After a short, productive explosion of early activity, the universe has begun its long mope towards oblivion. To the extent that anything was ever important, it won't be. Time, space, energy, matter—all gone.

What is to be done?

Scientists confirmed that nothing has any meaning in a paper presented at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Honolulu on Monday, August 10. A team of researchers compared the energy in the light of over 200,000 galaxies across the cosmos, and the writing in the stars was clear: The universe has about half as much energy as it did 2 billion years ago.

The observable universe is empty space and dense packets of energy—stars, nebula, galaxies—and much more in dark, unknown particles. The laws of the universe say that all that energy will ebb toward homogeneity. Every particle in every star will burn out, and spread evenly across the breadth of space. Which should not be surprising. Lack of originality has always been considered the foremost quality of a steady state universe. "So what that means is the universe won't be hospitable for life anywhere," says John Beacom, a physicist at Ohio State University. "Not for our life in the Milky way, not anywhere else in any other galaxy. We’re clearly on this inexorable trend where they are all running out of fuel."

If death is truly possible for something that never truly lived. "We're using this metaphor of the death of the universe, I'm not entirely sure what that means," says says Leonard Finkelman, a philosopher at Linfield University in Oregon. The metaphor of universal death then, comes back to our own human narcissistic need for meaning. Besides, death implies the end of time, but time (and its partner space) define the shape of the universe. When that shape is gone, those definitions cease to exist.

Anyway, do not be so bourgeoise about it. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you. When you look into space, nothing looks back. All you see is space. And you don't even see all the space! Most of it is completely, utterly, black. Superblack. NONE MORE BLACK. That's space.

Yes, sure, it varies. Jupiter is massive and beautiful, Pluto is cold and tiny, creaking with geologic activity. But that's all on a small scale. Life? Don't talk to me about life. Absent evidence that it exists anywhere besides Earth, life here is a statistical anomaly. Insignificant. An outlier that you throw out of the dataset. Hell is other people, which is not a problem in space, because there are no other people out there.

Just the fact that you are alive now is a novelty, a signal that vanishes against the vast noise of cosmic space. You think cosmic spacetime cares whether you buy an iPad Mini or a Kindle Fire? It does not, my friend. Absurdity is born in this confrontation between your need for reason and the unreasonable silence of the universe. Camus understood astrophysics better than any of these guys.

The universe began at a point in place and time known as the Big Bang. But it exploded—the very first example of the center not holding. And now things are really falling apart.

The dynamics of how it exploded were such that everywhere you look has same distribution of stars, the same distribution of temperature, the same distribution of energy. How's that for ennui, buddy? Same shit, different galactic supercluster. "We look at the universe and we see the same temperature in the microwave background. It implies that the whole universe was once in causal contact," says Simon Driver, an astrophysicist at International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, and co-author of the study. And like the meaning your life once held, that contact was lost.

Energy from galaxies further away is like a message from the past. "Imagine that we were receiving letters from galaxies, and imagine it takes two billion years for those envelopes to arrive," says Driver. "Then imagine I open the envelope and it shows me how that galaxy felt two billion years ago." And those letters were youthful and energetic, like the notes you passed in high school. Those letters make you cringe now, when you compare their youthful energy to your own weary, cynical present.

Likewise, when compared to the light emitted from our own tired stellar neighborhood, those ancient messages from faraway stars held a clear message: We're all doomed.

That's right: Everything you know and love, the entire universe of possible things, will be gone in 100 billion years. A trillion, tops.

Oh, but you're snickering, like that's so far away, you miserable flash of pretension-to-meaning. But in just 5 billion years the sun will burn itself up, and take the inner solar system with it. "Suppose earthlings don’t annihilate each other for 5 billion years. We can probably get to other stars," says Beacom. Then humanity will have another 5 billion years to sit on the couch and watch reality television while swallowing its compulsion for self-destruction before having to move again. Because that's when the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy.

Will humanity find a new home amid the stars? No! Of course not. Human beings have never built anything that got farther than a few dozen light years, including I Love Lucy broadcasts. Even the search will be futile. According to this new study, every other galaxy in the universe will be petering out along with the Milky Way. "Eventually the universe is going to run out of stars that will supply enough energy for life," says Beacom.

Nothing to be done.

"The universe will continue to exist," says Finkelman. "It will have just entered a state of not producing any more energy." This is the way the universe ends. Not with the bang that started it. Not even with a whimper. Only silence.