# What will the universe be like in a googolplex years time?

It will be cold and dark in 10^(10^100) years.

What else can be said of the state of things in the far distant future? Will everything have fallen into supermassive black holes and then radiated back into space so there is no matter left?

Will the universe revert to an exotic state as it was in primordial times, or will it slow and stay unchanged indefinitely? What kind of structure will it have?

• Googolplex, unless you mean the headquarters of Google. – James K Oct 28 '17 at 19:56
• Maybe things will randomly appear in Quantum resurrection. – Max Oct 28 '17 at 20:36
• A googol orders of magnitude is an absolutely silly large number. Orders of magnitude stack up really fast. The universe is some 13 orders of magnitudes in age. In 90 billion years it will be 14. 900 billion years after that, 15. 20 orders or 30 orders of magnitude are enormous. Millions or tens of millions of billions of times longer than the age of the universe so far. 8 orders of magnitude is the difference between a second and 3 years. A googol orders of magnitude is ludicrous. But it might work for the decay of supermassive black holes as noted in the answer. – userLTK Oct 29 '17 at 10:14
• The Cubs will have won a 2nd World Series, the new Apple iCommunicator will be selling like crazy, and Microsoft will have just released their 154,392,684th bug patch for Windows 10. – jmh Oct 30 '17 at 19:14

That is nearly long enough to reach heat-death, which is estimated as about $$10^{10^{120}}$$. What that means is rather speculative, since it depends on various events that we have never observed, such as the spontaneous formation of black holes by quantum tunnelling. Such events are utterly rare, but are predicted to occur at very long timescales.

Any matter, will have at some time over a googolplex years quantum tunnelled into having enough mass to collapse as a black hole. So no matter will exist

Any black hole will have evaporated in Hawking radiation. So no black holes exist.

Redshift will reduce the energy of photons to the point where their wavelengths are comparable to the scale of the universe.

Nothing is happening in the universe.

Now there is a: immovable object/unstoppable force paradox here, for in a universe that is spatially big enough, there are pockets of order among the chaos of heat death.

• Well, technically it's not close at all to the heat death. It'd only be a googol-th of a googol-th of a googol-th of a googol-th... and so on, of the wait. The heat death, as you gave above, is $10^{\text{100 nines, followed by 20 zeroes}}$ times larger than a googolplex. This is because $\frac{10^{10^a}}{10^{10^b}}$ gives an exponent with $a-b$ nines, followed by $b$ zeroes (e.g. $\frac{10^{10^7}}{10^{10^3}} = 10^{9999000}$). At least, that's the observation I've made using a calculator. – Sir Cumference Oct 29 '17 at 3:25
• There are quite big error bars on that "120" – James K Oct 29 '17 at 7:15
• Fair enough, although it is mind boggling to think our best estimate is just so huge... – Sir Cumference Oct 29 '17 at 15:03