"So, is there any chance of something OTHER than the heat death or the decay of all matter?"
The Big Rip, mentioned already, involves extrapolating a present trend that has already changed once in the past of the universe indefinitely into the future. It is not impossible this is wrong somehow.
"Although that also begs the question "cant get there" -- how likely is that?"
Under the inflation model, those parts of the universe can be conceived of as being already out of our light cone, and accelerating away. Unlike "parallel dimensions" or other "quantum realities" that we can imagine being physically not distant, and somehow accessible, in some sense, these realities are "merely" 10 raised to arbitrarily large powers of meters away. It seems somewhat more final to me.
On the other hand, well, don't underestimate what's already here... there's already far more information available locally than any human brain is capable of processing. We need not pine for the universes 10^1,000,000 meters away... we've got more than we can do here already.
The Big Rip, mentioned already, involves extrapolating a present trend that has already changed once in the past of the universe indefinitely into the future. It is not impossible this is wrong somehow.
"Although that also begs the question "cant get there" -- how likely is that?"
Under the inflation model, those parts of the universe can be conceived of as being already out of our light cone, and accelerating away. Unlike "parallel dimensions" or other "quantum realities" that we can imagine being physically not distant, and somehow accessible, in some sense, these realities are "merely" 10 raised to arbitrarily large powers of meters away. It seems somewhat more final to me.
On the other hand, well, don't underestimate what's already here... there's already far more information available locally than any human brain is capable of processing. We need not pine for the universes 10^1,000,000 meters away... we've got more than we can do here already.