What appeals to me about Delbert's "black holes all the way down" idea is that it doesn't require exotic physics beyond what Newton could dream up. It doesn't require white holes, or holomovements, or icosahedral spacetimes, or some wierd topography. Black holes within black holes might be considered 'fractal' I suppose. But that's as abstract as it gets. And it answers the question on all our minds: What came before the Big Bang? Well, it was a red supergiant with 6 - 15 solar masses. It's really simple.

The idea that life could survive is the only dubious part IMO. We don't have to wait a trillion years before we start having problems. In a few billion years M31 galaxy will collide with the Milky Way and might cause alot of problems. In a few hundred million years the Earth will get really hot, and become uninhabitable. If we survive that long we'll have to think seriously about moving somewhere else. Within 10 human lifetimes, well within the range of recorded history, transportation, the ability to move large volumes of goods and services will cease to exist, unless petroleum or motor vehicles themselves can be replaced. This trend will probably become readily apparent within my lifetime, 50-100 years from now. If we're lucky.

There are intermediate sources of energy, but the Sun is the ultimate source, and I don't have alot of confidence that we can tap it on industrial scales. Alternative energy technologies, especially solar technologies, tend to be expensive, low yielding, and may take more energy to manufacture than they produce in their operational lifetimes.

However the universe supported the emergence of life, so one might have at least some faith that it will continue to support it in some fashion. We'll have to adapt obviously. It's conceivable that we'll have to move closer to the sun, or move our facilities closer to the sun to take advantage of steeper temperature gradients, to generate energy more effectively for industry. Inverse Compton gamma ray lasers powered by the Sun's corona might beam energy to scintillators orbiting Earth, converting gamma particles to microwaves to relay to electric power antennas on the surface.

It's exotic and expensive and cutting edge. When simpler technologies won't suffice, the chances that even more sophisticated technologies that I barely understand working is dubious.

If we make it to Betelgeuse, or some other red supergiant, after colonizing the atmospheres of countless tens of thousands of other stars, we might not survive after all. Like salmon, we may only have the chance to 'breed and die', by which I mean sow the seeds that will influence the evolution of the new universe. Maybe we'll discover that the next universe won't support life unless we tweak things a bit. It's all very large.