Hi All

In his magisterial future history, "Last and First Men", Olaf Stapledon imagined two phases to the cosmic process - one in which energy is available and stars form, the other in which the Universe is depleted and lies fallow. He imagines ~ 100 trillion years for the former and ~ 1000 trillion for the latter. He wrote back in 1930 before physicists had a true handle on the age of stars, so he gave the Sun a life of ~ 10 trillion years.

With the MECOs idea which decay in ~ 10^16 years according to the latest paper on them, I don't wonder if there's not some truth to the idea of Cosmic renewal. Eeriely that's about ~ 1000 times longer than the maximum lifetime of stars, just like in "Last and First Men". Perhaps the ultra-density conditions some how reset matter for a new phase of cosmic creation?

MECOs as currently envisaged decay into electromagnetic energy, so it doesn't quite reset matter into a hydrogen/helium post-Big Bang mix. But maybe that's the job of as yet unknown scalar fields that recompact space-time? Of course all this implies that intelligence doesn't make it through the cosmic cycles OR it writes itself into the Planck Scale and avoids the cosmic pyre.

Adam