SLIDE 11.
One hundred billion
years will pass.
Earth orbits a mere
twenty million kilometers from its necrosun in this epoch, and the
fires of the accretion disk are banked. Continents jostle and
shudder, rising and falling, as the lights strobe around their
edges (and occasionally in low equatorial orbit, whenever the
Stasis permits a high-energy civilization to arise).
By the end of the
first billion years of the voyage, the night skies are dark and
starless. The naked eye can still—barely, if it knows where to
look—see the Chaos galaxy formed by the collision of M-31 and the
Milky Way; but it is a graveyard, its rocky planets mostly
supernova-sterilized iceballs ripped from their parent stars by one
close encounter too many. Unicellular life (once common in the
Milky Way, at least) has taken a knock; multicellular life (much
rarer) has received a mortal body blow. Only the Stasis’s lifeboat
remains.
Luna still floats in
Terrestrial orbit—it is a useful tool to stir Earth’s liquid core.
Prone to a rocky sclerosis, the Earth’s heart is a major problem
for the Stasis. They can’t let it harden, lest the subduc tion
cycle and the deep carbon cycle on which the biosphere depends
grind to a halt. But there are ways to stir it up again. They can
afford to wait half a billion years for the Earth to cool, then
reseed the reborn planet with archaea and algae. After the first
fraught experiment in reterraforming, the Stasis find it sufficient
to reboot the mantle and outer core once every ten billion years or
so.
The universe changes
around them, slowly but surely.
At the end of a
hundred billion years, uranium no longer exists in useful
quantities in the Earth’s crust. Even uranium 238 decays
eventually, and twenty one half-lives is more than enough to render
it an exotic memory, like the bright and early dawn of the
universe. Other isotopes will follow suit, leaving only the most
stable behind.
(The Stasis have
sufficient for their needs, and might even manufacture more—were it
necessary—using the necrostar’s ergosphere as a forge. But the
Stasis don’t particularly want their clients to possess the raw
materials for nuclear weapons. Better by far to leave those tools
by the wayside.)
The sky is dark. The
epoch of star formation has drawn to a close in the galaxies the
Earth has left. No bright new stellar nurseries glitter in the
void. All the bright, fast-burning suns have exploded and faded.
All the smaller main-sequence stars have bloated into dyspeptic
ruddy giants, then exhausted their fuel and collapsed. Nothing
bright remains save a scattering of dim red and white dwarf
stars.
Smaller
bodies—planets, moons, and comets—are slowly abandoning their
galaxies, shed from stars as their orbits become chaotic, then
ejecting at high speed from the galaxy itself in the wake of near
encounters with neighboring stars. Like gas molecules in the upper
atmosphere of a planet warmed by a star, the lightest leave first.
But the process is inexorable. The average number of planets per
star is falling slowly.
(About those gas
molecules: the Stasis have, after some deliberation, taken remedial
action. Water vapor is split by ultraviolet light in the upper
atmosphere, and the Earth can ill afford to lose its hydrogen. A
soletta now orbits between Earth and the necrosun, filtering out
the short-wavelength radiation, and when they periodically remelt
the planet to churn the magma, they are at pains to season their
new-made hell with a thousand cometary hydrogen carriers. But
eventually more extreme measures will be necessary.)
The sky is quiet and
deathly cold. The universe is expanding, and the wavelength of the
cosmic microwave background radiation has stretched. The
temperature of space itself is now only thousandths of a degree
above absolute zero. The ripples in the background are no longer
detectable, and the distant quasars have reddened into
invisibility. Galactic clusters that were once at the far edge of
detection are now beyond the cosmic event horizon, and though Earth
has only traveled two hundred million light-years from the Local
Group, the gulf behind it is nearly a billion light-years wide.
This is no longer a suitable epoch for Science Empires, for the
dynamic universe they were called upon to study is slipping out of
sight.