It’s try-or-die---extinction is inevitable because of heat death---only continued human development can engineer a way out
Jim Holt 4, M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia, Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University, Contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Slate, “Star Trek and the Lifeboat Scenario”, Slate Magazine, 3/4/2004, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/03/star-trek-and-the-lifeboat-scenario.html
Tipler’s idea of an infinite frolic just before the Big Crunch was seductive to me—more so, at least, than Dyson’s vision of a community of increasingly dilute Black Clouds staving off the cold in an eternal Big Chill. But if the universe is in a runaway expansion, both are pipe dreams. The only way to survive in the long run is to get the hell out. Yet how do you escape a dying universe if—as little Alvy Singer pointed out—the universe is everything?
A man who claims to see an answer to this question is Michio Kaku. A theoretical physicist at City College in New York, Kaku looks and talks a bit like the character Sulu on Star Trek. (He can be seen in the recent Michael Apted film about great scientists, Me and Isaac Newton.) He is not the least bit worried about the fate of this universe. “If your ship is sinking,” he said to me, “why not get a lifeboat and leave?” We earthlings can’t do this just yet, Kaku observed. That is because we are a mere Type 1 civilization, able to marshal the energy only of a single planet. But eventually, assuming a reasonable rate of economic growth and technological progress, we will graduate to being a Type 2 civilization, commanding the energy of a star, and thence to being a Type 3 civilization, able to summon the energy of an entire galaxy. Then space-time itself will be our plaything. We’ll have the power to open up a “wormhole” through which we can slip into a brand new universe.