When The Blue Shift Comes : End of Time Sci-Fi

[Recent sci-fi posts have discussed Osiris by E.J. Swift and 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.]

If humanity has spread throughout the solar system by 2312, it has spread throughout the stars and galaxies of the universe When the Blue Shift Comes, a two-novella work by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. Robert Silverberg has been writing science-fiction for more than 50 years. Zinos-Amaro is a newcomer to the field. In this addition to the Stellar Guild series, Silverberg teams with Alvaro Zinos-Amaro to produce a fantastical look at the very far future. Silverberg contributes the first of the novellas, The Song of Last Things, which he had laying on the shelf since 1987. As he explains in the introduction to the second novella The Last Mandala Sweeps by Zinos-Amaro, he had "embarked on an ambitious project...of writing a novel, or series of novels about the end of the universe." He abandoned the project but it found new life when the Stellar Guild editors approached him to participate in their series. He sent The Song of Last Things to the editors and Zinos-Amaro has completed the effort with the second novella.

Hanosz Prime is the ruler of the planet Prime in a galaxy far from our own. His tranquil life in the "1111th Encompassment of the Ninth Mandala" is disturbed when a traveler tells him of an anomaly at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. This particular black hole is devouring matter at an enormous rate. Mankind's original home planet will soon be destroyed. Now in the far reaches of time, everyone enjoys a long life. Through a rebirthing process, a person can take on any bodily shape he or she wants and most of humanity has changed beyond recognition. Only those who are on Earth, though, are unlimited in the number of rebirths they can undergo. They have become physically immortal. Hanosz decides to undergo a rebirth, hand the ruling of Prime to his reluctant brother, and visit Earth to see if he can avert the disaster.

Thanks to the discovery of hyperwave and hyperspace technology, these inhabitants of the far future have both faster-than-light communication and faster-than-light travel. And thus Hanosz is soon on Earth at the estate of Sinon Kreidge and his lovely (by Ninth Mandala standards) daughter, Kaivilda. Needless to say, the people of Earth are disturbed by the recognition that they are no longer immortal. Factions advocating both action and passivity are debating what, if anything, to do about the impending disaster. Hanosz consults Earth's Oracles; an attempt is made on his life; and he leaves Earth with a duplicate of Kaivilda in tow to try to prevent the black hole from devouring the Milky Way Galaxy. With the aid of Kaivilda and the AI's onboard his ship, he travels towards the singularity. It soon becomes apparent that the black hole, which is growing at an enormous rate, will not only devour the Milky Way but also the entire universe if something cannot be done to stop it. Parallel universes, an information-filled holographic film at the edges of space-time, causality, changes in the universal physical constants - all play a role in the concluding drama.

When the Blue Shift Comes takes place unimaginably far in the future. As the mysterious narrator states: "Between our time and theirs, the English language was forgotten in its entirety...along with all the details of our civilization right down to the mere fact that it had ever existed." The humans of that time have changed beyond recognition - physically, emotionally and mentally. The closest relationship between two beings is one of "rapport" - an almost mystical state of union. Hanosz' and Kaivilda's "newfound rapport, vibrant and irresistible, makes the universe subjectively new in a way no amount of matter and energy reshuffling could ever hope to match...This rapport includes everything that Is, connecting everything that was once apart, joining and unifying even the most disparate of forces, sensations, impressions and ideas." When confronting their own mortality, the far future denizens of Earth are not that much different from ourselves. Kaivilda reflects: "No day has been taken for granted; every dawn has been an education, replete with longing, gratitude about her continued existence, and ... uncertainty about the future."

Other Stuff

The End of Space-Time

Theories of the ultimate fate of our universe seem to be divided into three general categories: the Big Freeze (aka "heat death"), the Big Crunch (the universe collapses in upon itself when its current expansion reverses), and a Never-Ending Multiverse. How the universe ends up depends on the amount of matter it contains - specifically on whether the gravitational force from the universe's matter is enough to stop the expansion of the universe that has been in progress since the Big Bang. Physicists are still trying to get their heads around this and no one knows the answer for sure. The growing understanding of dark matter (which is 5 times more prevalent than normal matter) and the recently discovered (1998) dark energy (which increases the universe's rate of expansion) are being figured into the calculations.

Briefly:

• If the amount of matter is too small and the universe continues to expand indefinitely, then all matter and energy will reach a "heat death" with temperatures near absolute zero. Long before this, the stars would be so far apart that the night sky on any planet would be completely devoid of them. 

• If the amount of matter in the universe is too great, the expansion will halt and then be reversed. Galaxies would collapse and the night sky would be filled with millions of suns as the universe hurtled backward into the dense point that exploded into the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. 

• If, as in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the amount of matter is "just right", then the expansion of the universe would eventually come to a stop. In this case, though, there would be no reversal back into a Big Crunch. Whether expansion stops before there is too little useful energy to support life is a point to be considered.

Then there are variations within these categories. For example, in the Big Bounce, a variation of the Big Crunch, the collapse of the universe creates another another Big Bang and the process is repeated again and again...collapse...expansion...collapse...expansion... and so on.

Finally, the Never-Ending Multiverse derives from the theory of eternal inflation. In this theory, inflation, the incredibly rapid expansion of space-time that occurred immediately after the Big Bang, is a continual process with new universes being created all the time. While a given universe such as ours would suffer heat death, the Multiverse itself would never end.

These final expansions or contractions of the universe lie far in the future - more than a hundred trillion years in the future according to current theories. How about something closer to home - the Sun and the solar system and, of course, the Earth?

 

Life-cycle of the Sun; sizes are not drawn to scale. [Wikipedia]

 

Th Sun is about midway through its life cycle. In about 5 billlion years, the Sun will have grown into a "red giant". The Sun is not large enough to turn supernova when it collapses but rather it will eventually become a white dwarf star. As it expands into its red giant phase, it will make life unsustainable on Earth. About 1 billion years from now, the Earth will be so hot that its oceans will evaporate. In 4 billion years, there will be a runaway greenhouse effect that will make nearly all life on land extinct. In 7.5 billion years, Earth will be absorbed by the expanding sun. Man will have to take to the stars (or at least to the moons of the gas giants) if the species is to survive.

Physical cosmology is the branch of physics that studies, among other things, the ultimate fate of the universe. For further reading, I recommend the following Wikipedia articles, which were helpful in developing this post.

Theories About the End of the Universe
Future of an Expanding Universe
Life Phases of the Sun
Future of the Earth

Blue Shift

The Blue Shift of the book's title refers to the property of waves (e.g., light, sound) to increase in frequency (i.e., have shorter wave lengths) as the object emitting the waves approaches the observer. A red shift denotes the opposite effect as the object recedes from the observer. A common example of the shifts in frequency is the sound of a car that approaches and then passes the observer and recedes in the distance. The most scientifically important instance of the shifts is Hubble's Law, named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953).  Hubble showed that the velocity of a galaxy moving away from the Earth increases with its distance from us, implying that the universe is expanding. Hubble did this by measuring the redshift of the light coming from what at the time were called "nebulae" but what we now know as galaxies.