Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought

Scale of the Timescales & Initial Reactions

• Many highlight how absurdly long 10^78 years is, noting it feels like “forever” and is utterly beyond human or even civilizational relevance.
• Some find it emotionally unsettling or “sad” that a finite end exists at all, even on such scales. Others dismiss it as irrelevant compared to surviving the next 10^2–10^9 years.
• Jokes abound about rescheduling meetings, mortgages, retirement, Warhammer backlogs, and a “Restaurant at the End of the Universe.”

What the New Result Claims

• The article is read as: Hawking-like radiation applies to all gravitating objects, not just black holes, giving a general upper bound on the lifetime of matter (~10^78 years).
• Previous 10^1100-year figures are clarified as proton-decay–driven lifetimes of white dwarfs, not their shining phase.
• Some discuss oversimplified popular explanations of Hawking radiation (virtual particle pairs), noting these are acknowledged simplifications.

Strong Skepticism About the Paper

• A linked critical comment on an earlier paper argues the authors misuse an approximation (a truncated heat-kernel expansion) far outside its domain of validity, generating a spurious imaginary term that drives all the mass-loss conclusions.
• A reply by the original authors is noted, but critics say it largely shifts goalposts and doesn’t fix the core problem: the formula fails in cases where exact results are known.
• Several commenters emphasize that such far-future predictions are extremely sensitive to assumptions and shouldn’t be treated as settled fact.

Cosmology, Time, and Entropy

• Discussions branch into multiverse/inflation ideas, Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, and whether time or distance “exist” after heat death.
• Entropy and the second law are debated: is entropy the arrow of time, or merely a consequence of causality? Can time “stop” when nothing changes?
• Boltzmann brains, proton/electron decay, iron stars, and heat death are referenced via popular science books, videos, and Wikipedia timelines.

Could Intelligence Ever Prevent Decay?

• Some ask if a far-future civilization could slow or halt cosmic decay; answers range from “second law is immutable” to “utterly unknown.”
• Fiction (Asimov, Baxter, Pohl) is recommended as a thinking tool, along with speculation about universe-scale computation, simulations, and moving or redesigning universes.
• Others argue humans (or recognizable descendants) almost certainly won’t exist on these timescales, questioning why it should matter to us now.