Resolves once there's a strong scientific consensus on the answer, or a consensus that we can't know the answer until it happens. In the latter case, I'll resolve with equal probability to all the options that haven't been ruled out.
Duplicate answers will be ignored, only the first to be submitted counts. Catch-all answers are ignored, I'll resolve to a more specific one.
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I don't know if people think that "Heat Death" means "Death by Heat," but in fact it means the opposite, and "Heat Death" and "Big Freeze" are the same thing.
As for "It won't, because <insert engineering scheme here," this is equivalent to belief in an immaterial soul, and in fact implies the existence of such souls. The overall structure of the universe is fully determined by physical laws and initial conditions, even if some details are indeterministic. Either way, with or without the indeterminism, nothing inside the universe can change the fate of the universe.
@DavidBolin Yeah I already pointed out the heat death/big freeze redundancy below. This market will not resolve to "heat death" under any circumstances, since "big freeze" was submitted earlier.
I thought heat death was about thermodynamic equilibrium and big freeze was about the temperature becoming too low, and they're conceptually distinct even if they mostly happen in the same possible worlds, or something.
As for engineering schemes, it seems like they couldn't change the fate of the universe if it was determined purely by laws like conservation of energy, but in some situations they could change the statistical "fate" of the universe by pushing it into states that were very improbable on a model with statistical assumptions that failed under intelligent optimization. As examples of how "nothing inside the universe can change the fate of the universe" could be false, what do you think of the paper linked below or some of the proposals here?
@StevenK Apart from the speculations about creating and using wormholes etc, I don't see anything in the paper saying that humans can affect the large-scale structure of the universe or how it ends.
There is the claim that IF the universe currently has a certain structure (which itself is not and will never be up to us), then infinite subjective experience is possible, without affecting the large-scale structure of things.
"in some situations they could change the statistical "fate" of the universe by pushing it into states that were very improbable on a model with statistical assumptions that failed under intelligent optimization."
This can work in theory if you prove that the existence of intelligence is extremely unlikely in your model. If your model predicts the existence of intelligence at some point is reasonably likely, it follows that statistically predicted outcome remains the predictable outcome even with intelligence.
@DavidBolin i.e. if you validly prove with mathematics that with such and such laws and random initial conditions, outcome X is extremely likely, outcome X will be likely even if intelligence arises, unless the arising of intelligence was extremely unlikely. The only other option is that your initial conditions were simply not random, but organized deliberately in order to prevent outcome X.
@DavidBolin This question defines the end of the universe broadly enough to include "heat death", so if an engineering scheme causes there to be infinite subjective experience under heat-death-like conditions, the engineering scheme prevented the end of the universe, unless you want to say that this subjective experience continues after the end of the universe.
@DavidBolin Obviously a full model of the universe includes life and intelligence and technology, but that doesn't mean technology can't cause the universe not to end (taking as a baseline a model that wrongly assumes these things don't have large-scale consequences, e.g. via assumptions that the large-scale distribution of matter will continue to evolve in the way that it has; my impression is a lot of claims about the far future are based on such models).
@Conflux This is the same as the big freeze, they're just different names.