Society without stars

As you might know, our Universe is expanding. In fact, the expansion is accelerating (due to dark energy). As expansion progresses, patches of the universe will not be visible anymore (they cross the cosmic horizon), because light isn't fast enough to reach us from there. In about one billion (long scale, 1 billion= $10^{12}$) years all other galaxies will be out of sight, and in 100 billion years, even stars won't be visible. (see introduction of http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.3855v2.pdf)

In such a lonely world, how human (or human-like, whatever) societies would be? I'm interested in two types of societies:

• Well developped societies, with access to ancient records about stars (photographs, stellar charts, astronomy textbooks, maybe even records of contacts with extraterrest species). Would they believe that old records are just mythology? Would they feel lonely?
• Newly created societies, without any previous proof of other stars.

In my opinion, this is not duplicated from How would technology develop differently without astronomy?, because the Solar System would be perfectly visible. Of course, I'm considering that life is still viable (maybe we have moved to another place to survive the red giant Sun)

PS: Ethan Siegel has just posted this about astronomy in the far future. While not essential to answer the question, it provides helpful backbround. And I really enjoyed it.

posted over 9 years ago

Bosoneando‭

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