“So… Do Protons Die?”
I never imagined asking this question, but I had to. The logic underpinning the time travel technology in my novel Machine City 2050 depends on light. And therefore, photons, and further, protons. So, I asked are protons mortal?
The short answer is that protons are practically eternal. The Standard Model of particle physics offers them near immortality because they don’t decay, they don’t fizzle, they persist.
But the Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) quietly disagree. These models predict that protons might, possibly, eventually decay but on a scale vast beyond human, in the vicinity of a a hundred trillion trillion trillion years. That’s 10³⁴ years, or 1 with 34 zeros after it.
That’s a long time. And still, we’ve never observed a single proton decay.
But when they do die, what happens to the universe?
What is the Heat Death of the Universe?
As the universe expands, stars die, galaxies grow dark, and black holes vanish thanks to Hawking radiation. This is the approach toward heat death.
And this the kind where heat is not a fiery apocalypse but a cold void where everything, all energy, motion, life, fades into a still entropy.
The universe still exists, technically, but nothing interesting can happen. There are no gradients left to exploit, no engines left to run, bits to flip, growth, expansion, life.
And when might this ghostly hush descend? Not for a while. The timeline looks something like this:
- 10¹⁴ years: Last stars flicker out
- 10³⁴–10⁴⁰ years: Possible proton decay, black dwarf explosions
- 10⁹⁷ years: Final black holes evaporate
- 10¹⁰⁰–10¹⁰⁶ years: Heat death, maximum entropy, minimum drama
In the words of poet Percy Shelley, we’re headed not for a bang, but a whisper stretched across eons.
Could we survive the end of the universe?
Could we survive heat death? We could, perhaps, for a while.
We could extract energy from:
- Gravitational interactions
- Antimatter reactions
- Black hole radiation (Hawking-powered space heaters)
- Or go full Dyson-hibernation mode, sleeping for billions of years between thoughts to conserve energy
Physicist Freeman Dyson himself speculated that intelligent life might adapt by slowing time, living in brief computational flickers spread over trillions of years. Think of a digital monk in deep cosmic meditation.
But here’s the catch: eventually, there’s no free energy left. Not even for a single bit of computation. Even information, the very act of remembering, costs energy. Entropy wins. Everything stops.
Still, science fiction isn’t ready to lie down.
Science Fiction’s Rebellions Against Entropy
Writers have been flinging ideas into the far future like time-traveling poets.
In Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” humans ask a godlike AI how to reverse entropy. The AI keeps evolving, long after stars and matter have vanished. In the final lines, it figures it out and reboots the universe.
In Greg Egan’s Diaspora, post-humans become software, adapting to new physical laws and seeking refuge beyond standard matter.
Even Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero sends a ship racing faster and faster through time, watching the collapse and rebirth of the universe from the inside.
And then there’s the truly mind-bending stuff: creating baby universes, escaping into quantum tunnels, or converting consciousness into abstract mathematics floating free of space-time.
The End Isn’t the End, It’s a Mirror
Whether we burn out, fade away, or reinvent the universe from scratch, thinking about how the universe ends is really about thinking forward. About imagination. About limits. About whether life, not just ours, but any, can find a way to keep meaning alive when the lights go out.
In asking “Do protons die?”, I wasn’t just asking about particles. I was asking if there’s a loophole in entropy. Some kind of back door or trick. A hope that maybe it doesn’t have to happen.
But science says maybe not.
But stories? Stories say maybe yes. That’s the magic of science fiction.
And that’s worth reading, and writing, about.
Got your own end-of-the-universe hypothesis? Add it to the comments below or pitch your own guest article to The New Europa Journal.
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