A Trip to the Cosmological Future

Are we there yet? How many lightyears until we can take a bathroom break?

We have arrived at the bright and shiny year of 2020, counting from the birth year (+/-) of a man called Jesus (a time traveler maybe). It’s also the year of 13,820,000,000 +/- some million years, but somehow this number is not practical to use in our everyday calendars, especially the part with the uncertainty of maybe 60 billion years. Which new year would we celebrate this year? 13,820,001,021 or maybe 13,819,978,867? Let’s just sweep it under the rug, and stick to the birth of Jesus. It’s easier.

The journey begins

Since the Universe was born it has been growing and changing and traveling continuously through time.

Just a few hundred million years after the birth of the Universe, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. Stars in our galaxy have formed and some have already lived and died for many generations. The biggest and brightest O-stars burned-out quickly — after only 5–6 million years. Many generations of those kinds of stars have already lived and died. The smallest and oldest stars in our galaxy, those long-lived red dwarfs will continue burning for another lifetime of the Universe (or 10 trillion years, whichever comes first).