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Earth's core is also heavier than it statistically deserves. Unfortunately, we're limited by the speed of light and looking at solar systems very far away. We'll always see their past, they'll always see ours.
I'm not afraid of a Predator-ish scenario, the "War of the Worlds" factor would protect us. Even if we could establish contact, contamination of each other's biosphere would be something to avoid. Of all possible meals they could encounter, I doubt humans being the healthiest.
On the other hand, imagine the aliens being tasty mushrooms. Intelligent, but at the same time, the delicious delight the galaxy was waiting for.
We'd eat them. For sure.
Anomalies are already part of the factor concerning habitable planets in the equation, so this doesn't change a thing. We are lucky for more reasons, like having a protector like Jupiter. However you turn such variables, all huge multipliers stay the same. Just fill in the parameters as you like and check the result.
In general, it's not that unlikely for stuff to be collected at la-grange points, forming trojans and later on falling back to the main planet of an orbit. It's not how our moon was formed (it was one of the theories, but doesn't fit the distribution of heavy elements), but could lead to similar moons - in simulations. Also, having more than one moon could have positive effects too.
Megafauna and megaflora depend on high oxygen levels. They wouldn't start a space program anyway. Like fish would never start experimenting with electromagnetism. Intelligent life doesn't have to be a mammal.
Right now, we are able to talk about the time after humanity's existence. We still can simulate what's going on later. We can think about later events, calculate due dates - only because time continues to exist after us. The way, we observe and define time, doesn't depend on a spectator being present.
Our understanding of the singularity in the beginning and the general direction where seemingly everything is going to in the end is key to our boss-level, if it was a game.
In contrast, we cannot theorize about anything beyond maximal entropy in a timely manner. It's after the end of time.
At the very least, I'd expect humanity to reach a degree of understanding, so that our current thoughts become funny anecdotes to them.
As for other intelligent species (warning, popular scientific theories ahead, not proven in any way):
I think it's the Drake equation (don't beat me to it), implying that there has to be more intelligent life out there. Recent discoveries of planets in other solar systems make it more and more likely, that we weren't/aren't/will not be the only ones.
And it's the Fermi paradox (again, no beating please) explaining why we won't reach each other.
As a fan of Sci-fi alien encounters, a bit of a bummer. Still, both sound reasonable to me, from our current state of knowledge.
I really hope that we will take it to the next step, up to an interplanetary species, even beyond the limits of our current math.
In the end, will humanity (or its space-offspring) be able to witness anything of all this?
Probably not, but would we be who we are if we wouldn't try it anyway?
Yes, there are bad things going to happen, but they won't affect time (locally, huge moved masses will slow it down, but time in general stays applicable). We can still theorize of things going on later. We still can apply time to simulations and models. So, time still exists, even if all of these disasters happen.
At the moment of maximal entropy, it ceases to exist. We are unable to even think about anything depending on time after this point (without ending in a paradox).
Still, this is only the most current variation of the most probable theory. There are some newer theories about dark matter worth looking at. Some could shake up common understandings again, basically a good thing.
The very end of time, a slightly positively loaded particle disc with no reactivity at all, seems to be a common denominator.
As for the Andromeda merger - don't be too worried about solar systems. As a whole, galaxies are not that dense. The night sky would be awesome to look at and the possibility of gravitational interference exists, but our solar system is far away enough from the center for an expected collision. Imagine it more like the re-arrangement of molecules in two inert gas clouds.
Again, this is just from one point of view, taken out of context. The global ecosystem is much more fragile, it will eventually be a part of a chain of events that would lead to uninhability before our sun's "don't call it supernova, it just causes the same level of devastation but is a conveniently short word".
Please excuse that I might be missing the absolutely best wording, English is my 4th language after all and vocabulary is the hardest thing not to mix up. Usually, scientific things are standardized and easier to talk about, but at the beginning and end of time, we're in its fringe territories (and my astrophysics class was at a German speaking technical university, decades ago).
This is Moon's perspective, not Earths. Moon's stabilizing qualities to our angle vanish long before its probable settlement. Earth will encounter extreme winds and most possibly become uninhabitable because of this.
Still, we're on a billions of years scale - not nearly to the end of time - the topic - and nothing to worry about now.
Don't know what you mean with your strikes, my point was that it basically has nothing to do with the topic. They're just "local" disasters, but don't affect time. Don't blame me for trying to simplify things for you by listing examples you might understand. If you want the long version - it's just the current state of science, read it up.
Ok, this was simplified, the swelling up to a red giant will have the same effects to planets in range, so the difference in wording doesn't matter. Let's use the longer wording: It will run out of fuel.
At its peak, the sun's diameter will more or less reach Earth's course (somewhere between Venus' and Mars' orbit, it's still an estimation).
And yes, at the current speed and acceleration, moon will have left a stabilizing position long before, Earth will already wobble a lot when this happens.
The great inflation gets a pass, because it's a one-time event and for now, there's no better theory around - not saying that some of the current models won't be subject to changes over time, of course they will. If the singularity happened as supposed, we'll have to accept that our perception of time does not apply to anything before.
As for disasters - Gliese 710 would be another predictable problem - or the moon slowly leaving/destabilizing earth - our sun's supernova - they will happen, but won't be the first problem humanity will encounter in a near future. Even a magnetic polar shift is going to happen at any time _geologically_ soon, meaning in 20k years, a lot more, not exactly never or maybe tomorrow.
The Brian Cox prediction is not wrong, just following another definition of "the end". Life in the known universe is likely to be consumed by black holes, but time as it's defined by physics would not yet cease to exist. There's still a lot of reactivity going on, a lot of energy around.
As long as something is going on (or has the potential to do so), it takes time to progress - it defines time by progressing.
<blockquote>That even SPACE-TIME would cease to EXIST as well???</blockquote>
Yes, this is when time in general ceases to exist. Space-time would still exist up to this moment - by definition, but it would be stripped of its effects. At this moment, space would be a flattened layer, equally slightly radiated (simplified). The definition of space becomes a more statistical one - it's practically a 2D disc.
With time goes space-time, but the dependency on space becomes a constant anyway.
It's really about the last moment the Standard Model of physics predicts for itself. Pretty morbid when I think about it. When there is nothing left to tell now apart from the moment before because they are all the same, forever - or not forever, there is no way to know, because time has gone.
Space would continue to exist, other aspects of the Standard Model could still apply, but remain perfectly balanced (powers) or are simply not applicable (thermodynamics).
We cannot tell for how long. Nobody can.
When a theory includes exceeding the speed of light (applies to all things happening universally everywhere simultaneously), it becomes a curiosity to me. I'm surely biased, but I read them like Sci-Fi. The big bang theory is the only exception I make :)
Gamma ray bursts occur all the time, somewhere. Imagine it like the scenes in movies, where a thief tries to evade the laser beams circling around the precious object. The probability for one to hit us is on an astronomical scale - making geological disasters like a super-volcano more likely.
It's possible at any time to get hit by one and it would impose a huge problem to our atmosphere, regardless of the side it hits. There are some factors playing in our hands, like extreme relative speeds and the relative flatness of the universe compared to the angles in which such bursts appear to occur.
The universe would continue to exist anyway, with or without us. Time would go on.
Maximal entropy is on a universal scale, when time actually ends. It's about the end of the universe when things like planets, suns, even elements, everything more complex than a common kind of particle had ceased to exist long before.
In the end, there still is "something", but nothing happens any more and there's no potential to make anything happen. Everything has fallen apart to an extremely thin and common particle soup. This is why it's called the "big freeze", like at 0 Kelvin, absolutely nothing happens.
We don't have to directly worry about it. If it does, it will happen in a very distant future. Maybe it doesn't happen at all, there's so much left to explore, it's only how the current understanding of physics predicts its own deconstruction.
Having reached maximal entropy once, "time" is over. Even if something started over again, it would be inherently impossible to tell the duration of nothingness in between.
Some versions of the "big rip" theory impose a certain event at the end, something that could be considered the last universal moment, happening everywhere at once - like the snap of Thanos' fingers in the movie. Simultaneously entering a different "aggregation level" would be on a comparable scale.
This is what I was referring to (it's a movie board after all ;) ).
The big freeze theory doesn't provide such a spectacle. Theoretically, an evenly distributed maximal entropy is reachable.
Personally, I'd bet on natural chaos. It takes a lot of conditions to be met for a process to fully complete in nature. There are surely effects out there, on scales we cannot yet comprehend - or never will. If even distribution was a universal thing, anti-matter would have annihilated us a long time ago.
The steady progress of time leads to some disturbing conclusions - but I'd put them in the philosophy section.
Particle physics in general digs into the basics of mass and gravity, this takes us closer to the great inflation and current models come pretty close to the moment.
Everything beyond is only based on models, where some theories are hard to prove or disprove because the early stages were very different - that's why we need such massive experiments.
Max Tegmark might be right, that such events are like phase transitions. We have no precedents or other universes to look at. At least, it doesn't look likely to happen in a Thanos snap style. From what can be observed today, something like a slow delution looks like the most probable (very) far future.
This theory was pretty popular in the 20th century and it has a beauty to it.
But at the moment, it looks like infinite expansion and de-radiation - the big freeze.
Prior:
We can't really handle infinity, it breaks our math. So we aren't good at describing situations of infinite density like the singularity. Time, as we know it, depends on mass and acceleration. This is why our models come close to the moment of the great inflation, but struggle with the very event itself. It becomes an infinite moment.
Causality dictates, that there must have been something "before", but we cannot really know and we can't put it into a timely perspective as we're missing any insights. Our main source of information, cosmic radiation, has a starting point we can't look beyond.
After:
Entropy will increase up to a point where energy levels and distances are below/beyond recognition. Technically, as long as there's some minimal mass somewhere (including energy), time exists. The last thing to observe "our" time will be some kind of minimal radiation, spread out over an indefinite area. Does it really end? Well, it approaches an ending.
Surviving the Game (1994)
"Drama" is a bit a stretch ...
"Great" even more ...
1. The King's Speech (2010) King George V
2. King Ralph (1991) Most of them
1. The Who. Who Are You? - I Am The Walrus. The Beatles
2. Baha Men. Who let the dogs out? - Rhiannon. Fleetwood Mac
3. The Clash. Should I Stay Or Should I Go? - Leave Me Alone. Michael Jackson
Death to Smoochie
When there's a (partial) 3D version and it doesn't look 70's, I'd put it into the 2010s
Otto Wanz
Hacksaw Jim Duggan