It is sad.

But, on a flip side - somewhat tangentially, I've recently become interested in molecular biology. The strides we're making within the field is incredible.

Perhaps it isn't as sexy as astronomy, but it's far more within our grasp, and arguably has a far bigger impact on us, at least right now

Eventually, the human consciousness will move to a synthetic medium, and we will feel far less "trapped" as time will virtually cease to hold meaning.

I'm also intrigued thinking about a post-meat existence. But I think that while time will then not be measured in hours or days, we will be counting down the total energy available to us from Sol, and if it will suffice to bring us to a new star or other energy source.

There will always be an uncertain countdown.

This begs the question - is there a maximum "star cluster" size, beyond which a post-meat society on starship(s) would be unable to obtain more energy?

In essence, given some function that takes in:

- a graph of stars/blackholes (energy sources), with:

- the distances between each energy source

- the expected remaining lifetime of the source

- (optionally) the probable locations of new sources, and their expected time to maturity

and:

- a set of starships, with:

- the maximum material lifetime of the starship (e.g. of solar panels)

- the percentage of material renewal possible at each node

- the energy consumption of the starship

is there a finite longest path, that is meaningfully smaller than the universe?

And what is the probability that we will encounter a life-bearing planet on this path, which we will have to mine to oblivion to enable the renewal of our starship(s) for the survival of our own species?

There may exist extra timelike dimensions that can be a conduit for information. I hear that the ultrahyperbolic equations this leads to are difficult to comprehend.

You might take comfort in, that it also puts a dampener on interstellar wars (my assumption).