If you think we have problems now, just wait a few billion years, when the accelerating expansion of the Universe triggers an energy crisis of cosmological proportions. Sounds grim, but as a new paper points out, an advanced civilization faced with doom won’t have to go gently into that good night—there may very well be a way to rage against the dying of the light.
Owing to the inexorable influence of dark energy, the space in our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. We don’t need to worry about this right now, but for those civilizations still around tens of billions of years from now, it’ll probably be a major headache. By this stage, galaxies outside of our Local Group—a conglomeration of about 54 nearby galaxies—will be moving away from us faster than their light can reach us, making them completely inobservable, and by consequence, utterly inaccessible.
With all stars beyond the Local Group residing beyond the cosmic horizon, advanced civilizations, hereafter called civs, would be thrown into a colossal energy crisis. As pioneering physicist Freeman Dyson has speculated, advanced civs would likely collect energy by wrapping stars in solar panels, a megastructure known as a Dyson sphere. Without the ability to access new stars, civs would no longer be able to sustain themselves and expand. The accelerating expansion of the Universe, therefore, would eventually present an existential threat to highly technological intelligent life.
But as University of Chicago astronomer Dan Hooper explains in his new paper (available as a pre-print on the arXiv), advanced civs, whether they be our descendants or extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs), could act proactively to deal with the situation. To combat a Universe dominated by dark energy, a civ that has graduated to Type III status on the Kardashev scale—a civ that’s harnessed the energy produced by stars throughout its galaxy—could use the energy collected by Dyson spheres to propel captured stars in the opposite direction of universal expansion. By doing, so a civ could collect as many stars as possible before it’s too late. As Hooper explains in his paper:
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