The Last Place Humanity Could Live

Here's The Last Place Humanity Could Ever Live

In the far distant future, long after the Earth is gone, here's where you'll still find humans, maybe.

NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon

By Avery Thompson

The ultimate fate of our planet is fairly well-established. A few billion years from now, our sun will grow into a red giant and swallow our planet and destroy it. But what happens after?

While the deaths of large stars typically consist of explosive supernovas ending in either dense neutron stars or black holes, smaller stars tend to die less dramatically. A medium-sized star like our own will eventually shed its outer layers, with only a dense core remaining.

That dense core is called a white dwarf, and it's capable of burning for trillions of years. Long after the last sun-like stars have winked out, billions of small white dwarfs will still be scattered throughout the galaxy. These white dwarfs could be the last refuge for light and energy in a distant, dying universe, as Kurzgesagt explains.

White dwarfs form when stars die and their remnants don't have enough mass to form neutron stars or black holes. Instead, these smaller star cores collapse into hot, dense objects balls that aren't powered by nuclear fusion like their parents, but glow dimly with the leftover heat that remains.

Space is very empty, so that excess heat has almost nowhere to go. It will take trillions of years for white dwarfs to cool and fade, and until then the stellar remnants will continue to glow dimly, providing a small amount of heat and light to anyone living nearby.

In the far distant future, if humanity is still around, it will likely only exist huddled around faintly glowing white dwarfs, as that will be the only place in the universe still potentially habitable. Humans of the future, if they still exist, would spend the entirety of their lives around such worlds, waiting for the last lights in the universe to go out.