Time-lapse Video to the Future: From the Present to the End of the Universe

Many minds have tried to figure out what the future of the universe will look like. We know it is extremely young, barely 13.8 billion years old, and that our existence occupies an almost insignificant fraction of that time. However, any attempt to study its evolution forces us to work on scales so large that they challenge human comprehension. A recent video published by the channel MelodySheep on YouTube invites us to take a trip to the extreme future of the universe, doubling the speed every five seconds. How much time are we talking about? Suffice it to say that the Earth disappears in the first three and a half minutes…

Important events await planet Earth. One possibility is the formation of a new supercontinent, which experts call Pangea Proxima. It is supposed to happen in about 250 million years, but if we keep moving forward, the most radical change will be the loss of its ability to sustain life, courtesy of the evolution and aging of the Sun. In 10 billion years, our mother star will become a white dwarf… and even then, on a universal scale we are talking about less than a blink. How long will it take for the universe itself to be affected? This video will give you a pretty solid idea:

The future of the universe

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. In this creation from the MelodySheep channel, the speed of time doubles every five seconds. In just three and a half minutes, 35 billion years passed, but the answer to the previous question requires us to go much, much further. In a trillion years, stars will begin to disappear. They will exhaust their fuel and explode as supernovae or mutate into more exotic forms. In 100 trillion years, the Degenerate Era will begin, marked by a graveyard of dead stars, until those very remnants decay completely. White dwarfs will be the only beacons of light for billions of years, but their fate is also to go out, turning into black dwarfs (a star that is currently hypothetical), leaving black holes as the absolute kings of the universe.

The rotational energy of black holes will be the only source of energy available to any civilization that has managed to survive to that point. One of the biggest questions about the future of the universe is whether the proton decays or not. If it doesn't, the information presented in the video could change, but one thing is certain: black holes will share the same fate as the rest of the cosmos, dissipated via Hawking radiation. Entropy will win its race, and the universe will reach equilibrium, remaining in that state forever… though we are not sure. Quantum fluctuations or the tunnel effect could create another universe. Poincaré's recurrence theorem indicates that after an extremely long but finite time, a system should return to its original state, or a very similar one. Will that apply to our universe? We don't know.

To close this article, a classic recommendation: “The Last Question”, by Isaac Asimov. Look it up.