The End of the Universe

Will the universe end? Yes, yes it will. All we need to do to figure that out is to look at the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of the universe will only go up over time. This means that the universe will end as it slowly becomes more and more disordered and more processes break down. When philosophers say that "everything must come to an end", they are scientifically correct. Due to constantly increasing entropy, literally everything will someday break down and come to an end. So where does that leave us? Are our fates sealed?

No.

The amazing thing about life is that it constantly finds ways to surprise the universe. Every human over the age of forty is constantly spitting in the face of death, since humans should only really be alive for about forty years. Therefore, it may just be possible to outlive the universe. Of course, the chances of this happening are so infinitesimally small they may as well be zero. Luckily for us, humans are known for defying the odds. So how would we go about surviving the end of the universe?

First, we would have to survive and overcome any minor hurdles thrown our way for the next few billion years (think global warming, asteroids, supervolcanoes, diseases, etc.). Already sounding tough? You've barely seen the tip of the iceberg. After about 4.5 billion years of surviving everything, it'll be time to move out, if we haven't already. The Andromeda galaxy is set to collide with the Milky Way galaxy at that time, and I don't know what will happen, but it can't be good. Even if we somehow survived that, the Sun would become a red giant around that time, effectively scorching the Earth and killing all life on it. So, we would probably want to leave the solar system and maybe the galaxy. After finding a nice planet to settle down in, humanity will have a well deserved break. Hopefully, we will be harnessing all of our energy from solar power by then. One by one, the stars will go out and humanity will continue to hop from one solar system to another. Eventually, all of the stars in the universe will die out. At this time, humankind will have to learn to harness the rotational powers of black holes for energy. Thankfully, we have trillions upon trillions of years to figure this out. Unfortunately, as Stephen Hawking proved, the even the black holes themselves will die. The universe will slowly collapse into nothingness. At this time, humanity will either have to create a new universe, escape into another universe, or create a simulation to escape into. So that begs the question, how do we know we aren't already in a simulation?

Simply put, we don't. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation created by humans to escape the end of the universe. In fact, there is a very good chance that our "reality" is nothing more than a simulation. Perhaps we will never know.