41–50 of 196 posts
That's one of my favourite hints in Outer Wilds. You will see a Supernova. Not with a fancy telescope, it's visible to the naked eye, and if you watch the sky you'll see another soon enough. You can see this right at the start, and unlike the random direction of the probe launch you don't need any game lore to, if you're smart enough, put two and two together.
We're dealing with the sum total of everything, if the true nature of things is that there are a finite number of supernovas I'd be surprised. The real shock is how small the number of supernovas is and how young everything seems to be in the known universe (the age of the observed universe is estimated at maybe double digit billion years). These are tiny numbers given that we're quite possibly dealing with infinity…
Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the universe has exploded
Tens of thousands a year is one an hour!
There are so many supernovae you really could bounce too close to one and that would end your trip real quick
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it need fixing?
Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
While dumping matter into a black hole destroys the matter, it doesn’t destroy the mass. It just confines all of the mass in one place. Powering your Birch World is just a matter of using the Penrose process to extract energy from the black hole for the next few million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (about 3×10¹⁰⁴ years give or take a few). The stars will only last for about a million trillion years (10²⁰ years plus or minus a bit), so this plan extends your your lifetime by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.
Maximal extension perhaps, but not quite forever. Forever takes a lot more work.