An interesting idea about life surviving in the last stages of the universe, if we assume there is to be a Big Crunch where gravity or whatever force starts to reverse the expansion of the universe and eventually pull the universe back together into a singularity point again. Restarting the Big Bang cycle probably. The Omega Point theory is the idea that highly advanced civilizations that will exist by the time the universe is contracting and starting to grow hotter will cluster around stars and black holes for energy. As the temperature of the universe increases due to being gradually compressed together, more and more energy will be available due to all that extra heat. This will lead to an exponential climb in computing power, and at this future point these civilizations will be doing their living, thinking etc. through computer power of some kind. Like super advanced AI civilizations or something like that.
The Omega Point theory says that all matter will eventually be incorporated into living beings, or made part of living processes and civilizations. The idea is that there is another sort of parallel evolutionary process where all matter is slowly working its way into being part of life, to becoming alive, under the following idea: that life is information and information cannot be destroyed. I don’t really agree with that, for example a massive asteroid could hit Earth right now and destroy all of the information and life of humanity. But I suppose if humanity were more advanced and spread out across many planets and solar systems then it could be the case that our information would be impossible to erase, well not even then since we could encounter another alien species that deliberately destroys us completely.
Anyway, information or ideas are like a copy of the real physical thing. If the thing itself is gone, the information or imprint of it as an idea can remain. I think that;s sort of the point. So future civilizations will be living in a hyper-reality like inside vast computer simulations where all information generated is stored and never lost; near the ending stages of the universe these civilizations will have access to increasing amounts of energy per energy input required to sustain and grow their simulations, which means they can expand the sims without end. So every possible thing that could ever be recalled or simulated can be simulated. This is occurring while physical matter and energy in the universe is being sqished together. Per unit of time, the universe decreases in volume by a certain amount; the corresponding increase in available radiant heat energy will become exponential. This will not only allow the civilizations alive at that time to run as many sims as they want, but to run them at higher and higher levels of computational power, meaning they can simulate more actions or events subjectively within the sims in any given amount of time… therefore time begins to increase subjectively within the sims as energy becomes near-infinite, and these civilizations start to “live forever” even as the universe around them is slowly dying a fiery heat death.
Omega Point is the point in the distant future at which everything in the universe is incporporated into the “Mind of God” so to speak, everything becomes part of life/intelligence as information. Some super advanced civilization will be feeding off of that unlimited energy as the universe is shrinking back into itself, taking all of that energy and matter into itself and using it to sustain its computational systems and to run those systems at the highest possible levels of processing power.
Then there is another similar idea for if the universe doesn’t end in a Big Crunch but instead keeps expanding forever and eventually everything drifts apart in cold blackness and entropy ends up winning. In that scenario, the idea is that civilizations will cling to whatever stars remain and will be able to keep operating their own computational systems and simulations because of how the ambient temperatures keep getting colder and colder. As the temp gets colder it becomes more efficient to run computer processing because of less heat loss. For example, the star around which a civilization exists loses energy over time and the temperature around it goes down; now the civilization is able to expend less of its stored energy to obtain the same amount of processing power as it did before using a larger amount of its stored energy. This efficiency increases as the temperatures decrease, allowing the civilization to carefully partition out its stored energy reserves over time in such a way as they never run out. The civilization is able to live forever even until the very final moments of the universe when even the last sun winks out of being.
Anyway some pretty fun ideas. Let me know what you think and if you’ve heard of these or similar ideas before.