sciencetech-blog

comments

How will the universe end - with a bang or with a whimper?

According to this video it is very much the latter, but only after all life on Earth has long since disappeared.

Host Joe Hanson takes us on a journey from near future to far future, and ultimately shows us how the universe might come to an end.

Scroll down for video

In a video called 'The Far Future of the Universe' host Joe Hanson discusses how Earth and ultimately the universe might end. He says that within 500,000 years we can expect a climate-altering large asteroid to hit our planet, while in a billion years all life will be gone

In the video called 'The Far Future of the Universe' he starts with the postulation that most people on Earth alive today won't be around in 150 years.

In 100,000 years the position of Earth in the Milky Way will have changed to such a degree that the constellations will look completely different in the night sky.

Any time in the next 500,000 years, meanwhile, we can expect Earth to be hit by an asteroid large enough to significantly alter our climate.

In 600 million years photosynthesis becomes impossible as the sun sends more carbon dioxide our way.

A billion years from today all multicellular life, including us, will be eradicated as the sun boils our oceans and destroys our greenery according to Hanson.

'We wouldn't want to be around for what comes next anyway,' he jokes.

In 600 million years the sun will have pumped so much carbon dioxide into our planet that photosynthesis will cease, leading to all multicellular life being eradicated. By the billion-year mark, all oceans and life will have disappeared from the surface of Earth, leaving it looking somewhat like Mars

In four billion years our Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy but, owing to the huge spaces between stars, it is unlikely many collisions will occur. In fact, it's possible that only six out of a total of a trillion stars will hit each other

At the four billion year mark, our Milky Way galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy but, although they will interact, most of the galaxies are empty space.

This means that only about six out of a trillion stars might actually collide.

In 7.9 billion years, when our sun runs out of gas, it starts to expand and consumers the inner planets Mercury and Venus before deflating into a white dwarf 1.6 billion years later.

About 150 billion years later, changes on the scale of the universe start to take place.

As the universe expands, we would lose sight of all galaxies from Earth if we were still around as they are too distant for their late to reach us.

At the trillion-year mark, stars stop forming, and 110 trillion years all of the stars will have exhausted their energy and flickered out.

'This is where the sky goes dark,' says Hanson.

In 7.9 billion years, when our sun runs out of gas, it starts to expand and consumers the inner planets Mercury and Venus before deflating into a white dwarf 1.6 billion years later

In 110 trillion years all stars will have died out while in a quadrillion years our planet, now a lifeless hunk of rock, will fall into what is left of the sun (now a black dwarf) as its orbit decays

Ultimately the universe will continue to expand until everything in it is dead. All matter will be so spread out than, in essence, nothing will remain and the cosmos will be completely empty, says Hanson

One quadrillion years from now, what remains of planet Earth is pulled into the black dwarf that is now the sun as its orbit decays.

Further ahead from this point, however, seems to be a bleak future for the universe.

'Anything that remains will be stretched so far apart that it really doesn't, and isn't, matter at all,' says Hanson in the video.

'After that the universe is basically empty.'

This is, of course, just one theory for the end of the universe.

Others include the universe ending in a 'Big Crunch' that in turn leads to another Big Bang.

Whatever the case, however, our Earth will be long gone before the universe has even begun to edge towards its conclusion.