There's a wonderful entry on wikipedia which describes the future of our solar system. The story about what's going to happen to us, our world and our sun in the far, far future is a fantastic read.
Somehow it feels very comforting to me, thinking about this and the size of the universe.
That is an incredibly cool article. Totally wrecked my productivity this morning.
I was surprised by how close the end is. The circle of life of stars -- where they form, die, and are born again from the ashes -- looks to be impossible more than 1-100 trillion years from now. I'm not sure why, but that seems to be the most dangerous thing in the article. Without new stars forming, there are no new planets forming in new habitable zones, which means no new life.
I wonder if something could be done by intelligent life to avert the ultimate end. Could intelligent life theoretically artificially keep new stars forming?
This is way above my head to answer your question coherently. One way to look at it is, that the possibility of colonizing the solar system is low, maybe impossible. Without this, at some point all energy will simply evaporate into all directions if we can't reach other suns. The Great Filter is an interesting study in this regard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Somehow it feels very comforting to me, thinking about this and the size of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future