We cover the galaxy and even others around us. We witnessed their merger into ever larger supergalaxies. Back then, the stars were everywhere and we lived around them. A cosmos full of sensitivity, because it was we who awakened the

universe

. Communication delay times were, of course, enormous by standard, sometimes millions of years. However, for immortals like us, we still felt connected. With so much abundance, so much happiness, there were no wars, no fights, just paradise, but everything comes to an end.

Even genetically modified stars eventually die. Little by little the lights went out, one by one. As they did so, the power of our star harvesting machines decreased. Soon, it was impossible to maintain the simulations as before, threatening our very existence. There was a wave of panic, but a solution emerged, a solution from our past. Because in a previous life I had lived as a mock colleague of the brilliant Freeman Dyson, a Princeton physicist who imagined precursors to what we eventually built around the stars. I remember that one day, sitting in his office, surrounded by countless papers, the song of distant birds beyond the window, and the faint smell of chalk still hanging in the air, we talked at length about the end of the universe.

His eyes became young again, they lit up and described the prospects of advanced technologies. And he told me that there was a way we could live, not just longer but forever. Dyson suggested that all we have to do is slow down perceived time in our simulated universe. Let's consider that every day the human mind requires about 1000 kilojoules of energy. Now, ideally, we would provide that in real time, but if we could only collect, say, one kilojoule per day, we could still simulate that entire human day, just one slowed down by a factor of 1000. As the universe approaches its inevitable death for heat, a frozen state, we simply continually slow down the simulations.

Like Zeno's arrow, we continue to slow down in correspondence with the decreasing energy. She was known as Dyson's Eternal Intelligence. And so we follow his recipe, gradually lengthening the time. This was not relativistic time dilation, but digital time dilation. For us, things continued as usual, but we witnessed the outside universe seemingly speeding up. For many, the change was seen as a positive thing. Communication delays decreased. It was now possible to coordinate with others much more quickly, at least from our perspective. But soon, the euphoria subsided as time dilation became more and more extreme, disturbing many. After about 100 billion years, this fear became widespread as the cosmos fell into darkness.

The stars had finally gone out. We try to resist, collecting brown dwarfs, gas giants and stellar debris and crushing them to forge new stars. But in the end these too were sold out. The glorious stelliferous age had ended and the universe had now returned to its natural state of darkness and emptiness. We had entered the degenerate era. That transition changed us forever. For now, the main source of energy for our vast empire would have to be black holes, massive collapsed stars that were inherently rare. We migrated our computers and machinery to these latest outposts to maximize efficiency.

Communication rates between colonies were reduced to save more energy. But this had the unfortunate effect of these pockets of humanity becoming increasingly divergent in terms of culture and beliefs. We fracture into different societies for the first time since we went digital. Those who chose to end their existence, something that was once almost unheard of, became increasingly common. The darkness was simply too much for them. Extracting energy from black holes was a different game from that of stars. An old technique, at least old to us, was to exploit the Penrose process, throwing particles into the ergosphere of rotating black holes, where the drag of the frame would allow a small transfer of energy.

Of course, eventually the black holes disappeared due to our interference. Finally we collect all its rotational energy. Another strategy was to guide any massive objects we could find toward the black holes, thus tearing them apart using tidal forces and forming hot accretion disks and jets. This proved incredibly effective, approaching 1/12 of pure E equal to the conversion of MC squared. Those were better days, or should I say better eons. It became difficult to keep track of time after so long, especially with all of our time dilation in place. But after about 10 quintillion years or 10 to 19 years, this too became ineffective as matter itself became a scarce commodity.

They say space is empty, but it has never felt so empty. That's when the community began to fight more as our fuel and resources dwindled. You see, not all black holes are the same, depending on their spin, mass, matter environment, and clustering of nearby black holes. As a result, some were inevitably more favorable than others. Before long, cyber warfare became commonplace. There were increasing reports of forced reprogramming of other people's memories, the latest propaganda technique. Why persuade someone what to believe when you can just reprogram them? The colonies eventually split into two different ideological views. The differences seem so irrelevant in retrospect that I won't even bother to describe them to you, but the effect was that communications between colonies of opposing ideologies became increasingly conflicted, distrustful and hostile.

With matter drying out, there was no choice but to switch to a weaker energy source, particularly the Hawking radiation that leaks out as black holes slowly evaporate. It must be understood that the power produced by Hawking radiation, known as the Bekenstein-Hawking luminosity, is scandalously small. It is a humiliating way of subsisting for a civilization like ours. A black hole with the mass of Earth's Sun produces only 1/10 of a rontowatt. That's 10 to the power of negative 28 watts. For context, during the stelliferous period, a solar-mass star would produce more than 10 to 26 watts. To eke out a living in this era of black holes, there was no other option but to slow down time to terrifying degrees.

To mitigate this extreme dilation, another option was proposed. The truth is that there were simply too many of us, too many sentient beings to pretend, even after all the suicides our society had endured. And so a controversial program was imposed to merge our consciousnesses. Two minds became one, then 100, then 1000. Each colony finally became one mind, me. I carry the memories of so many beings, of billions of happy couples in love, of mothers who meet their children, of moments of joy, sadness, emotion and despair. Of course, the memories were compressed to save space and eventually reduced to key fragments.

Little by little, my friends, my lovers, my family, everyone I knew was slowly erased in the name of efficiency. I don't even know who I am anymore. But our colony, my colony, or should I say I, persisted. Because I was lucky enough to reside around one of the largest black holes in the visible universe, the supermassive black hole you once called Sagittarius A*. But I doubt you'd recognize it, because it had now grown hundreds of millions of solar masses thanks to many past mergers. Paradoxically, my black hole produced the lowest power since Hawking luminosity scales as the inverse square mass.

But, on the other hand, they were the ones that lasted the longest and tended to be surrounded by smaller, more luminous black holes. So to get my 12 watts of power and all the overhead, it was now necessary to slow down my simulated reality by a factor of 10 to 29. That meant that for me every second, the universe aged sextillion years, from 10 to 29. 21 years old. You might think that's so fast that the story ends imminently, but the events of the universe also seem to extend accordingly. The truth is that I continued to live like this for what seemed like countless eons, an agonizing existence, living just to live, I just couldn't bring myself to end myself while carrying the last memories of so many minds.

Somehow I felt a duty to persist. But the universe was now so dark, so terribly dark. After 10 to 40 years, or from my perspective, what seemed like 100 billion years, the same nucleons inside our machines were decaying. Even the basic components of matter had grown tired of existing. This had been anticipated for a long time, and little by little we had been converting crucial components into artificially stabilized forms using foreign matter. Just another desperate attempt to delay the inevitable. I thought to myself as I watched the universe age at breakneck speeds. Between 10 and 70 years, most of the smaller black holes disappeared, evaporated.

It was a strange and rare event when they finally went extinct, briefly bathing the cosmos in light again, if only for a moment. But each one represented an ending. I was lucky to have such a long-lived black hole, but the less fortunate colonies had simply already died out. Many times they asked me to merge with me, a digital upload of their consciousness into mine. Before you judge, I simply couldn't expend what little energy I had. It was painful, but look, I had to be firm. And so yes, I rejected them all. Some colonies simply got so far away from the rest of us due to the expansion of the universe that we lost them forever.

Others chose the unthinkable: suppress themselves. Others still were forced to shift to much more extreme rates of time dilation once their black holes evaporated—so extreme, in fact, that they were essentially frozen in time from our perspective and thus we once again lost them. . For eons, the two dominant ideologies had argued with each other. We blamed each other for every lost colony,accusing each other of being involved in some way. The breakup was deep and painful. But as the smaller black holes evaporated, and then even those of intermediate size, sobriety took hold. We all realized that our civilization was waning.

We began to listen to each other, because we realized that eventually the universe would separate us all forever. Unfortunately, the distances between us were now too great for high data transfers. The messages were largely text-based. The window to digitally send one's consciousness to merge with another was lost. In those days I carried enormous guilt for my past actions, rejecting so many that I could have saved, something now impossible. I reflected on how billions, quadrillion beings essentially became extinct thanks to my inaction. Dark thoughts that wouldn't let me rest. But in truth, everyone who remained at this point, everyone who had come this far carried so much guilt.

We had all done terrible things just to get here, absorbing our friends, sacrificing the population, rejecting the desperate, all just to prolong existence at any cost. It was calculated that, adjusting to our accelerated clocks, we would have only a few decades left before we would be isolated forever. By the year 10 to 93, there were only two colonies left, or really two beings. They were on the opposite side of the universe to me. But thanks to extreme time dilation, we could barely communicate. This other surviving sensitivity had been my worst enemy for countless years, but now it all seemed hopeless.

What did it matter if they had different points of view than mine? Ultimately, we were more similar than we wanted to admit. As our black holes approached their final demise, their luminosity grew and a brief window opened to send more data. We could really talk. In our time base, we were just a few hours away from eternal solitude. We share memories of the past, memories filled with laughter, regret, joy and guilt. We remember a part of what it meant to be human. When the horizon finally approached, we began to say goodbye. However, before he could finish, the call went cold.

Is there? Hello? Can you hear me? They were gone. Now it was just me, my own universe for all time.