Every Star Is Going To Die

Every star you can see tonight is going to die. Most of them will be gone before the universe is a hundredth of the way through its life. The sky is not a permanent feature. It is a phase — and a short one. This film follows what happens after it: the last cloud of gas collapsing into the youngest star that will ever exist, a hundred trillion years from now. Red dwarfs burning on in an empty sky long after the last galaxy has gone dark. Matter itself coming apart. Black holes inheriting everything, then leaking away over a number with a hundred zeros in it. And then the turn, which is the reason the film exists. Almost every observer that could ever exist would exist in the dark, in the cold, with nothing left to look at. We do not. Compress the whole life of the universe into a single year and the entire age of stars — every star that has burned, every one still to be born — is over before sunrise on the first of January. We are not living at the end of anything. We are absurdly, impossibly early. The lights are still on. Go outside tonight and look up. — Timescales follow the standard picture of the stelliferous era ending around 10^14 years, proton decay (if it happens) between 10^34 and 10^40, and black hole evaporation running to 10^100 for the largest. Proton decay has never been observed; it is a prediction, and the film says so. Every frame of this animation was generated programmatically in After Effects — 14 scenes and 149 shots, built by script rather than drawn by hand. Narration is an AI-generated voice.