That last line is enough to chill the soul with the implication… another hundred billion years of light in a Universe quadrillions of years old, while everything else has gone utterly dark. What are the odds that two shining stars in Milkomeda will cross paths to be visible to each other in that Stygian gloom? Could planets be revived to life? Or would they all be reduced to debris or swallowed up?

That’s a cosmic Darkness deeper than anything imagined by William Hope Hodgson in his “The Nightland” – a tale set on an Earth of a Sun gone dark that I’ve been reading. He wrote under the influence of Kelvin’s predictions of the Sun’s lifespan and H.G.Wells’ finale in “The Time Machine”. But similarly they have temporary revivals of the Sun as the inner planets crash into it.

Fixed the link, thanks!

Greg