Science and the Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo

Author:Ervin Laszlo
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: New Science/Physics
ISBN: 9781594779909
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Published: 2010-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

THE FUTURE OF LIFE IN THE COSMOS

The reasonable certainty that life, even advanced forms of life, exists on other planets does not tell us that life will exist forever. The fact is that life cannot exist indefinitely in the universe: the physical resources required for carbon-based life—the only kind we know of—do not last forever.

The evolution of the known forms of life depends on a strictly limited range of temperatures and the presence of a specific variety of chemical compounds. These factors, as we have seen, are likely to exist on a number of planets in this and other galaxies, on planets that have the right chemical and thermal conditions, situated at the right distance from their active star. But whether such planets are highly abundant or relatively rare, the conditions they provide for the sustenance of life are limited in time. The principal reason is that the active phase of the stars whose radiation drives the processes of life does not last forever. Sooner or later stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, and then they either shrink to the white dwarf stage or fly apart in a supernova explosion. The population of active stars is not infinitely replenished in this universe. Even if new stars keep forming from interstellar dust, a time must come when no further stars are born.

Even if the time dimension is staggering, the limitations are real. About 1012 (one trillion) years from now, all the stars that remain in our universe will first have converted their hydrogen into helium—the main fuel of the supercompacted but still luminous white dwarf state—and then will have exhausted their supply of helium. We have already been able to observe that the galaxies constituted of such stars take on a reddish tint, then—when their stars cool still further—fade from sight altogether. As energy is lost in the galaxies through gravitational radiation, individual stars move closer together. The chance of collision among them increases, and the collisions that occur precipitate some stars toward the center of their galaxies and expel others into extragalactic space. As a result, the galaxies diminish in size. Galactic clusters also shrink, and in time both galaxies and galactic clusters implode into black holes. At the time horizon of 1034 years, all matter in our universe will be reduced to radiation, positronium (pairs of positrons and electrons), and compacted nuclei in black holes.

Black holes themselves decay and disappear in a process Stephen Hawking called evaporation. A black hole resulting from the collapse of a galaxy evaporates in 1099 years, while a giant black hole containing the mass of a galactic supercluster vanishes in 10117 years. (If protons do not decay, this span of time expands to 10122 years.) Beyond this humanly inconceivable time horizon, the cosmos contains matter particles only in the form of positronium, neutrinos, and gamma-ray photons.

Whether a universe is expanding (open), expanding and then contracting (closed), or balanced in a steady state, the complex structures required for the known forms of life vanish before matter itself super-crunches, or evaporates.

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