To be truly alone

Just when I was concerned about what's going to happen in just 100bn years, something even weirder has emerged.

After the age of stars and planets - starting in a thousand trillion years' time - the stars will have dimmed. Gone nova, neutron, or just plain browned out. And the universe will be a much less interesting place for a long, long time. (Some 10^25 years or so.) No light, little heat, less hope. No place for planets; they'll have burned, frozen, or been crushed to dust. Nothing warm, nothing wet, no life-spawning rocky forests or carbon-rich oceans. Life will have ended.

And yet - life will re-emerge and flourish for a time, in that long dark twilight, due to a statistical fluke every hundred billion years or so. And if that life evolves intelligence (which takes less than four billion years, in the only example we know of) there's only one thing for them to learn: that they are utterly alone.

Every so often in that dimly diffuse universe, two brown dwarfs - dead suns, balls of hydrogen taking their time to dim after the fusion fires go out - will pass into each others' orbits and collide. If they hit hard enough, the kinetic energy liberated will restart the fires. Hydrogen will start fusing again deep in their hearts.

(These will be incredibly rare events. But 10^25 years is a lot of time for rare events to happen.)

Amazingly, a new sun will light up the endless night. A star not too different from the sun. And the corona of dust around the two-made-one may form planets, some in a habitable zone where liquid water can exist on their surfaces.

And here's the Big Joke: There, at the other end of midnight, there'll be civilisations again.

Such events will only occur once every hundred billion years or so. But the 'degenerate age' of dead suns and frozen stars will go on for far, far longer - 10^25 years, a trillion trillion decades. Statistically, over the span of that epoch, several thousand planets, some with intelligent life on them, will be created out of the darkness, perhaps one or two per million galaxies.

And here's the weird part: they will be truly alone.

Us earthlings are lucky enough to know the universe in its first flush of youth. We can look up at a crowded sky, a vast grab-bag of galaxies ripe with possibilities. We can study them, dream about them. And - one distant day - we'll travel among them.

But the astronomers and engineers of those distant civilisations will be mere statistical flukes amid a dying universe. Their skies will be dark. The distance and rate of expansion between their dead galaxies puts everything beyond their causal horizon, and even if they found a way around the speed limit, all that's there is more dead black stuff. There's nothing around them, nothing beyond their planet and its chance-created sun.

Those people will have no ... dreams.

Their dreams won't be shattered by discovering this, because they'll never have anything to dream about. Their lives really will be for nothing. Whatever they achieve, whatever art or science or architecture they create, will all be for nothing, because there's nobody left to share it with.

They really will be alone. And there'll be nothing they can do about it. They've turned up to a party when the host has long since switched out the lights and gone to bed.

I thought having just 100bn years to explore before the rest of the universe races beyond our causal horizon was pretty depressing. But those future folk have really got it bad.

Get rid of TRIDENT? The UK really has gone mad

The new IPRR report on defence spending is the most dangerous document in Britain today.

It seems innocuous enough: a spending review mindful of the slump, talking about 'savings' in areas like the Joint Strike Fighter and Astute class subs. But I just can't believe Britain's civil servants - senior military among them, including a former NATO secretary and ex-SBS Paddy Ashdown - are actually considering abandoning Trident.

War has changed, and the ability to wage it should rightly change too. But getting rid of the one thing that lets Britain sit at the top table? It's just four submarines out of Scotland, soon to have just three tubes each that are capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles. They cost billions, but not many billions, and for decades they've meant that any maniac acquiring a nuke, from Korea to Iran, will think twice about chucking one at the UK. Keeping Trident was one of the Big Changes in New Labour that made people think it could govern effectively; well, it couldn't, but it was reasonable at the time to give them a chance.

Some of the report's other conclusions are odd too. I mean, a 'top-heavy military'? Do you know how many boats the Navy has that are actually capable of fighting? It's about 25, and a few of them are little more than dinghies! I don't know about planes, but I'd doubt the UK has a hundred fighter jets that could take off today. And as for the troops in boots - ask any squaddie about bad equipment and unhardened Land Rovers. It's obscene.

Defence is one of the few things that marks out a patch of land as a nation. Britain has lost industry; lost credibility; and with the nannying police state that's grown up under Blair and Brown, it's lost any sense of its own destiny too, individual ambition and responsibility suffocated by red tape, bossy surveillance, and an ever-expanding public sector that fosters a culture of not-my-fault and victimhood.

In an increasingly dangerous world, Trident is the one thing that might make a maniac think twice. It's the one part of defence we need more than ever, more even than during the Cold War. While it may be politically expedient to talk budget cuts and slump spending, this recession will have gone away in two years; the Kims and Ahmedinajads won't. Let's fight for our nukes.

The perfect black suit: a guide

The black suit is a basic of any man's wardrobe; I don't own any other colour. (Yes, I know a 'warm spring' complexion like mine is better suited to greys and blues, but I just don't like them.) There are plenty of good ones around off-the-peg, but good is the enemy of great. So what are the elements of the perfect black suit? Here's a guide.

1. Work out the value curve.

Unless you truly don't need to look at costs, this is where you start. Obviously the very best suits are hand-tailored, from £3000 up; my tailor once showed me a gold-threaded one he was making for a Saudi for £18,000. While that's a high price, it's nowhere near the highest value. Three times the price doesn't mean three times better looking; a truly great handmade suit might look a few percent better, and then only in the eyes of a trained pro. The perfect black suit is about value, not price.

That same tailor greatly admires a £200 suit at Marks & Spencer; his expert eye couldn't fault the cutting or draping. But a £200 suit still underperforms on the value curve, because it'll still look like a £200 suit. Nor are the big names - Armani, Boss, Brooks - on the value curve, because you're paying for the brand name. That's at least a 50% premium. A £1500 Hugo Boss is the same quality as a good off-the-peg on the High St, and you're £500+ down on the deal.

There's a plethora of small houses in France and Italy making high-quality mens' suits for export; this is where value lies. The perfect black suit, in the UK today, costs around £800-1200. This is where you should set your budget.

2. Stitched and buttoned, not fused and glued.

Next come the 'hygiene factors': checking the £800 rack really does contain proper suits rather than pale imitations. The two basics are stitching and buttoning. Examine a sleeve - you'll have to look closely - and check that a) the seams are joined together by actual threaded stitches, and b) the buttons are real go-through-a-hole fasteners, rather than decoration glued onto one side. If it's not stitched, you're being stitched up.

3. Next, decide your fabric.

The perfect black suit may be linen or wool; I go for wool since it's easier to take care of. Since the perfect black suit is something you can wear everyday, don't go fo the ultra-fine wools like Super 200; they'll wear out quickly. Super 100 and below, conversely, look a bit workaday. I go for Super 120-150. My latest suit, a nice light summer weight, is Super 130 with 5% silk woven in.

4. Check the details.

The perfect black suit is about style, not fashion. That means no one-button or four-button jackets: two is the happy medium, three if you're tall. I'm 183cm but almost always go for two buttons.

Peak or notched lapel (pointy ends to the lapels, or a straightforward W shape on its side) is up to you; my perfect black suit isn't about drawing attention to itself, so I go for notched. Peaks are a bit more look-at-me.

The 'vent' - splits at the back that let the jacket tail fold rather than flap when you're gesticulating wildly or reaching into pockets - always feature here, since the perfect black suit is versatile. (No vents is dressy but looks worse if you need to reach pockets.) A centre vent (down from the small of the back) is normal, whereas side vents - a vent pointing down to each bum cheek - looks smarter. I usually go for side vents.

Single or double breasted is again about choice; I have both. One rule here: if you've got much of a stomach, go for single. Tall and lean men can wear double breasted without problems, but I still go for single most of the time.

5. Make sure it's your size.

This is harder than it sounds. Most men think 'fit' is at least a size too big; this destroys the waist and makes you look formless. Since you'll be tailoring it later, the only thing that matters is the jacket. One rule: the edges of the jacket's shoulders - where the shoulder meets the top of the sleeve - must sit exactly on the bone of your shoulder. Everything else is moot.

However, to bridge the gap from good to great, check these hygiene factors:

- Stand sideways against a wall. If the pad of the shoulder touches the wall before your arm does, the suit is too big. Ask for a size down.

- Wear a proper shirt to the shop. You should see 1-2cm of shirt collar above the jacket collar at the back, and the jacket collar should be touching the shirt, not hanging away. And if you see a crease of excess fabric below the jacket collar, try another jacket or see the tailoring tips below.

- Check the length. The jacket's lower edge should hang level with the base of your bum, where your leg starts. That's the basic rule. If you have really short legs, go for an inch above; really long legs, go for an inch longer; but no more than that.

- Check the arms show some shirt. Sitting at a desk with arms resting on it, there should be 1-2cm of shirt cuff protruding.

- Button it up and make a fist. Too much space between suit and chest makes you look shapeless. If you can fit your fist between the buttons and your body, it's too big.

6. Don't skimp on the trousers.

The only rules here are a) trousers rest on your hips, not wrap around your navel; and b) the cuff breaks over your shoe and hangs down to the top of your heel. As long as they look symmetrical (falling straight and centred over each foot) that's all you need.

- Flat fronted works best if you are. But much of a stomach means a few pleats will help. I wear flat fronted.

- Most tailors don't like belts, but in a world of phones and Blackberries belts are too useful to do without. So make sure there are plenty of belt loops; the best ones come in pairs 5-10cm apart around the waist.

7. Last but not least: take it to a tailor.

Remember the £800-1200 it takes to get a really good suit? There's another £200 to budget for: take it to a tailor.

As long as you've got the basic fit, any tailor can do amazing things with a nip or tuck: remove ruffle at the collar, take out billow from the legs, even lengthen or shorten cuffs proportionately if you're not quite symmetrical (and nobody is.) Of all the stuff above, a tailor's what really counts; without any stake in selling you the suit, he'll tell you what's wrong and what works. Listen to him.

And that's the perfect black suit.

Deadline: 100 billion years

I had an email today from one of the authors of "The Five Ages of the Universe". The book - a pop but respected work by two physicists - divides our universe's lifetime into five 'ages' from the Big Bang era to the final cold emptiness after black holes. It was published a decade ago, and I wanted to know if any of its hypotheses had been disproven or changed.

His answer was scorchingly apocalyptic.

The big development since 1999 has been our partial understanding of dark energy: it's causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. While I knew this intellectually, I hadn't thought about what it means if - as seems to be happening - it doesn't stop.

This darkly-driven expansion is putting ever-bigger volumes of space between galaxies. And in a startlingly short span of time, that expansion will be happening faster than light.

Now two objects - such as galaxies - moving apart faster than light will be cut off from each other, forever. There is no way anything can cross the span of space between them even in principle. Our little cluster of stars, the Milky Way, is going to end up alone, as other galaxies - in all their splendour and diversity, all those stars and planets to discover and understand - move beyond our causal horizon.

And this starts happening in just a hundred billion years.

Just a hundred billion?

Is that all? Is that really, really all we've got?

I'm depressed.

Given the timescales of the book, that's only next week or so. The book projects out to 10^145 years, as near as good a definition of 'forever' as you'll find. But long, long before those cold final days, our glorious universe will splinter into a trillion islands, little stellar villages cut off from each other by the most fundamental limit of all. The bubble in which we influence reality will shrink by an unimaginable percentage.

If we don't have warpdrive or wormholes at that point, it's all over.

And here's the really scary part: as long as we're off this rock, the universe won't even look that different. It will still be a spacescape of stars and solar systems; the last suns won't flicker for several tens of trillions of years. There'll be planets, not yet formed today, thriving around distant suns, and there may be life on them.

But those races yet to evolve will never know us.

Their universes will be smaller than ours, perhaps just single galaxies of a few million stars. And they will never know - indeed, they have no way of ever knowing - that a young race called the humans, just a few hundred billion years earlier, once looked at dust - through Hubble and James Webb - that would one day become a warm, life-spawning planet.

Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?

Trying so hard to be optimistic, to believe there are no limits to knowledge, that there's an infinity of space out there to explore. And learning that one day we simply... won't be able to?

It won't matter much if you're planning on remaining earthside, of course: you'll be able to reach up and touch the sun (suitably attired) in just 7.6bn years, as it becomes a red giant. That's practically tomorrow. But a few billion years is enough time to build the kind of economies and engines to allow us to spread out across the galaxy, even if we have to do it the old-fashioned way (without warpdrive.) So our local star isn't the issue here.

The issue is... all those other suns, lost to us forever.

Whole universes pinched off into their separate realities, walled away from each other by the laws of physics. Our universe, giving us a final finger in its last flush of youth.

Less than a second into our universe's long day of life, we'll be cut off from the rest of it, forever.

I think I need a hug.

Goggle eyed at goggle boxes

I've just realised I know nothing whatsoever about TV.

I mean, I know how HD works and what Blu-Ray is, but I'm totally outside the mainstream of British TV viewers. I've got a DVD player and a boxy TV set that doesn't get a viewable signal, both bought around 2003. (Fuzzy TV is a problem known to everybody living near Canary Wharf; that building's shiny sides play havoc with TV reception, and if I look out of my balcony there's an edge of 1 Canada Square pointing directly at me.) And that's all. I'm not even sure if this TV is ready for the big analogue switch-off.

But now I spend around two evenings a week at home, I'm in the market for something that'll feed my movie hunger. Sky's leaflet looked quite good, and what's more their CRM marketing infrastructure seemed sound (unique offer code, a trick often planned but rarely executed well) which gave them points with me. £16.50 plus a free box thing - not bad. But how do I actually choose?

I have no idea what a Sky installation would involve. There's an existing dish thing stuck to the outside of my house, but I've no idea what/where it's connected; there's a normal aerial outside too. And what TV should I buy to take advantage of suddenly watchable TV if I went for it?

I know what I want: a 32-inch flatscreen that'll hang on the wall and free up some floorspace in my miniscule London living room. I want the speakers or whatever built in (I'm not an audio buff) and the Sky box or whatever built in too if possible. Also, it needs to have a grenade launcher. (OK, I lied about the grenade launcher.) But the number of options for a subscription is so confusing I'm just not going to bother; it's like mobile calling plans when they first came out.

I mean, HD or not HD? Sky or Freeview? And what 'packs' of channel options? I like news stuff and documentaries, so that's an extra few quid already; movies are surprisingly pricey too. I'm not paying £26 a month for a few films on top of a £16.50 subscription. And my mews doesn't have cable, so there's no decent internet option I can take up. I don't have a landline (no point) so getting anything above normal TV services would mean another £25 or so each month. And pretty soon I'm looking at a hundred quid a month. This value equation isn't delivering for me.

Oh well. This boxy TV is good for a few years' DVD-watching yet, even if it does take up a precious square metre of floorspace...

First whisper of extragalactic planets

We don't measure life by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. For me, the first hint of a planet calling not just a different sun, but a different galaxy home, was one such moment.

I remember when the existence of any planets outside our own solar system was seriously questioned; even intelligent astronomers fell victim to the religionist's trap of thinking we, and the little rock we live on, are somehow 'special'. We're not, of course: we're just the end product of a (continuing) process of random mutation and natural selection egged by viral vectors snipping out and inserting bits of genes here and there between species. The physics that drove dust to collect in swirls around stars until it got lumpy enough to grow by its own gravitation are the same everywhere, or at least for a very very long way beyond little Sol.

Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been discovered by their wobbles; a few have been observed directly; we're now getting to the point where earth-sized rocks, not gas giants, start to open up to our lightyears-distant probing. In not too many years we may have tools for detecting water and carbon on these rocks, rocks like Earth.

And I believe that when we finally get out there, whether by instruments or vehicles, there'll be planets in our galaxy (and those beyond it) as teeming with life as our own little Earth. Things that crawl sightless on ocean floors; things that soar in the thinnest gases; things that shuffle and scuttle and wriggle, and maybe - just maybe - things that walk and talk.

I just hope I'm around long enough for the conclusive proof that we're not alone in this universe.

Result! Quacks fleeing for the hills

Ha ha, brilliant. The chiropracters (quacks who believe manipulation of the spine can cure all ills) are running scared. It seems their libel win against Simon Singh for calling them 'bogus' (won due to Britain's absurdly generous libel laws) is now rebounding on them big-time.

As a result of a grassroots campaign, it seems chiropracters up and down the UK are taking down their 'Dr' placards and lists of ailments they claim to 'cure' - in other words, no longer making claims that can't be supported by evidence. And there's a good chance that the UK's libel laws will be changed as a result of this and other cases, too. Result!