The above-linked essay is now available on Paul Gilster’s Centauri Dreams blog, and I would like to express my thanks to Paul Gilster for posting it.
This present effort is less continuous with my previous Centauri Dreams posts, in so far as I skip ahead to the very far future, approaching the limits of cosmological eschatology, in which the structures of civilization—even the large scale structures of spacefaring civilizations—are no longer relevant because no longer extant.
What happens after the end of conditions conducive for anything that we could call civilization? Does the history and legacy of civilization come to complete and utter ruin, or does it persist in a kind of afterlife to civilization, no longer civilization itself, but a successor (what I have elsewhere called a post-civilizational institution) consistent with the memory of civilizations of the Stelliferous Era?
We all know that it is incautious to try to say anything definitive about the far future, and especially the science of the far future. Our scientific knowledge is growing so rapidly at present that it is difficult to say what will be possible in ten years or hundred years, much less in the Degenerate Era when all the stars of the Stelliferous Era have run out of hydrogen and the universe has gone dark. Nevertheless, there are emerging theoretical frameworks for thinking about the extremely distant future. As a chronometric scale for cosmology I employ the five ages of the universe formulated by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, and in this context I consider the possibility of Freeman Dyson’s “eternal intelligence” (the phrase is not due to Dyson, but the idea is).
This is a rather long essay, but I hope you’ll follow the link and head on over the Centauri Dreams, read the whole thing (don’t forget the thirty footnotes, as these have some interesting ideas also), and leave a long, detailed comment for further discussion.
