Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society.

With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr. Baker-Smethurst and the Society's deputy

director, Dr. Robert Massey. This is the place where Robert and I take on even more of your questions from the supermassive mailbox,

which has been inundated by so many of them that we just had to add these extra bonus episodes in between the main ones.

Okay, so Robert, let's start with this fun question from Peter Theophilus Bevis.

They say, what will happen to all the stuff we are made of between now and the end of time?

Is it possible, likely, improbable or impossible that all the stuff the earth is made of will eventually be smashed into bits and then used in the formation of different planets?

Will the people on those planets still be finding our old

nappies, Barbie dolls, enameled baths, cut diamonds and concrete bird baths? Well, that's a sort of

fun and slightly depressing question, isn't it? The idea. I mean, this would be the ultimate

signature of alien life when you've heard space dolls on Earth that were covered.

What a thought, yeah. So, yeah, so no, no. I mean, okay, so it works at different levels this.

So you have to think back to, well, or forward to, rather, the fate of the solar system, first of all.

And probably, maybe, maybe not the Earth will get swallowed by the expanding sun. And as it swells up to become a red giant in five billion years and more in the future and even before then we'll have lost our atmosphere as it heats up so the odds of most of our junk surviving is pretty low and as you get closer to that point even if the earth isn't the surface is like it'd be covered with lava. So all of that stuff is basically going to be destroyed. If you had some of that stuff in space, it would survive differently. But even plastics don't survive particularly well because they expose to radiation. They get broken down into bits. So they're not going to do well. Concrete might. But again, I'm not sure running the clock forward billions of years, whether we have anything really that would be recognisable after so long. So in a sense, I suppose you could argue that the atoms from which this stuff is made, they would be the legacy. So if you have the outer atmosphere of the sun being dispersed in space, swallowed the earth then bits of us will be

indeed spread out among the stars and some of that might just end up in new stars and planets so

philosophically maybe just about and if you if you consider it on the very long time scale then

there are ideas about whether matter itself breaks down whether protons decay or not probably not

from what i've read, but if it happens,

it happens in 10 to the 36 years, which has the wonderful name of an undecillion of years in the

future, which I had to look up this morning to check how far away in the future it actually was.

That is amazing. And Becky, Chris Ryan, has this question on black hole mergers. Hello everyone from Australia.

I love the show and I've been reading Dr. Becky's book

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