Suppose the universe settles into "heat death". Will any organisms be able to live at any level?

Question

Heat death is among the ways speculated that the universe as we know it will end up. If that happens, will anything be able to live anywhere at any level of operation? If so, what might life be like for them? Could any civilizations survive into this era?

Answer 1

heat death is a very fascinating idea. it makes complete sense, but its basically the "safety net" of the doomsday scenarios. most other scenarios predict deaths in billions of years. heat death would occur in trillions. after all matter has decayed into photons and leptons (electrons), even black holes. its really a misnomer i think, heat death makes you think it would get very hot. but really it is that everything will get down to nearly absolute zero and the energy density of universe will be extremely low. quantum phenomena would become visible on the macroscopic scale, of course we wouldnt be around to witness this.

but its a pretty sturdy model, its based on half lives of protons, hawking radiation, and many other things that are decently easy to predict. the only problem with it is that something else will wipe out the universe before then, most likely the big rip.

so to sum up. no nothing at all could survive until then. first star would stop being created and stars would cool into either neutron stars, white dwarfs and then eventually black dwarfs, and black holes. planets would be flung off orbits and then stars. eventually all matter would decay into electrons and photons, and you cant make a society out of electrons (u cant even make a single atom or molecule...)

Answer 2

As campbelp has pointed out, this idea implies the extreme of entropy. Energy has dissipated so much that there is no potential left. But beyond that, heat death means that there wouldn't even be any matter as we know it. Even hadrons would have all decomposed. The Universe would be an inconceivably thin haze of quarks and leptons. I believe this would also require that black holes disintegrate. (Hawking radiation?) If they didn't, their gravity would always provide some potential for interaction.

This is a very depressing end. I believe many scientists reject it because it offends their sense of aesthetics. But campbelp didn't tell us why he thought it wouldn't occur. Maybe it's because of this popular "dark matter" notion, which some believe will stop the expansion of the Universe. Now all they have to do is actually prove the existence of this invisible, non-interactive matter.

Answer 3

No. Heat death has the word "death" in it for a reason. All organized energy driven actions, like living processes, would be impossible. But that is just the theoretical outcome when taking entropy to its logical extreme. That will never happen in the real universe. Even if it did, it would be so many billions of years in the future that who would really care?

Answer 4

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Answer 5

The heat death is a possible final state of the universe, in which it has "run down" to a state of no thermodynamic free energy to sustain motion or life. In physical terms, it has reached maximum entropy. The hypothesis of a universal heat death stems from the 1850s ideas of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) who extrapolated the theory of heat views of mechanical energy loss in nature, as embodied in the first two laws of thermodynamics, to universal operation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

the key of this passage is that "no thermodynamic free energy to sustain motion or LIFE"

I believe that no life could be possible without any thermodynamic energy....not even bacteria.

Answer 6

Sounds like Sun screen won't help. Sounds very grim, Bummer!