If Bill & Ted wrote a book about cosmology it might be Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence – provided whatever the silly slacker duo said was technically accurate, based on modern (2018) observational astronomy and theoretical astrophysics. Author Paul M Sutter, a professor at Ohio State University, spices his writing with wicked puns and parenthetical asides as he explains the Big Bang, stellar evolution, quantum fields, general relativity, and the ultimate fate of the universe. He's delightfully meticulous in his emphasis of the unknowns in our current understanding of the cosmos. From Sutter's bottom-line summary near the end of the book:

... I'll be the first to admit that this picture is a bit hard to swallow, but we should remember that, well, the universe doesn't care what we think about the issue, and it's the (extreme) logical conclusion if we're to take our most modern theories at face value.

Or maybe we're just wrong about all of it. It's not like it hasn't happened before.

We don't know if inflation is correct. We don't know how the rules of quantum mechanics can be extended to incomprehensible timescales. We don't know if the technology of entropy can be applied to the whole entire universe, let alone over the course of an exceedingly exponential number of years.

And don't even get me started on braneworld cosmologies or string theories or whatever the kids are calling it these days. The more hypothetical the physics, the more room for creative explorations of the end state (states?) of the universe.

Our knowledge of the universe at 10¹⁰⁰ years isn't much different from our knowledge at 10^-100 seconds: woefully incomplete. In both cases it's the energies involved. In the young cosmos, the temperatures are so high and pressures so extreme that the physics of the familiar are melded together into some strange chimera that eludes understanding. In the remote future, temperatures are so low and processes so agonizingly slow that the statistical rules that govern our daily lives lose their identity. In both cases the universe is extreme, exotic, and potentially unknowable. At its core, after centuries of searching, we don't know how the universe began or how it will end—or if those are even reasonable scientific questions to ponder.

But at least there is symmetry.

_{(cf Cherished Beliefs (2000-04-19), Universal Knowns (2002-06-13), Little Book of Cosmology (2023-03-31), Little Book of Aliens (2024-01-28), ...) - ^z - 2024-04-04}