And then, over the next few trillion years, the cosmos slowly quiets down. Most of the gas in the elliptical galaxy coalesces into stars and burns away. Even the most long-lived stars, the plucky red dwarfs, consume all their hydrogen fuel and turn into white dwarfs, which begin to cool. And when I turn around, I see no other galaxies in the distance. The accelerating expansion of spacetime has pushed the neighboring galaxies so far away that their light can no longer reach us. The elliptical galaxy is an island of matter in an endless sea of black emptiness, and I feel very sorry for any astronomers who might still live there. They’ll never see the rest of the universe, never glimpse the traces of its early history, never detect the ancient background radiation unleashed by the Big Bang.
