Just an amateur opinion: If we think of science as a beliefsystem (a system to arrive at a close approximation of truth), it is much more adaptive than any other explanatory system. I think for that reason alone it will ‘win’ in the long run, but emotional systems will carry on/blossom in some form or another as societal breakdowns occurs, or if Science incentives gets compromised by ideology/money, thereby resulting in less trust.

If we look at what science already know, some Physicists, (carrol etc) believe we already have an ‘engineering corpus’ of everything we see on a daily basis, but as soon as we look at the edges of non-human scales/focus there’s a lot to find yet.

Even if we ever find a theory of everything and know all the primary forces, we still need to learn all the ways these forces can be combined, and we cant readily predict ‘interesting phenomenons’ down the line from an algorithm, so exploring will continue in our current reductionist exploration, but will perhaps pivot to a more holistic exploration. Steven Wolframs ‘ruliad’ is supposed to contain all possible combinations of everything and all their derivations (forgot the def. ;) ), and he talks about theoretical science realms that we will have a hard time even seeing/understanding. Some argue that the primary forces also varies across the universe. Chaos theory argue that it will take endless energy to collect endless dynamic data - even if we compress it into math/axioms etc. All exploration of chaotic space will take time to compute. Also, If we want to utilize our knowledge we need to either store/retrieve, or compute based on data/algorithms. In Billions of years this use/pursuit of knowledge will cost a lot of energy.

There’s a lot to think about in such a question, but it’s interesting how we can send shit to other planets, but we completely lack the knowledge/technology to manage a large ecosystem, or organize our self in a way where we don’t harm each other or our habitat. The first is very easy compared dynamic systems. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what our dynamic systems can do for us if we learn to tame them.

Anyway, in the long now, thousands of years, I think the system of Science will evolve, improve, but we will not reach 42. There will always (billions of years) be combinations of forces that we cant predict easily and some we have to explore/create to discover/enjoy.

It got a bit messy, sorry…