Universe collapse is terminally inevitable---only an advanced human civilization can re-engineer the rules or escape---this also disproves the existence of advanced aliens because they’ve likely peaced out in the same way by now

Billions of years from now, the universe as we know it will cease to exist. The good news is, that gives us a lot of time to prepare, and maybe even figure out a way to cheat cosmic death. Here are some possible ways our descendants might survive a cosmological apocalypse.

The Universe, like the organisms that reside within it, is a mortal entity. Born in the Big Bang, it will eventually meet its fate through an equally cataclysmic process, whether it be in the form of a Big Rip, a Big Crunch, or an eternal deep freeze. Regardless, all life as we know it will be extinguished.

Unless, of course, our highly advanced offspring can find a way to escape the confines of the cosmos—or more radically, change the rules of the cosmological game.

Building a Basement Universe

Our great-great-great-grandchildren, many times over, could leave our current universe by migrating to a natural or artificially created “basement universe.” A future civilization would link the new universe to the old one with a wormhole, and use it for living space, computing—or to escape an old, decaying universe.

“In, through...and beyond.” Disney’s The Black Hole (1979)—a good idea, but poorly executed.

This may seem outlandish, but this idea has been explored by some serious scientists, including theoretical physicists who take the occasional deep dive into black hole theory and inflation cosmology.

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute and Stanford string theorist Leonard Susskind have speculated that universes spawn other universes in a natural, evolutionary process, known as cosmological natural selection (CNS). They argue that the cosmos is not just randomly ideal for the development and proliferation of intelligent life—but in fact, our universe may have actually evolved to be that way.

Smolin suggests that baby universes are reproduced through black holes, and that our Universe is nothing more than a glorified black-hole generator. Making baby universes via black holes is thus the “utility function” of the universe. Likewise, Susskind’s theory invokes black holes, but he adds the nature of “inflation”, the force that causes the early universe to expand rapidly.

Given that universes could emerge naturally from the singularities of black holes, some theorists have wondered if it might be possible for us to build our own “basement” universes. The process of artificially creating universes was first proposed by theoretical physicists Edward Farhi and Alan Guth in 1987. Writing in The New York Times, Malcolm W. Browne explains:

...Guth likens the universe in which we live to the two-dimensional surface of a sphere which, because of its immense size, appears to us to be almost perfectly flat. There are circumstances, he says, in which an ‘’aneurysm’’ could develop on this surface, a region in which space and time bulge like a tumor, eventually pinching itself off from its parent into a new universe.

To a hypothetical observer inside the bulge, conditions might initially resemble those of the Big Bang explosion from which our own universe is thought to have arisen. But to observers in our own universe, Dr. Guth said, the aneurysm would merely resemble a black hole — a supermassive object whose immense gravity prevents the escape even of light. After a certain amount of time the black hole would evaporate, leaving no trace of the place where a new universe had been born.

But once the bulge separates from the host universe, the new universe will exist in a totally separate space/time continuum. Any communication between the two universes would be impossible.

In their paper, “An Obstacle to Creating a Universe in the Laboratory,” Guth and Farhi sheepishly concede that a tremendous amount of energy density would have to be acquired for this to happen. As the authors write in their paper, “The requirement of an initial singularity appears to be an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of an inflationary universe in the laboratory.”

As Guth notes in the NYT article, “Such an achievement is obviously far beyond our technology, but some advanced civilization in the distant future might...well, you never know. For all we know, our own universe may have started in someone’s basement.’’

More encouragingly, philosopher Nick Bostrom and cosmologist Milan M. Ćirković put out a paper in 2000 arguing that an advanced civilization might actually be able to not only engage in this kind of universe-engineering—but it might also be able to transfer information directly into this baby universe. This information could conceivably include uploaded minds, which would make the prospect of immortality a very tantalizing one, indeed.

Transcension

And it’s not crazy to imagine that we could send our minds through a black hole, once they were uploaded to a computer.

Fifteen years, ago physicist Seth Lloyd argued that black holes are the densest and most efficient computational devices capable of existing in our universe. His “ultimate laptop” consists of a kilogram of compressed matter shrunken down to an absolutely miniscule black hole. Owing to Hawking radiation, this computation engine would only last for a fraction of a second (10-19 seconds to be exact), but during that time it would perform about 1032 operations on a 1016 bits.

Inspired by this idea and those of Smolin and Susskind, futurist and systems theorist John Smart has connected the prospect of baby universes, whether they be natural or artificial, to the Fermi Paradox, i.e. the realization that we have yet to see signs of extraterrestrial intelligences when we should have by now. It’s conceivable, he says, that all advanced extraterrestrial life rejects its universe of origin, in favor something more interesting in the Great Beyond. Smart calls this the Transcension Hypothesis.