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other friends of mine over the online VoIP service Discord. We spoke for around 70
channels such as PBS SpaceTime and Isaac Arthur, both of which cover topics of
astronomy and astrophysics, Isaac Arthur particularly focusing on it through the lens of
interstellar societies and how they would function. My friends and I all share a similar
through (realistic) sci-fi settings, and we regularly discuss such things in our free time
over voice chats, building what has amounted to a rather intensive and in-depth setting
civilization altogether. All of us were in consensus that they were possible, but we
shared different insight as to how they might draw power from a universe with dwindling
resources and energy to do so, and with such great expanses of space between objects
in the expanding universe that travel would essentially be made useless by the
I expressed the idea that societies would largely rely upon black holes once they
had become the dominant form of stellar remnant within the universe, with societies
being built in orbit of these behemoths, using megastructures known as Matrioshka
Brains which could as such run a matrix-esque simulation containing countless billions
or even trillions of individual uploaded minds in such a way that they would be able to
function within their own reality, the Matrioshka Brain being powered by harnessing the
energy of the black hole in any multitude of ways, such as tapping into the energy of its
immense rotational potential, gravitic potential from mass spiraling in its accretion disc,
or even directly tapping into the black hole through Hawking radiation.
My friends spoke more on what could be the last bastions of society within the
dying embers of the universe, such as the iron star, something we are not sure can truly
exist within our universe yet. The iron star is a stellar remnant, and its existence is
entirely dependent on the stability of the proton. At the moment, we are not entirely sure
whether or not the proton is a stable formation, or one which is unstable, although with a
half-life so immense that within the scale of the stelliferous, and even the black hole
However, if it is unstable and will eventually break down to its composite quarks
and gluons, the iron star will be impossible, and eventually all matter in our universe will
either be consumed by black holes that evaporate away from Hawking radiation, or
degrade until the only things in the universe are a sea of virtual particles and photons. If
the proton is a stable structure, however, eventually dead stellar cores such as black
dwarves, will eventually become massive balls of Iron-56 Nuclei through the processes
of quantum tunneling of light nuclei, and alpha-decay of heavy nuclei. These actions will
produce massive amounts of energy as they occur, even though they will be extremely
far between (on the order of 10^1500 years for an entire core to convert to iron),
Altogether, I found our discussion to be one that was rather fruitful and
stimulating. Astronomy is a subject that I heartily enjoy. I’ll often find myself spending
much of my free time working on projects related to sci-fi settings, or by watching videos
by channels which focus on astronomy and astrophysics, and as such it is fun to have