Timeline of the Far Future
I have often thought about what it would be like in the far, far future.  After the age of baryons comes to an end, we would also see an end to <i>structure</i>: you cannot build anything out of leptons larger than a positron and electron orbiting one another, delicately, at a distance.  No chains, no three-way bonds or glorious carbon four-way bonds, just a froth of electrons, positrons, and variously-flavred neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.<p>If the Big Rip were to happen, one might imagine civilizations forming around the event horizons of black holes (&quot;dead stars still burn&quot;) fizzing out Hawking radiation, getting ever closer to avoid the Big Rip, a controlled fall designed to balance against the stretching of space while harvesting what you could get from Hawking radiation.  I&#x27;ve seen projections, sketches, really, of computation that involved states only changing as energy became free, and so these civilizations would be almost frozen in amber to outsiders but ticking along from their vantage point, up until the black holes&#x27; &quot;temperature&quot; drops too far below the ambient themal bath.  The decay gets faster and faster as the curvature of the event horizon increases, so that civilization&#x27;s end would have an incredible speedup right before the black hole itself evaporated.