How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe - Chris Lintott

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Oct 10, 2025

Dive into the mysteries of the universe's end! Explore the lifecycle of our Sun, Earth's fate, and the enigma of dark energy. Learn about cosmic expansion, the Big Crunch, and the role of entropy in shaping our universe's destiny. Chris Lintott discusses mind-bending concepts like Boltzmann brains and the potential of universes reproducing. Reflect on the philosophical implications of a bleak cosmic future as music weaves through these profound ideas. It's a journey that leaves you pondering both the universe's end and its intricate beginnings.

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INSIGHT

Sun’s Long-Term Timeline

The Sun will exhaust core hydrogen and swell into a red giant in about 5 billion years.
In ~1 billion years solar heating will strip Earth's atmosphere long before engulfment.

ANECDOTE

Oklo's Natural Nuclear Reactor

A natural nuclear reactor formed two billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon, leaving isotope signatures.
This preserves evidence that fundamental constants have not changed significantly over billions of years.

INSIGHT

Cepheids To Cosmic Expansion

Henrietta Leavitt's Cepheid period-luminosity relation allowed distance measurements to other galaxies.
Edwin Hubble used this to show galaxies recede and thus space is expanding.

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How will it all end? Predicting the far future of our Universe depends on understanding its present. This lecture starts with what seems to be a paradox in modern cosmology: that we have a model that does a fantastic job of explaining what we see, but which says 95% of the Universe is in forms (dark matter and dark energy) that we don’t understand. From there, we get a quick tour of the next 100 billion years – and speculate how the Universe’s end may hold the secrets of its beginnings.

This lecture was recorded by Chris Lintott on the 24th of September 2025 at Conway Hall, London

Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.

Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He was the founder of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, 'The Crowd and the Cosmos’. His latest book is ‘Our Accidental Universe’.

Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC's long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max. He can often be found at the helm of Oxford’s science comedy night, ‘Huh, That’s Funny’.

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/how-it-ends

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