Seeing as the heat death of the universe occurs once black holes have stopped emitting Hawking radiation, and BH’s life spans are tied to their mass, could a (very, very advanced) civilisation bring two or more together? Assuming nobody’s succumbed to proton decay before then, of course.
Bonus question: if so, what’s the longest timeline we could theoretically make? I’m thinking it would involve a black hole using all the matter in our local galaxy cluster.
I believe there have been multiple sci-fi stories written about such concepts. It would go to assume that any civilization still around in 10^43 years from now will have no choice but to live around black holes while harnessing their rotational energy. My current favorite series, Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter, explores some possible endings of life in the long-term life cycle of the universe. There is also the final book of the Three Body Problem, which if I remember correctly, shows civilizations in pocket universes around black holes.
There is a YouTube video you may want to watch by Isaac Arthur. It mentions the possibility of combining black holes to elongate their life, and I won’t spoil the final answer for you. But like always, entropy prevails.
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You’re spot on ;) Xeelee Sequence is a collection of a bunch of books, loosely held together by the fact that they all take place in the same universe propagated with all possible forms of life. This is a story where there were entire civilizations rising and falling during the first pico-seconds of the Big Bang.
How do they handle the science behind everything? Do they try to use modern concepts and technologies and misunderstandings of how those work, or do they hand-wave it as “this is their technology and they will not elaborate because it’s basically going to be magic to you” kind of science?
I’m not an educated science-ologist (not to be confused with scienTologist) but I do dabble in quite a lot of the astrophysics, geology, etc, as a 20+year hobby, so space-based science fiction tends to rub me the wrong way when they try explain things using modern concepts, but they have misinterpreted or misrepresented things to “make it work”
Treknobabble is 100% okay for me, it’s a technology I don’t understand because it’s too advanced for me and uses concepts only theorized for now.
Or is it less sciencey focused and more “these are the stories of these peoples” anthology type? Both sound good.
Honestly it sounds fascinating, and from the buried synopsis of a few, I think I’m gonna like it. It’s been awhile since I read science fiction, I’ve been focusing on fantasy lately, specifically Dungeons & Dragons-universe books.