The Legendary Shelf Life of a Twinkie

How long can a Twinkie REALLY last?

If we could step outside the universe and somehow inspect its packaging, we’d find a shelf life of something on the order of a 100 trillion years. After that, all the heat in the universe will be exhausted. Life and all energetic processes will hit their thermodynamic expiration dates. But long before that, our Sun’s nuclear fuel tank will be running on fumes. The outer layers of our star will peel off into the inner solar system, vaporizing Mercury, Venus, and most likely the Earth. No worries though. We will be long gone. All life will have perished a couple billion years earlier as the Sun grew hot enough to boil off the oceans.

But the shelf life of a typical species is around a million years. So in all likelihood humanity will never survive to see the Earth’s inglorious end. And you, as an individual organism, your shelf life is a little more than seven decades — 10 decades on the outside. So why even bother worrying about the fate of the Earth, much less the universe? Our shelf life is but a bug splat upon the windshield of an unimaginably immense cosmological road trip.

But don’t despair. The world is full of shelf lives shorter than ours. We need only go to the produce section of our local grocery store to see that.