My understanding is any form of life requires energy. Even androids 🙂 But stars will eventually burn out and there is a concept of “heat death”. Does this mean that in some point in time there will be no more energy sources to use and whole life will cease to exist, artificial or not?
In: Physics
Yes, that’s exactly what heat death implies. Pretty much all chemical reactions rely on an “exchange” of energy; the reactants are in a higher energy state than the products, which makes the reaction thermodynamically favorable. In the process, the energy difference between the reactants and products is released into the environment as heat/raised temperature, light, or noise. Light and noise eventually become heat.
That energy that turns into heat is essentially lost; you can’t capture it and convert it into anything useful. The only thing you can do is take advantage of it as it moves from something that is hot to something that is cold; that movement of energy is “free”, as in it happens naturally. However, once that “hotspot” has cooled, you can’t get any more energy from it.
So the concept of “heat death” means that everything that can degrade (thermodynamically) has done so, creating all heat/raised temperature possible, and those “hotspots” have cooled, so that everything is the same temperature. At this point, there will be no way for any chemical reactions to proceed, so the universe becomes completely stagnant.
Yes, but after the suns have died out there will still be black holes that can be used for energy, but even those will decay. but not just that, after an even longer period of time all matter will have decayed into energy, so there will be nothing to use the energy, just the energy.
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