It's official. The universe is dying.

[vorlon13]

Gravitational radiation is relentless, but really slow. Eventually we get snarfed up in a blackhole, and then over another really long time, we get evaporated into Hawking radiation, and the expansion of the universe and the noted above redshifting erases that.

Any atoms or particles still floating around (neglecting proton decay) will be in the form of Bose Einstein condensates and will be blurred to nonexistence.

[Pyrrho]

...

Nothing really good or really bad lasts a long time.
...

I disagree with that saying.  David Hume expressed it well, so I will simply quote him:

Admitting your position, replied PHILO, which yet is extremely doubtful, you must at the same time allow, that if pain be less frequent than pleasure, it is infinitely more violent and durable. One hour of it is often able to outweigh a day, a week, a month of our common insipid enjoyments; and how many days, weeks, and months, are passed by several in the most acute torments? Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil, but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater horror and consternation.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10, David Hume.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm

Humans, and animals generally, are much more capable of experiencing pain than pleasure.  You cannot have a continuous orgasm, but you can be in continuous agony.

[Anomalocaris]

what will happen? break apart or come together?

I had hoped you wouldn't ask. The moon goes away due to friction but I think that only happend because it gets energy from earths rotation. A bound system with a kepler potential would usually come together and crash if it slowly loses energy. I think... The virial theorem says that smaller ~ less energy. Yes, it should shrink and the planets fall into what is left of the sun.

In a loosely bound planetary system like our solar system, would the loss of energy from gravity waves cause the system to collapse faster than expansion of the universe might tear it apart?

[Anomalocaris]

Alex, out of curiosity, is there such a thing as perpetual motion in the universe?
eg: planets spinning around the sun, etc

or must THAT also come to an end at some stage by loss of energy somewhere? (any latency issues here)

Even if you ignore tidal friction, a planetary system is basically a gravitational wave emitter and would gradually lose its rotation to gravity waves which then get redshifted away.  We are however talking loooong times here, orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe.

Tidal friction is not forever.

Tidal friction retard relative angular motion.    Eventually,   if the moon revolves in the opposite direction from the planet's rotation, and the planet's rotational angular momentum exceeds the surplus orbital angular momentum of the moon, the moon will crash into the planet, ending relative angular motion and thus ending tidal friction, 
Or if the moon revolve in the same direction as the planet's rotation, the moon and the planet would slowly become completely tidal locked so that rotation of both the moon and the planet become synchronized with the period of revolution of the moon around the planet.   When that happens relative angular motion stops and the tidal bulge stays permanent at one place, and there would be no more friction.

I believe both of these would occur in relative short period of time, no more than a few times the current age of the universe.  Nothing on the time scale of loss of orbital energy through gravity wave emission of ordinary planets and stars.

[robvalue]

...

Nothing really good or really bad lasts a long time.
...

I disagree with that saying.  David Hume expressed it well, so I will simply quote him:

Admitting your position, replied PHILO, which yet is extremely doubtful, you must at the same time allow, that if pain be less frequent than pleasure, it is infinitely more violent and durable. One hour of it is often able to outweigh a day, a week, a month of our common insipid enjoyments; and how many days, weeks, and months, are passed by several in the most acute torments? Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil, but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater horror and consternation.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10, David Hume.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm

Humans, and animals generally, are much more capable of experiencing pain than pleasure.  You cannot have a continuous orgasm, but you can be in continuous agony.

This is my problem. Obviously we were not designed, but if we were, it was by a sick bastard. We seem way, way more able to experience extensive and continual levels of suffering compared to pleasure.

I've talked about this before, I feel that even when I was mentally healthy my capacity for suffering was exponentially higher than my capacity for happiness. It's not like the scale goes from -100 to +100, it's more like it goes from -1,000,000 to +100. Added to that the fact that time appears to grind to a halt when we are suffering to prolong it and whizzes by when we are happy, and you have a recipe for disaster I'd be interested to know if others feel the same.

Would I put up with one day of torture for one day of bliss? No! I wouldn't even put up with one day of torture for 100 years of bliss.

[Pyrrho]

This is my problem. Obviously we were not designed, but if we were, it was by a sick bastard. We seem way, way more able to experience extensive and continual levels of suffering compared to pleasure.

I've talked about this before, I feel that even when I was mentally healthy my capacity for suffering was exponentially higher than my capacity for happiness. It's not like the scale goes from -100 to +100, it's more like it goes from -1,000,000 to +100. Added to that the fact that time appears to grind to a halt when we are suffering to prolong it and whizzes by when we are happy, and you have a recipe for disaster I'd be interested to know if others feel the same.

Would I put up with one day of torture for one day of bliss? No! I wouldn't even put up with one day of torture for 100 years of bliss.

I would not introduce the numerical expressions you have selected, but I more or less agree with you.  Even if the range positive and negative were the same, one can exist for longer periods in the extreme negative end than at the extreme positive end.

You are right that this is not something that fits with a good god designing things.  It does, however, fit with evolution.  With life generally, much of what one does is avoid things that can kill you.  The great pain that is possible is a strong motivator.  And if you could experience continual bliss, that would tend to impede further action, which would not be conducive to a long life.  Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that people and animals are more capable of continuous pain than continuous pleasure.  But this state of affairs is not compatible with a benevolent creator.

[robvalue]

Yeah, I've thought the same thing. To survive, you need to sort things out in a hurry. It does explain the body's need to constantly tell you what "danger" you are in, and it also explains the apparent slowing down of time... giving you more of a chance to escape, as you're on high alert.

Totally supports evolution, and makes a mockery of any "good" God. I mean, why would God even need us to be aware of danger and pain unless he was planning to whack a great deal of it in for us to deal with? I'd have just not had any of it. But then, I'm not a total jack ass.

"Yahweh..."

"I'm busy!"

"Hum, Yahweh, why are you giving those people pain detectors?"

"Shut up!"

"Why would they need those? They won't do anything, will they. Unless..."

"I said shut up! Go make your own fucking happy little place with no torture. This is my play area."

[Shinagami]

Brooklyn is not expanding!

[robvalue]

Hey, you're still here Yay!

I felt like a fucking mess this morning when I wrote my first post in this thread. I've somehow pulled myself together a bit now.

[Alex K]

I had hoped you wouldn't ask. The moon goes away due to friction but I think that only happend because it gets energy from earths rotation. A bound system with a kepler potential would usually come together and crash if it slowly loses energy. I think... The virial theorem says that smaller ~ less energy. Yes, it should shrink and the planets fall into what is left of the sun.

In a loosely bound planetary system like our solar system, would the loss of energy from gravity waves cause the system to collapse faster than expansion of the universe might tear it apart?

Excellent question. What I can say with certainty is that if dark energy behaves like a cosmological constant or a constant vacuum energy density, the expansion of the universe will approach an exponential expansion once matter and radiation are so dilute as to be negligible (this is almost already the case). In that picture the universe will remain in a similar rate of expansion as we have now

Scale ~ e^Ht

but then with a forever constant hubble parameter H which would be similar to the one now. The expansion forces felt by matter in this universe will. not be growing with this scale factor but more or less remain constant like H, so they should remain as weak as they are now and therefore remain irrelevant on the scale of the solar system.

A so called big rip scenario where the forces of expansion act on shorter and shorter scales require exotic forms of dark energy beyond an ordinary cosmological constant, something which provokes a faster than exponential expansion (maybe something like e^(t^2)). But there is no evidence for that yet.