The Void’s Finale: The End of the Universe

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Welcome to The Edge of the Void! Your booth is ready. Our waiting staff is at your beck and call. Your dining experience is one that’s been billions of years in the making.

What’s this reservation for? Dinner and a show. Your appetizer: Big Bang Spread on Rye. Your main course: Sizzling Entropy Roast. Your dessert: Dark Energy Soufflé.

And your entertainment tonight? Front-row seats to the end of the universe.

You’re probably asking yourself what half these things are. As your maître d’, I’ll give you the rundown.

Defining entropy, courtesy of Chemistrylearner.com.

This dining experience is the perfect lead-up to the end of the universe. Our appetizer begins our meal as its namesake began the universe, and I’m not talking about the rye. The big bang sent all matter and energy in the universe careening outwards from a dense, super-heated point about 13 billion years ago. It’ll be an explosion for your taste buds, assuredly.

Meanwhile, entropy continued to build as the universe spread out, making it a naturally abundant choice for our main course. Not sure what entropy is or if you might be allergic to it? Thankfully, you’d know if you were, since every chemical reaction, matter’s every change in state, and every movement in a system increases its entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder, meaning that we’re moving closer to a more chaotic universe every moment. Your show tonight will make it clear how important that is. But for now, dig in! Dessert is on its way.

Our dessert comes with a side dish: the revelation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Why is this? That’s where the dark energy in our soufflé comes in. Much like how a typical soufflé rises, our dark energy soufflé will continue to rise and expand until it reaches unfathomable proportions. But what is dark energy? Is it some sort of exotic substitution for the classic soufflé recipe?

A ring of dark energy (superimposed in blue), courtesy of NASA and ESA.

Not quite. In fact, dark energy takes up about 68% of the universe, though we know more about what it isn’t than what it is. Our best guess is it’s akin to a constant energy fluid or field that fills all empty space. More importantly, the amount of dark energy seems to be growing. Its increasing density is pushing the universe apart faster and faster.

But, with dessert finished, tonight’s show is upon you! What will you see when we draw back the curtains? Even our fine establishment doesn’t know, but astrophysicists have three theories.

The first possibility is the universe’s heat death. Remember entropy? As the universe continues to expand, there will be a point where we reach maximum entropy and all energy will become forms that can’t carry out essential processes for existence. The universe will be left a disordered husk that has no potential for anything new. While our universe began with a heated bang, this would be the chilled whimper that ends it.

A second, more exciting possibility plays on our universe’s accelerating expansion: the big rip. Dark matter will continue to push apart the universe ever faster. Soon, galactic clusters, galaxies, star systems, stars, planets, and eventually atoms will be ripped apart as the force of expansion overcomes the forces binding them together. With atoms splitting in the last millionths of a second of existence, you’ll get to see a cascading series of nuclear explosions as the epic finale.

A graph for Potential paths for the end of the universe, courtesy of NASA and GSFC.

But what about the opposite effect? The universe’s expansion could decelerate and begin contracting towards its centre. This is the big crunch and may occur as gravity overcomes dark energy’s expansive force. Our universe will get crowded as galaxies, stars, and planets begin to collide. Increasing density will lead to skyrocketing temperatures as everything packs together before condensing to a dense, super-heated point. Sound familiar? Yes, this is the inverse of the big bang, where everything began. A fitting way to bookend the history of the universe.

However the end comes to pass, I hope you enjoy the show! We’ve been waiting between 22–200 billion years for you to arrive, but your reservation is ready, the food is good, and it’s an exclusive show. I don’t have a ticket, so do me a favour and tell me how it ends. I don’t mind spoilers.

Shawn Brixi — I’m an avid fan and writer of science fiction and fantasy. From the Alien to Star Trek, I’ve always been a fan of any media taking place in space and of the science of space and stellar exploration as a whole! I even built a model of the Hubble Telescope back in Grade 8 (before some goof broke it).

It’s my hope to eventually write a great book; whether it takes place in the cosmic void or another world entirely is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I hope to entertain you all here on this blog!

Space tourism is a billionaire’s club

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Photo by spring mag.

How did we get here?

Space travel used to represent limitless possibilities. When I was a kid, one of the most common responses to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was being an astronaut. Whereas now, unless that kid is also a billionaire that is unlikely to happen.

2021 saw an uptick in “space tourism”, with billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon musk, and Richard Branson carving the way in space tourism. Each of these tycoons is creating its own space tourism-based company, so what does that mean for the rest of us?

Up-and-Coming space tourism companies funded by billionaires include:

  1. Space X - created by Elon Musk

  2. Blue Origin - predominantly funded by Jeff Bezos

  3. Virgin Galactic - Richard Branson

I think we can all agree here that space is a glittering star in a market of climate catastrophe and dull world events, something worth celebrating, whoever you are. But the emerging market of space tourism is a different beast altogether. As bad as air travel can be for the environment, space travel is much worse. And it’s one thing when it’s for a noble cause like expanding human knowledge, such as the work done by NASA and discovering new worlds. That’s enough of a worthy pursuit that it can be justified.

But space tourism is not that. It feels like glorified joyrides for the richest to partake in. Last year, Elon Musk said if the UN gave him a breakdown of how $6Bil could solve world hunger he would do it. Not enough to solve world hunger, but enough to prevent starvation from affecting 42 million people at risk of famine. So not quite the same thing, but still a big difference that could be made if he followed through with it. But he didn’t, and earlier this year he bought Twitter for $45Bil. There are so many more useful places that money could be going. The space race has become a different thing than it started.

drowning kid meme created by author.

Changing the meaning of space race

In just over 50 years the meaning of the space race has changed significantly.

Space Race in 1970: Unified efforts competing between countries for which nation would be the first to make it to space (the moon in particular).

Modern-day space race: Which billionaire will be the first to make it to space! Circa 2021, AKA the space tourism boom.

Space tourism has been described as glorified joyrides for society's richest. Since these trips into space are not substantial in their distance or time in the night sky. But I would argue that this is a whole lot of money, resources, and environmental impact happening for a joyride.

And when the funding for space tourism companies such as space x is so much more than NASA's annual budget, it paints a worrying picture for the future of space travel. It makes it harder for real change and advancements to occur in space travel when more barriers are being put up in favour of space tourism. My question is where is the place for qualified professionals and is it being filled by billionaires? How these barriers will affect the future of space travel

Space used to be a place of limitless opportunities, where everyone believed they could be an astronaut. Space travel was once a place of magic, where the possibilities were limitless. How will this boom in space tourism affect us 20 years down the line? Or a hundred?

I want a world where space remains a place full of possibilities. And not just a space occupied by the 1%. I worry about what that means for access within the realm of space travel if we continue down this line. Astronauts undergo vigorous training for a reason. And so making space into a place anyone can go to (if they can pay enough money) is a dangerous slope. Until we see how all this newfound “innovation” will play out, I will join the many Twitter users roasting the billionaire space race.

existentialism collage made by milo

Milo Ezra Kane - Milo is a writing student who longs for the cold embrace of the void. When they aren’t talking about space, they can be found playing dnd, embracing the absurd, and screaming into the void about the weight of capitalism.

You can find a launch pad of other content Milo has created on linktree. Or hop over to medium to find more of their writing.

Three Ways the Cosmos Could Drop the Hammer on Earth

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Carl Sagan once called Earth a “pale blue dot.” It’s true since, compared to the vastness of the universe, we’re truly diminutive.

As it turns out, our “pale blue dot” is also quite fragile. Countless void-borne hazards threaten life on Earth. I’m going to count us down, starting with the rarest danger.

3. The Gamma Ray Burst: The Universe’s Answer to the Death Star

Since 1991, we’ve seen about one Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) per day in galaxies far, far away. Each of those galaxies sees one approximately every 10,000 years.

A Gamma Ray Burst being shot from a black hole, illustration courtesy of NASA.

Why are they so rare? Space.com tells us that they’re the side-effects of the formation of black holes from two neutron stars collapsing into one another or when a black hole consumes another neutron star. They’ll also blind you with a burst of light more brilliant than supernovas or even hypernovas.

But that’s not what should worry you. What you do need to worry about are the dense directional lines of gamma rays they spew across the void. That’s the actual GRB.

They’re nothing to scoff at. GRBs can shear Earth’s Ozone layer, irradiate most of our ecosystems, and cause a chemical reaction in our atmosphere that would form harmful ozone at ground level to choke us. A GRB may have already hit Earth 450 million years ago (m.y.a.), potentially causing an ice age and the Ordovician Extinction Event which massacred marine life.

Thankfully, GRBs are deadlier the closer we are to their origin. We should be fine as long as no black holes form nearby.

2. Losing Earth’s Magnetic Field: Our Natural Planetary Shield

The layers of Earth’s magnetic field, courtesy of UC Regents.

Closer to home, Earth’s magnetic field is a big part of why we’re alive. With it, we get to keep our atmosphere, get an umbrella against cosmic radiation, and shelter from solar winds and flares. Losing it would be catastrophic to life on Earth. We should be thankful, especially since we get the northern and southern lights as a bonus!

The field isn’t without its hiccups. It will periodically flip its poles every 300,000–500,000 years, which can drastically weaken it. The Laschamps Excursion, a temporary flipping of the poles 42,000 years ago, reduced the field to a mere 5% of its strength and may have been responsible for numerous extinctions. Another flip may have been responsible for the End-Ediacaran Extinction 542 m.y.a.

Every shield has its limits. According to the European Space Agency, our magnetic field has weakened approximately 9% over the last two centuries. Even then, let’s not forget a solar flare in 1989 was strong enough to knock out power in Québec, Canada with our shields still up.

1. Asteroids: More Than What Killed the Dinosaurs

Here we are. The literal “big one.” This is the astronomical fear that spawned not one, but two movies in 1998: Armageddon and Deep Impact. It’s natural to be afraid, especially since there are so many tracked—and untracked—near-earth objects: over 1350 known threats as of 2022.

Earth is used to invasive space rocks raining down onto it. Theia, the biggest known Earth impact, ejected enough molten material from earth to form the Moon.

But the best-known impact is the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 m.y.a. A 13-kilometre-wide rock slammed into us at 72,500 km/h, kicking up trillions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, halting all photosynthesis, and wiping out 80% of life.

Asteroid impacts aren’t always bad, though. A study on Yarrabubba’s crater tells us its impact 2.29 billion years ago through an ice sheet several kilometres thick may have vaulted trillions of tons of water into the atmosphere. It may have given us the greenhouse effect that shaped the atmosphere we know today.

Thankfully, our biggest known threat, Asteroid 1950 DA, is only 1.1km across and has only a one-in-three-hundred chance of hitting us in the year 2880. Mark your calendars!

So, is it the end of the world as we know it?

Our “pale blue dot” is truly vulnerable. Thankfully, probability says all these Earth-shattering things will likely happen anywhere but Earth. At the very least, if we have to live in a real world with real threats, we don’t have to worry as much about fiction’s most popular space-borne threat: alien invasions.    

 Or do we?

Shawn Brixi — I’m an avid fan and writer of science fiction and fantasy. From the Alien to Star Trek, I’ve always been a fan of any media taking place in space and of the science of space and stellar exploration as a whole! I even built a model of the Hubble Telescope back in Grade 8 (before some goof broke it).

It’s my hope to eventually write a great book; whether it takes place in the cosmic void or another world entirely is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I hope to entertain you all here on this blog!

World-building in Space: Filling in Those Parsecs

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Space is very big and very empty… but it doesn’t have to be. What makes space so interesting is how it’s so large and so full of possibility. Our fertile minds have been populating the stars with people and places for as long as we’ve ever thought to turn our heads skyward. But it’s been up to writers like you to make those galaxies a place you want to book your next science expedition to.

Worldbuilding in space fiction is not easy. According to NASA, Alpha Centauri—our closest celestial neighbour—is just over 4 light years away. So, the first thing you need to do when you begin worldbuilding is figuring out how your wagon-train-to-the-stars is going to get there.

The warp core of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D, courtesy of Paramount Domestic Television.

Space fiction has no shortage of forms of locomotion. Star Trek has warp speed. Stargate has ancient rings that create wormholes between one another. Battlestar Galactica has FTL Drives that jump their ships from one point in space to another.

Regardless of how, when creating a world that spans the stars, traversal is key. Otherwise, no one is ever going to cross the void to meet each other. After that, you can build the appropriate level of technology in the rest of your futuristic world to complement it.

Next, with your fancy “space wheels” to get around, you’ll ask: why do you get around? Are we going out there just to chart nebulae and play ping-pong with comets?

Not quite. To make this universe compelling, you need to recall a natural—ironically—human instinct: socialization. This is when you need to start populating worlds with all those quirky—sometimes gross, sometimes-oddly-attractive—aliens.

There are plenty of takes on aliens and you want to tailor them to the sub-genre of space fiction you want to write. Are you looking to write an uplifting vision of the future? Are you looking to write how the horror space can never be truly comprehended? You need to carefully consider how your aliens reflect this.

Executor Pallin, a member of Turian Law enforcement in Mass Effect, courtesy of Bioware.

Mass Effect does a great job of this by introducing us to a whole galactic community, with the central idea of the game being to pull a diverse set of races together to combat an existential threat. Most space fiction tends to develop their aliens by fixating on a particular characteristic and building their culture around that, and Mass Effect is no exception.

The Turians are a civilization built on the concept of “public service first,” resulting in a heavy military focus. Meanwhile, the Asari are a race blessed with the strongest biotic powers and have a strong spiritual side launching off that. These focal points help define the races more clearly and help us relate them to humanity in some way. They also help us develop their home worlds, social systems, cuisines, and religions.

At the same time, there’s something to be said for the terrifying and unknowable alien. The Xenomorphs in Alien work into their sci-fi-horror genre because we don’t even know what they look like or what they’re capable of for most of the film. In this genre, less is sometimes better.

Of course, for your galaxy-spanning world to live and breathe, you need to tie all of these things together. Connection is key. All the parts of this massive, galaxy-spanning world must influence each other in some way to be compelling.

Think about these examples:

A battle between two Starfleet Vessels and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

  • How do the Klingons interact with the Federation in Star Trek? Largely through war, given the Klingons’ volatile nature and the Federation’s steadfastness.

  • How do scientific organizations interact with a newly discovered planet? They feel the need to push too far on a strange world that someone put up a “do not walk on the deadly space grass” sign that no one could understand.

  • Will someone look at the green-skinned-space-babe and say in Captain Kirk’s stilted voice, “I’d tap that,” to breach the question of how interspecies mingling works.

Well… maybe not that last one necessarily.

If you connect these distant worlds an­­d fill them with interesting people and places that interact in intriguing, funny, or dramatic ways, you’ll want to be boldly going there. And once you want to go there, your audience will want to follow you there too.

Shawn Brixi — I’m an avid fan and writer of science fiction and fantasy. From the Alien to Star Trek, I’ve always been a fan of any media taking place in space and of the science of space and stellar exploration as a whole! I even built a model of the Hubble Telescope back in Grade 8 (before some goof broke it).

It’s my hope to eventually write a great book; whether it takes place in the cosmic void or another world entirely is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I hope to entertain you all here on this blog!