Beautiful artwork! This was painted for me - and took quite some time, with so much amazing detail in it - by LeSoldatMort

So here we have my original view of the far future on display - two alien children on board an intergalactic vessel, heading to a new home in another galaxy. A galaxy that is very very old...as evidenced by how much it has shrunk over the trillions of years. It looks huge, but they're actually close enough that they can easily make out the relativistic jet emanating from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's aged core. This galaxy is probably much less than 10,000 light-years across, compared with our own's roughly 100,000.

Almost all of the stars have a sickly weak red glow to them, apart from the ones near the centre, which shine a somewhat brighter red-orange or even orange-yellow; except all the colours are being blue-shifted by their movement towards the galaxy, so actually at rest the view would probably be even darker. Almost all of the stars are small, barely-glowing red and brown dwarfs, warm enough to live around if your planet is close enough to the star; but then, such close planets tend to slowly bake due to their own tidal locking at such distances. One hopes that they would surely have technology to mitigate such effects.

If this was once a spiral galaxy (perhaps our own), the spirals have long since been destroyed by collisions with the other galaxies in its Local Group, and then by repeated ejections of stars or whole star systems through countless slingshot manoeuvres over the aeons. Now, it's just a roughly circular disc, not a spiral like the Milky Way, but not a global cluster like the Magellanic Clouds either.

Welcome to the year - by our calendar - AD 136,676,321,748,725

Welcome to "The Dying Of The Light".