(October 3, 2014 at 6:13 pm)oukoida Wrote: I quoted Doctor Who because with our current understanding of physics, anything regarding time travel is useless speculation, and it's better left to science fiction. We don't even know if the future is infinite.
Some of the time scales for events that can logically be anticipated to occur in the future are staggeringly large.
Evaporating large blackholes (billion solar mass ones) takes a very long time. Currently, all of them in the universe are still growing, and we have to wait a VERY long time for the universe to thin out enough so that the Hawking evaporation process can even start working. And early on in that process, it is REALLY slow about dissipating a REALLY BIG blackhole.
And recall, over this EXTREMELY long period of time, the universe is still expanding very rapidly. This serves to dilute further and further all the stuff in the universe. Volumes of space enormously bigger than our universe is now might contain only a single extremely feeble photon. And the universe will continue to expand enormously past that state.
Something else that takes a very long time is for our suns' (or whatever burned out hulk it becomes) orbit around the center of our galaxy to decay due to gravitational radiation. A REALLY long time.
