Re: Brown dwarves, deep future

sigidu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

> Say we have a civilization that wants to last forever. One caveat:
> they want to live as physical beings on a planet around a star, not as
> downloads or gas clouds or such.

I'm not sure I see it as realistic that *any* biological culture
*ANYWHERE* could be expected to maintain a viewpoint for a few
thousand to a million years... let alone the much *much* longer
timescales you are trying to project out. You'd have to shut off
evolution (change within a population of organisms), for instance.

> The stars will have long since gone out, most of the
> universe will have disappeared over the event horizon.
> The surviving red dwarf will orbit a dead galaxy composed
> entirely of cold stellar remnants...
>
> Thoughts?

Yes. What a terribly depressing night sky :). but as far as the
physics goes, it seems possible. You are talking about a civilization
with outstanding abilities in astronomic engineering - I'm not sure
they would be satisfied with "harvesting" existing brown dwarfs. If
they can honestly plan on multi-trillion year timescales, they're
probably really upset at all those huge stars running through fuel
they could use for a much longer period of time... and would start
arranging to disassemble existing stars, and prevent the formation of
future large stars, just to "ration the fuel". That might make for
some interesting galactic astronomy as we look over from the next
nearest galaxy...

--
Brian Davis