Snapshot · Modern Wisdom
To represent cosmic time on a ribbon where 1cm = 1 billion years, you would need 1.4 billion observable universes packed solid with ribbon to reach the end of the black hole era.
Where this was said
At 17:40 · chapter starts 16:18
Tim Urban, deep in research for his history-of-everything book, describes the black hole era: after the last stars die around 100 trillion years from now, only black holes remain, slowly evaporating via Hawking radiation over 10^106 years. To convey this number, he devised a ribbon analogy: if every centimetre represents a billion years and you pack 1.4 billion observable universes tightly with that ribbon, you reach the end of the black hole era. The dark era that follows is exponentially longer still — the entire black hole era doesn't even constitute the first proton of the first atom of the first letter of the first word on the first page of the first book in a library filling trillions of observable universes. Chris Williamson introduces the Boötes supervoid — a region up to a billion light-years across that is almost entirely empty — and floats the theory that advanced civilisations may be hibernating, waiting for the universe to cool so that computation becomes more efficient, which would explain the silence of the Fermi Paradox.
The black hole era lasts 10^106 years. To visualise it, Tim Urban imagined a ribbon where every centimetre equals a billion years — and calculated you'd need 1.4 billion observable universes packed solid with that ribbon just to reach the end. The dark era after that makes even that look like nothing.
The black hole era — after all stars have died and only black holes remain, slowly evaporating via Hawking radiation — lasts approximately 10 to the power of 106 years.
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