Kanook-Tlingit Nation

June 25th, 2010

I realize that some of you don’t laze around wondering about the “end-of-time” and to be
truthful neither do I, only when a random thought suddenly fires across my grey matter might I
pull up short and briefly wonder – like I said this is a rare occurrence in my day-to-day existence
wandering about on the Blue Marble. Why now is different I really don’t know, but I decided to
wander through some of the different scenario’s associated with our Earth’s and maybe our
Universe coming up short with time, that is as our scholars understand it.
Well before Abraham traveled from the valleys of southern Turkey onto Canaanite soil, a
simple man walked the earth, a philosopher from, what some say in “pagan” antiquity who was
monotheistic and moral without any assistance from the Christian, Islamic or Jewish religions.
He was the model and substance in the 20th Century for the musical theme of the movie, 2001, a
Hollywood Space Odyssey – “Thus Spake Zarathrustra” composed by the German composer
Richard Strauss. It is reported, from antiquity, that this monotheistic man went beyond the “last
turn of creation”, and foretold the destruction of the world, and its wonderful rebirth to be
inhabited by the good that will live in a paradise beyond compare.
During the last few years, many of you good folk wandering around out there have either read
or seen some visual information addressing the end-of-the-world based on the information
contained or not contained within the Mayan Calendar. Whereas interpretation of the disc’s by
archeologists with degrees hanging on their office walls that stretch from Miami, Florida to
Barrow, Alaska, inform us uninformed that our years will “zero out” on December 21 st, 2012.
This date corresponds to the end of a 394-year cycle called a “baktun”. And that a “baktun” is
part of a larger 8,000-year cycle called a “pictun”, and for some reason there is no continuation of
time shown on these ancient disc’s, prompting many scholars and non-scholars, and a few
scientists to speculate that this lack of evidence signifies the end-of-the-world. Think, for
yourself here, you visit our present day’s past and find a 12-month calendar that ends in a
December of a certain year, and you cannot located another calendar anywhere else in your
frantic search for another from a year-following – do you immediately jump to the conclusion
that the year shown, albeit a few years following your present time, do you assume that the end-
is-near? Some would!
Whatever kind of catastrophe awaits us in 2012, most of science believes that our eventual end
will come from beyond our sphere, you know an astronomical intruder that will provide what
some label a “serious threat” to the place you and I call home.
Just shy of 102-years ago around 7:15 AM local time a powerful explosion took place not far
from the “Podkamennaya” Tunguska River in the area of Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, albeit the
exact cause of the event is still under some serious debate, most believe it was the result of an “air
burst” caused by the fragmentation of a large meteoroid or comet at an altitude of 3.1 to 6.2
miles, estimates on the objects size range from ten meters to a few ten’s of meters across. Some
scientists tell us that an event such as Tunguska happens every century or so where a 35’ meteor
slams into our home with the force of a small nuclear force, and that every few thousand years or
so our Blue Marble passes through unusually thick regions in the cosmos of the debris trails of
comet, turning our yearly friendly light show of meteors into a deadly firestorm.
A little over 63-years-ago on Feb 12th, 1947, people going about
their daily business at 10:30 AM watched an incoming object moving
at approximately 31.3 thousand mph come flying out of the north at
about 41°, causing a bright flash accompanied by the sound of it
slamming into the earth a few miles from Luchegorsk about 275 miles
northeast of Vladivostok – its smoky trail around 20-miles long hung
around in the sky for hours.
As it entered the atmosphere it begin to break apart with its
fragments falling together, at an altitude of 3.5 miles a large part of it
broke up in a violent explosion, whereas before it began to breakup it original weight is estimated
at 1.9 million pounds, and the piece that exploded at around 198,000 pounds. Today if a 198,000
pound extraterrestrial object were to bump into let us say New York City finding a yellow cab
would be a little difficult to say the least, but it would solve part of their crime problem.
When you look at the possibilities or our extinction outside of the extraterrestrial element we
find a large yet diverse ways we can be done in, one of these that hasn’t occupied but a few minds
is the;
1) Deliberate misuse of “nanotechnology” - Whereas molecular “nanotechnology” will enable
the construction of bacteria size self-replicating mechanical robots that can exist on dirt or
other organic matter. Such devices could in reality consume our biosphere or destroy it by
other means such as poisoning it, burning it, or blocking out sunlight. A person, group or
 government could cause the extinction of our civilization by deliberately or accidentally
releasing some nanobots into our environment.
2) Nuclear holocaust, albeit we’re on pretty good terms with our past Cold War advisory
Russia, both the USA and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons – where
there are differing opinions on whether or not an all-out nuclear war would exterminate all
of humankind, the end of discussions relate that we’re not sure. Another side effect would
be a drastic change in our climate, whereas some predict a long-lasing nuclear winter, albeit
this scenario is also an unknown – and there could be spotty mini-nuclear hotspots due to
the development of nuclear arms outside of the superpowers, as at last count our society has
some 2,000 tons of plutonium laying around, and that ten-times as much is tied up sitting
on a nuclear weapon. Consensus among most scientists and scholars is that our race
pushed back to the Stone Age would not survive, due to our advance civilization as it
stands today being unable to provide for them in a world that has been devastated.
3) Computers/Simulation – this extinction event is based on the premise, labeled the
“Simulation argument”, whereas our society develops enormous amounts of computing
power in the near future that allows, among other things super sophisticated simulations
emulating life today or in the past, where all minds are simulated minds, and that these
minds (Matrix-movie) evolve and evolve pushing aside the minds of the real creatures
originally created – and if we move into this realm, what if the computer grid just shuts
down. Considering all options available, not so far-out of an idea.
4) Badly programmed super-intelligence – as we move toward creating a super-intelligence,
somewhere along the path our programmers at MSN make a mistake (which they have been
known to do once in awhile) and give the super-intelligence a couple of miss-commands
that turn into goals to annihilate humankind – this is assuming that somewhere along the
way our idiot leaders give this super-intelligence physical presence on our labs or weapons
factories, or access to the command-and-control of world-wide military installations.
Thereby a simple mistake, such as asking it to solve for let us say, what is the total mass of
plutonium, we now have it attached to missiles and it decided that this plutonium is bad for
us, them and makes a decision to get rid of it, and it runs amuck and does its thing.
5) Genetically engineered biological agent – There is no doubt that our society has made some
pretty impressive advances in the field of genetics, what “if” a tyrant, terrorist, or some
lunatic from Juneau created a doomsday virus, in other words an organism that combines
long-latency along with a highly –virulent and high incident of mortality, and it spreads
across the globe spreading violent death. Highly violent viruses can be spawned
 unintentionally, as show lately when Australian researches, when they created a “modified
mousepox” virus with a 100% mortality while attempting to design a contraceptive virus
for mice for use in pest control – while none of us are mice (albeit you might get an
argument for the term to apply to the members of the present sitting USA administration) it
is more than suspected than an analogous alteration would increase the mortality of the
human smallpox virus. Supporting this scenario the “mistake” was quickly published in a
scientific journal detailing the makeup of the “mistake”, giving the formula to the public in
some circles just scares the hell out of the political community as the “protectors” of the
human race. Just as nano-technology, genetically modified medicine carry’s its dangers,
and there is no guarantee the genetically modified cure will remain as it is originally
designed, mutating in another form causing the demise of large portions of our civilization.
6) Physics Disasters – there has been some speculation, albeit not in the local coffee shops
around the world, whereas some highly-evolved scientists tinkering with such things as
particle accelerators that some experiment in the future might just create a breakdown of a
meta-stable vacuum state (big-vacuum cleaner) in our part of the cosmos, thereby creating
a “true” vacuum of a lower energy density – in turn creating an expanding bubble of total
destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed-of-light, tearing
apart “all” matter as it sweeps along. And then there are some of these great minds who lay
awake at night worried that they might produce a negatively charged form of nuclear matter
(create a mini black hole) that would sink to the center of our Blue Marble and start eating
the rest of the planet. Seems impossible based on our present knowledge of physics, but
keep in mind we don’t understand “all” there is to know about physics, that is why we’re
doing these experiments.
7) Naturally occurring disease – just what “if” AIDS was as contagious as the common cold?
All across the spectrum, scientists, politicians and those who watch the news everyday
understand what a global pandemic would do to our home, and today we are subject to a
much faster spread of such a pandemic with jet travel, shipping goods from one country to
another at the drop-of-a-hat and our urban dwelling conditions as the population explodes
seemingly out-of-control – in other words we’re ripe for another “Black Death”.
8) Runaway global warming – albeit Al Gore and his thugs seemed to have marched us down
the wrong path, driven by their greed, a possible global warming scenario is not completely
out-of-the-picture – whereas the globe continues to warm at an unchecked rate – it might be
that this is a naturally occurring condition, only to be really stopped when for some reason
we slip into another Ice Age – me, I think the jury is still out on the direct related causes of
 global warming, whereas CO2 is such a small part of our atmosphere, that it might be there
is another reason some parts of our planet has experience a spurt of warming.
9) Asteroid or comet impact – now I will walk us back into the primary purpose of this piece,
albeit a category that carry’s a small risk of happening tomorrow, just as the
aforementioned, a good sized object, let us assume some 1.8 to 6.2 miles in diameter slams
into this Blue Marble, wait, records show us that there has been five and maybe well over a
dozen of “mass extinctions” caused by an extraterrestrial body breaking through our
protective atmosphere – most of you have read about the much published fact that many
believe what is known as the K/T extinction some 65-million years ago was caused by a 6.2
to 9.3 in diameter asteroid bumping into the Yucatan Peninsula.

Some of us have been outside on a clear night and watched streaks of light flash across the sky
in the blink of an eye, and we know that small objects frequently whiz through our atmosphere
and land somewhere. Our scientists know and understand that there is an “inverse relationship”
between the size of an object and the frequency that larger objects bump into our home.
Latest guesses put the statistics at asteroids with a 0.62 mile diameter striking the earth every
500,000 years – here the kicker (on average), and that large ones running around 3 miles in
diameter slam into us every ten million years or so and that the last known 6.2 mile in diameter
object to run into our planet was the one that smacked into the Yucatan Peninsula, what is known
as Chicxulub around 65-million years ago. The energy released by the impact has been
calculated to equal 100,000,000 mega-tons of TNT, which created a crater more than 110 miles in
diameter, making the Chicxulub Crater one of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth.
Some scholars argue that such an impact would have killed frogs as well as dinosaurs, yet frogs
survived the extinction event, while others state, after analyzing the core samples from
Chicxulub, that they prove that the impact event happened about 300,000 years before the mass
extinction, thereby not even being a causal factor in the extinction event.
 Over the last few years several other craters
approximately the same age as Chicxulub have
been discovered, “all” between the latitudes of
20°N and 70°N – such as the Silverpit crater a
buried sub-sea structure in the North Sea just off
the coast of the United Kingdom, albeit the
designation as a extraterrestrial crater is disputed,
whereas some maintain the crater like formation
was caused by the withdrawal of rock caused by
salt mobility. It estimated age is between 75 and 45 million years ago.
Under the assumption that it is really an impact crater, the impactor’s size is estimated at 395
feet across traveling at 44.7 thousand to 111.8 thousand mph having a mass of 2 x 10 times 9 kg,
in other words pretty big and damn fast. This size with the tremendous mass it had traveling at it
speed it would have generated a very large tsunami – so far no evidence in the surrounding area
has been found linked to a huge tsunamis, of course we’re talking a few million years ago.
Another crater during the same timeframe is the Boltysh Crater in central Ukraine in the basin
of the Tiasmyn River, a tributary of the Dnieper River. The crater is some 25-miles in diameter,
and is surrounded by an ejecta blanket of “breccia” preserved over an area of 2,510 square miles,
with an estimate that immediately after impact the ejecta area was 9,650 square miles to a depth
of 3 feet or more and some 1,960 feet deep at the crater rim.
Albeit both craters are much smaller than Chicxulub, the sequence has led many scholars to
believe that the Chicxulub impact may have been only one of many impacts during the period
noted. One other crater, albeit is
contested as being an impact crater is
the Shiva Crater located under the
waves in the Indian Ocean just west of
Mumbai. It too has an estimated age
of 65 million years. As shifting
currents more than likely have
changed its shape, whereas today it has been measured being 373 miles long and some 249 miles
wide and is believed to have been caused by an asteroid or comet some 25-miles in diameter.
As some evidence supports the fact of some serious impacts happening around the 65-million
year time frame, of which each one could possibly be an end-of-life impact, but three of them
spaced even 1,000 or more years apart would have made life-starting-over a complicated
proposition.
Recent observations of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact with Jupiter in 1994 demonstrated that
“gravitational interactions” can fragment a comet, giving support to many impacts over a period
of a few days if the comet should collide with a planet, and if the piece of rock is far enough out
in space from the planet and breaks up, one or more of the pieces might establish an orbit of their
own and impact the planet at a later time-frame. This “might” apply to the Sivan and Chicxulub
craters even though they might have been formed 300,000 apart.
Impact timeframes of millions of years are a little hard for one to grasp, whereas an impending
doom projected out a few million years will not cause one to run to their corner market to stock
up on bottle of whatever – but consider that asteroids with diameters ranging from 16’ to 33’
enter our atmosphere approximately once per year, with as much energy riding with them to
equal the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, about 33,100 pounds, Ordinarily they explode in
our upper atmosphere and vaporize. Objects averaging around 164’ in diameter slam into us once
every 50-100 years, producing the likes of Tunguska and recent calculations show there is strong
possibility of a one some 0.62 miles in diameter bumping into us in the month of March in the
year 2880, albeit the chance of this happening is rated on a scale of 0-10 at a low rating of 2 on
the Torino Scale.
Around 12,500 years ago our scientists say that our planet was going through a gradual
warming period with the ice moving slowly back towards the poles after 100,000 years of heavy
glaciations, with many square miles of the Northern Hemisphere under thick tracks of ice,
dipping down into England, New England, Great Lakes area and as far south as Olympia in the
State of Washington. In the midst of this retreat of the Ice our planet experience a 1,300 year
blast of chilly weather whereas the temperature in these regions dropped a sudden 14.4°F, this
sudden drop of temperature is classified as a mystery.
Winter returned for 1,300 years and civilization went into reverse, today some speculate with
their super-dooper computers and sheets and sheets of calculations that the planet collided with
the debris from a vast comet measuring some 31 –to- 62 miles across that had “wandered” into
our Solar System some 30,000 years ago, and then breaking up. Our orbit drug us into the debris
field which upon contact unleashed a “firestorm” that blanketed the atmosphere with ash and
dust, thereby reducing the heat and light from our friendly Sun.
The remnants of the massive comet are still around, and periodically our orbit and the orbit of
the “stuff” crisscross and we witness many of its fragments as periodic meteor showers and we
drift once again through the “Taruid Complex”.
 Albeit the huge comet broke up, there remains a portion that maintained most of the mass of the
breakup in one ball, which is known as Comet 2P/Encke, which lately made a pass through our
local system some 24 million miles from Earth on Nov 17th, 2003.

Orbit of the “Taruids” NOT 2P/Encke

Today, conservative estimates suggest that for every asteroid on a dangerous Earth-
Approaching orbit that there are hundreds more which have yet to be discovered, whereas today
we have mapped over 300 known objects on Earth-crossing orbits, with a majority of them
having the potential of causing death and destruction surpassing anything we have experienced in
our “human” history. Latest estimates, called by some scholars a rectal reach say there are at
least 100,000 objects out there we will sooner or later bump into, and some with an extreme reach
call for as many as 1,000,000.
August 13th, 1930 began as a normal day along the banks of the River Curuca in the Brazilian
Amazon region, near the Peruvian frontier. The inhabitants on the bright sun-lit morning were
going about their daily chores, when around 8:00 AM the sun became blood-red and darkness
crept across the landscape, caused by a large cloud of red dust accompanied by a fine white ash
covering the trees and plants. There then followed ear-piercing whistling sounds (three of them)
after which three huge explosions in rapid succession. Immediately after the three rapid
explosions the whole forest turned into a blazing inferno which lasted several months, causing a
dramatic decrease of population over a large region. Albeit the people along the River Curuca
survived – they believe the world was at end and their death was just around the corner.
Five days later, Father Fedele d’Alviano, an Italian Capuchin-Franciscan monk, began his
annual missionary trek into the River Curuca region and found the people still in a high-state of
extreme agitation – as when he arrived at each village they demanded that he inform them,
“What’s up Monk?”
Doing his level best he explained to them that it was “not the end of the world” but instead the
fall of a number of meteorites – following he interview countless inhabitants of the region and
forwarded his report to the Informazioni Fides: L’Obervatore Romano (Vatican Newspaper) in
1931, whereas it was subsequently published in the Daily Herald newspaper. The event was
discussed in the Journal of the International Meteor Organization (Vasilyev and Andreev) that
compared the happening to another Tunguska event.
Father d’Alviano’s report told of the inhabitant’s experiences, whereas fisherman looking up
had witnessed large balls of fire traveling across the heavens, and their impacts caused tremors
they compared to earthquakes which were felt and heard over 100s of miles – and that the Sun
stayed behind the falling rain of ash until mid-day. There is detail of the huge fires and their
length stretching into months.
Records from the San Calixto Observatory, active since 1913, which was consider one of the
best seismological centers of its day showed that there were three events recorded on that day, –
one at 12:04:27, the 2nd at 12:04:51 and the 3rd at 12:04:56 UT, which corresponds to the local
time along the River. Albeit their estimates at the observatory put the tremors at a distance of
130.5 miles distance. Which would have put the impact somewhere in Bolivia or even maybe
Peru, rather than in Brazil?
In recent years images taken by the LANDSAT satellite and from airplane radar maps
identified one-major feature to the southeast of the town of Argemiro, near the River Curuca,
which “maybe” an impact signature, which demonstrates that the impact vehicle was some 0.62
miles in diameter, and that Roberto Gorelli (an Italian astronomer) has estimated that object
weighting between 1,000 and 25,000 tons with an energy of 100,000 tons, making the event the
2nd largest event in the 20th century after Tunguska, and the records established at the San Calixto
Observatory examined by Angela Vega showed that the La Paz recordings concluded that the
signals could have been caused by surface waves of type Lg (long waves crossing granite)
indicating a surface explosion or meteorite impact.
Albeit Tunguska and the Amazonian Rain Forest incidents were local strikes and classified as
“smaller strikes” involving 164’ to 328’ size range and not globally threatening, they seem to
impact somewhere on our planet between 50 and 100 years – and if you happen to be in “one” of
those impact areas, bend over and kiss it goodbye.
On average every 100,000 years an object hundreds of feet across comes screaming out of the
sky having measured power equal to all the nuclear arsenals in the world, creating a catastrophic
event effecting an area the size of Great Britain, and if the impact is in one of our oceans a tidal
wave moving at tremendous speeds destroying low lying coastal regions, and if on land in
addition to the devastation caused by the impact creating enough dust throwing it into our fragile
atmosphere blocking out the rays of our life-giving Sun – in any case ruining your day.
One such event, that our scientists have identified is the Ries Crater in Bavaria some 15-miles
in diameter within the city of Nordlingen, whereas a 4,900 foot across asteroid hit, excavating
more than a trillion tons of material and scattering it over the northern hemisphere, somewhere
around 7.5 million years ago.
Albeit there are currently a large number of asteroids having orbits intersecting with ours
doesn’t translate that a collision is inevitable, thank goodness, our scholars tell us they range in
size from a few meters to up to 6-miles in diameter – a working group chaired by Dr David
Morrison of NASA Ames Research Center estimates that there are 2,100 such asteroids larger
than 0.62 miles, and maybe 320,000 larger than 300 feet in diameter. The 300 foot asteroids
would not cause a global incident, but it would certainly make life miserable locally when it
slammed into the area. They have concluded that an object larger than 1.2 miles in diameter
would put a large portion of our global population at a serious risk, in other words a “bunch”
would not survive. And any object over 3-miles in diameter would cause a mass-extinction on a
very large scale – but, with data since gathered from the collision of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with
Jupiter – they have lowered the size of a globally threatening body to one about 0.62 miles in
diameter.
About every 100 million years a monster passes through our atmosphere and slams into the
earth, generating global earthquakes, mile-high tidal waves, killing off all large land animals and
making life beneath the waves purely chaotic – with death soon to follow as it causes the
vaporization of trillions of tons of water or vaporized rock falling into the sea – and the land
surfaces food-chain is destroyed as the dust blocks the Sun’s rays and photosynthesis goes by the
wayside. Evidence found to date – show this happened 65-million years okay on the Yucatan
Peninsula, whereas our tiny ancestors (if you believe this sort of stuff) were the beneficiaries of
the demise of the giant lizards wandering about.
But don’t worry we have technology that keeps watch over the skies designed to give us ample
warning if a large rock is threatening our “space”, supposedly giving us sufficient time to do
something about it – question is what? Rambo and the Terminator have reached retirement age
and Bruce Willis has also hung up his gloves leaving us with Morgan Freeman to send out a
bunch of nuclear missiles to either blow the heck out of it, or give it a push one way or the other
and to lead the global prayer session when nothing works.
 And then there is the “real” beginning of the end. We have been taught in high-school science
classes that when “massive” stars eat up all their nuclear fuel – a sometimes result is created
called a “supernova” – the dying star brightens to rival an entire galaxy and it emits high-energy
particles that can destroy the ozone layer of a planet like Earth, that is if it is within 30-light
years.
Consider, some learned scholars link the demise of large North American mammals some
41,000 years ago to a supernova, and some other mini-extinction events have been proposed as
being caused by similar explosions of dying stars.
And then there is the “hypernova” albeit it very dramatic, it is also consider very rare whereas
there is a “violent” collapse of a super massive star that ejects jets of gas and high-energy
particles at pretty much the speed-of-light, and for a few split-seconds the collapsing star floods
the entire Universe in heavy-duty gamma rays.
It has been calculated that if the Earth was within 1,000 light-years of this event, and we
happen to be within the narrow-cone of high-energy radiation, we’d ceased to exist, in other
words if our luck goes sour and a hypernova happens and its beam is aimed at us, once again
bend over and kiss it goodbye.
Closer to home, and not that you and I will soon have to worry about it, we find our friendly
Sun which unlike large massive stars will die a slow death as it eats up the last of its hydrogen
and starts burning pure helium. Helium consumption leads to higher core-temperatures which
will cause the Sun to begin swelling into a Red Giant, in about 5 billion years. Computer
simulations show it expanding about 250 times, whereas it would engulf Mercury and Venus with
Mars remaining outside of its expansion, with Earth sitting in a zone of “maybe”. In other words,
Earth just might escape being eaten – which in a sense would make little difference to any of its
dead life on its surface. Where in 2008 British astronomers ran another simulation that showed
due to the Sun’s weakened gravitational pull moving outward away from the what was the center
of the Solar System – however because in addition to the Sun’s expansion the Earth would still be
within the outer atmosphere of our friend , and in this the pull of the outer layers would
eventually drag or beloved home back towards the Sun and vaporize our home in about 7.5
billion years, like I said nothing to run down to the corner grocery store to prepare for right about
now.
But our grip on life here is estimated to come to a close about 1-billion years from now, when
the Sun’s growing brightness wipes out our planet turning it into a hot-dry global desert where
dropping carbon dioxide levels will starve plants of their ability to conduct photosynthesis – and
we’d all die along with the plants.
In order for human’s to maintain their slim hold on life our future depends on some new
solutions that require our race finding a way to get off this doomed world and set up a few
colonies at another location – albeit another solution might be to capture a large enough asteroid
and use its gravitational effects to pull us out of orbit and nudge Earth further away from the Sun,
where brains who stay awake at night worrying about this scenario tell us that a continuous
asteroid passage every 6,000 years or so should keep Earth at a comfortable distance and give life
another 5-billion years here on this Blue Marble.
Some say that even life aboard a massive fleet of spaceships would beat species extinction,
which I see “if” we come to this solution we need to learn how to get-along-together better than
we do today.
The Sun will eventually lose most of its mass as it slowly morphs into a white dwarf, and our
Solar System resembles others that our Spitzer Space Telescope showed us in 2009, a white star
with dust and rocky debris drifting around it – which just may have contained at one time a planet
like Earth. Hopefully by that time some of our species would have escaped and colonized some
other part of our Galaxy, and escape the scenario of “death by cremation”.
In our concept of time, we look out and see that Stars come and go but Galaxies seem eternal,
where our Milky Way acts like it has all the time in the Universe – with its spiral arms like
cauldrons where new stars form out of gas that falls in like a fine rain from intergalactic space.
Stars like the Sun will some day die, but consider – in Orion and Taurus freshly minted stars are
switching on for the 1st time – whereas the bright fizz of a “supernova” is a sideshow, where most
stars die and unnoticed death and leave behind massive relics of fading embers.
 Since stellar lifetime is a very strong function of mass the smaller lower mass stars are very
stingy when it comes to burning up their hydrogen, thereby the lowest mass stars will eke our a
dim existence for over a “trillion years”.
Therefore, the end of the Milky Way will come every so slowly – in a stellar lockdown.
Massive stars live short lives and die in a super charged explosion – leaving behind a neutron star
or a “black hole”, neither of which emits any light. Stars like the Sun and those less massive die
as white dwarfs, slowly cooling with carbon-rich embers. Eventually more and more mass will
be trapped in compact stellar remnants or cooling white dwarfs and in Galaxies across the
Universe the twinkling lights will go out, and after tens of trillions of years the Universe will fade
to black – but as bleak (black) as it appears the end of “starlight” doesn’t mean that life must end.
A star shines by converting a “tiny” proportion of the energy locked in pure matter into
radiation – where the ultimate source of starlight is “gravitational energy”, in other words there
are many ways to convert gravitational energy into heat of radiation, so even after the stars have
all faded – enterprising civilizations could survive by harnessing the energy of “black holes”, and
new ‘artificial’ star could be created is so missed.
Some bright enterprising individual or group about 15-years-ago determined that the expansion
of the Universe was getting faster – whereby they laid out the fact of the presence of “dark
energy”, a product of pure space that has an effect “opposite” to gravity, in that it “repels” rather
then “attracting”. The made this discovery based on the observation that distant “supernova” are
much fainter than expected in a ‘decelerating’ Universe.
Think, “Dark Energy” is an embarrassment to mainstream physics, fundamental theories don’t
predict it and no one walking around today can figure out how a “pure vacuum” can have such a
bizarre property. Albeit in “some” theories dark energy is not considered a cosmological
“constant” of Einstein’s original formulation, as dark energy varies over time and space. If dark
energy grows, some theorize that it will cause the Universe to come unglued in about 20-billion
years in a crescendo called the “Big Rip” – where first galaxies, then stars, and finally atoms will
be torn apart by dark energy – nothing can survive.
Even without the “Big Rip” cosmic acceleration will steadily remove galaxies from view.
Where after a 100 billion years, most galaxies will recede faster than the speed-of-light, leaving
frozen final images on the edge of our horizon as if a boundary of a massive “black hole”.
The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will have long merged and our view of the Universe
will end at the edge of the super-galaxy – and as time moves forward familiar gravitational
structures become unglued – planet detach from their dead stars and drift through interstellar
space, stars dead or alive detach from galaxies and float about helter-skelter, eventually the
“proton” finding itself not stable will decay – the vast time taken to reach this point is to the age
of the Universe what the age of the Universe is to a “millisecond”.
As the “proton” decays the end is in sight, as everything falls apart whereas with the decay of
the proton atoms come apart, black holes evaporate – and our existence blinks out!
It was fun while it lasted!