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Living in a material world under the known laws of physics makes the collapse of all civilizations inevitable.
History gives me strong priors that most such "collapses" are local and move slower than most individual human perception. By the standards of Western Civilization circa 1800, Western Civilization has already collapsed and been replaced with something comparatively grotesque, which we today call "Western Civilization." The prevalence of atheism, pornography, premarital and extramarital sex, illegitimate birth, etc. would shock most Westerners from the mid 20th century, never mind the 19th. By the standards of those days, we already live in a dystopian hellscape.
And yet if you spend much time talking to nonagenarians, you will often hear resignation to the idea that the world simply changes (though some will definitely tell you that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket). Humans are incredibly, almost comically adaptable. Just about anything can become a "baseline" experience for us, given sufficient exposure (and lack of exposure to alternatives).
Now, some of the more extreme climate eschatology, political alarmism, nuclear war worries, AI doomerism, etc. will be quick to remind that some collapses are more dramatic, sharp-edged, and/or final than others. This is surely true. But given the number and variety of collapses I can see through history, the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it is shaping up to be more of an evolution than a revolution, and sufficiently gradual that it will annoy me when I am a nonagenarian (knock on wood), but probably not kill me or even cause me very much suffering. At worst, it will inspire in me only deep disappointment.
At best, I will have alien descendants born on Mars, whose lives and lifestyles would shock and horrify me. But hey--Mars!
The end will come for humanity, eventually, too. It would be nice, I think, if we could escape that. But I do expect, to my sorrow, that I will not be alive to see how our story ends.
The universe is quite possibly infinite in size.
Infinite size with finite mass just means there is an infinite amount of nothing between any specks of interest.
The mass of the universe may be infinite. But as per the conversation below, due to the expansion of the universe, the amount of it we can ever access may be limited.
Big Crunch or Big Rip, which is it? Either there's an ending coming.
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Even if the universe is infinite in size, as long as the speed of light is finite the slice of the universe any given civilization can access is limited.
I think this is somewhat dependent upon inflation. I very much only think, because it's been a loooong time since I took relativity. Yes, with constant positive inflation, there will be regions of an infinite universe forever inaccessible (with the relative sizes being dependent upon the magnitude of the inflation), but if, say, we didn't understand some dynamic of inflation, and suppose it actually ground to a halt. If inflation went to actual zero, then I think that an entire infinite universe would be, in principle, accessible, given sufficient time.
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Yeah this is basically my take. Also the fact that doomsday predictions are always extremely common and 99% of them don’t pan out!
Remember the Population Bomb? All sorts of other doom predictions?
And ironically the panic over things often caused other problems.
Remember global cooling? When I was a kid there were some vague concerns that the Earth could enter a global cool period. It could be the weather of 1816 forever.
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And the ozone hole in 1991 that was going to give everyone in the Northern Hemisphere melanoma. Lots of scary articles, but when the hole disappeared, nobody thought that even worthy of mention.
Well that is because it hasn't yet. We'll get back to 1980's levels in about 15-20 years still.
"It confirms that 99% of ozone-depleting gases have been phased out. Projections from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) suggest the Antarctic ozone layer will recover to 1980 levels by around 2066, with recovery in the rest of the world between 2040 and 2045"
and
"A hole that opens annually in the ozone layer over Earth's southern pole was relatively small in 2024 compared to other years. Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project the ozone layer could fully recover by 2066"
It's just slow steady progress at the layer being restored a little every year is not really news beyond niche publications.
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The ozone hole is different in that the problem was real, and serious, but we fixed it. Acid rain and lead pollution are other examples of that type.
Most doomer predictions are based on problems which are either fake (like natural resource depletion) or grossly overexaggerated (like climate change).
The media doesn't report good news (and social media is not much better) so you don't get to hear the information that would allow you to distinguish between a fake problem and a fixed problem. (And occasionally a problem is both fake and fixed, like the Y2K bug).
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