effects of intelligence on the universe

[Metric]

The universe is currently on the order of about 10^10 years old. If things evolve as we understand them, all nuclear fusion will have ended and all stars will be dead at a few degrees Kelvin in roughly 10^17 years. (numbers coming from http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/end.html )

An interesting thought occurred to me, the other day. If human (or other) intelligence progresses past a technological singularity, and thinks it a good idea to colonize the universe, then a natural long-term plan for each star-colony is to waste as little energy as possible, so that intelligence can be preserved for as long as possible. Making maximum usage of star-power basically means that no high-energy light should be emitted out into space -- it is much better to use it for something useful and then to emit it as low-energy light (this is the idea of the Dyson Sphere), or to find some way to store it. In either case, it is wasteful for a supremely powerful intelligence to let stars simply shine.

Now, because I have to make some assumption, I'm going to assume that independently evolved technological intelligences will crop up at a rate of one per galactic supercluster over the next the next few 10^9 years (since we're entering a stage of universe development where the increasing number of sufficiently high-metalicity star systems should be making the evolution of life more and more common). Since your average galactic supercluster is something like 10^8 light-years across, one could imagine essentially the entire universe colonized by superintelligence in something like 10^10 years -- i.e. when the universe is about twice as old as it is now.

The implication is that the universe may essentially become dark at this time, due to the fact that it's illogical to waste high-energy light. I.E. a fascinating property of a universe like ours may be that for something like 99.999% of the time that stars should be shining -- they don't. Instead, you have truly massive amounts of "deep thinking" going on, for a long, long time...

The moral of the story: get your stargazing in now, while the getting is good.