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A Snapshot of the Universe 3 Trillion Years From Now
ultracool wrote with a link to a Science Daily article that requires that you think long term. Really long term. Case Western Reserve University physicists are theorizing that trillions of years from now the universe will become 'static'. Essentially, the information that we use to gauge our Galaxy's position in the universe will have moved beyond the 'visible horizon. "What remains will be 'an island universe' made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void ... The researchers followed up that discussion with one tracking early elements like helium and deuterium produced in the Big Bang. They predict systems that allow us to detect primordial deuterium will be dispersed throughout the universe to become undetectable, while helium in concentrations of approximately 25 percent at the Big Bang will become indiscernible as stars will produce far more helium in the course of their lives to cloud the origins of the early universe."
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
Because no one ever prayed up a better microchip. Pointless meditations on the true nature of atoms and light however.... Well, not so empty a pursuit as religion in retrospect. Your brand of incredulity is the wellspring of poverty.
I don't know. It might be that the Hubble constant and short term climate processes have nothing to do with each other and that trying to make some inference between them is just asinine.
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
Because all religions that wield power abuse it.
Religions that have power are no longer religions - they are political ideologies. And politics are inherently corrupt and corrupting. Are atheist ideologies with power any less corrupt? Secular ideologies?
Religion is not the problem though other ideologies would like for you to believe it is as they attempt to increase their own power. Politics and the "will to power" are the human problem whether at the level of individuals or nations.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
I'm not sure it will matter. That is a hypothetical observation assuming that human-descendants, whatever they are, or other form of life will be around that long. Political turmoil with respect to life right how makes it hard to plan for a hundred years from now. Then there is the potential ecological turmoil if the scientists are right about greenhouse gases and humanity doesn't curtail its ecologically destructive habits. For the moment, there is no alternative habitat. Even if Mars is terraformed, which is difficult and unlikely, there's no way to move billions there, and there's not enough gravity and other factors to keep a stable atmosphere there anyway.
While a dense enough universe could collapse into a "Big Crunch", that is not the hypothesized ending of our universe. The density of our universe is not dominated by matter, but by energy, such that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. You're right that it's difficult to extrapolate to a time several orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe, as currently-unknown physics could end up dominating. (Someone observing the universe about 8 billion years ago would have been unable to measure the energy density of the universe, for instance.) But that does mean we shouldn't even try?
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True. But we can predict that light bulb driven by a fixed battery will go dark within a predictable number of hours.
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>Isn't the universe supposed to collapse sooner than that?
.. greedy to say the least.
1) No, that's what we used to think before, but now our current measurement indicates that the expansion of the universe is accelerating not slowing towards a big crunch.
2) We don't even have an interesting theory (as in a theory which gives testable new predictions) which is compatible with both general relativity and quantum theory, so asking for a theory for what happened before the big-bang is
3) What is silly is comparing myths with science.
While the parent was a bit harsh, he really does characterize a certain sect of woo wooers out there who have never studied anything more than high school physics but somehow think that every working scientist is wrong and missing some crucial insight that they, of all people, are privy to.