Slashdot Mirror
The Disappearing Universe
StartsWithABang writes: "If everything began with the Big Bang — from a hot, dense, expanding state — and things have been cooling, spreading out, but slowing down ever since, you might think that means that given enough time (and a powerful enough space ship), we'll eventually be able to reach any other galaxy. But thanks to dark energy, not only is that not the case at all, but most of the galaxies in our Universe are already completely unreachable by us, with more leaving our potential reach all the time. Fascinating, terrifying stuff."
Which part of the summary is "news"?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
one of the allures for me (and i think a lot of people intrigued with cosmology) is how we can interpret the findings as a macrocosm for our own personal microcosm of awareness and being.
the fact that seemingly inherent in our physical universe is a doctrine of the futility of outward movement (vis a vis reaching a sense of completion or boundary), to me, points to the individual quest for seeking oneself by focusing internally.
Unreachable with current technology perhaps, but who knows about the future?
This guy has very little faith. Yes the human race doesn't get along very well but we build great shit. We still have a lot of time to figure out the universe. He is talking about the speed of light, I'm thinking wormholes, warp drives, hyper space. If we can't figure out how to keep this universe together or move to a new universe in a few billion years than hey we still had a few billion years of existence; that's not bad.
Ignored as even a remote possibility as the author labels it sci-fi fantasy.
We can always hope that some type of controlled wormhole, or spacetime-bending faster-than-light travel can save us, but there’s no evidence that such an innovation—despite our best science fiction dreams—can ever be practically realized.
How open-minded and hopeful the author is...
Really, folks, you need to stop being terrified by everything.
Maybe someone else will some day be able to reach at least one other galaxy, but all of them are unreachable to us. We can't even get to another star in our galaxy.
How can that be? I thought nothing could go faster than the speed of light.
Or does the universe not have to obey it's own rule?
We'll have to take turns screaming at the terror which will spread over infinity. I'll start AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Physics graduate student here, and I'd just like to bring something into context before any ./ readers begin an existential crisis.
We don't *KNOW* anything about the dark matter/energy hypothesis yet. They are not well accepted theories like (classical) gravity or electromagnetism, but rather the best answer to questions we don't have any other way of approaching.
Warning: if you subscribe too heavily to these ideas now, you'll be way, way off base later when science starts finding better answers to the accelerating universe and other open questions. This stuff is great for discussion about philosophy and science fiction, but it is far from well accepted science.
"But not if our Universe is accelerating. If something is receding from us right now at more than 299,792.458 km/s—faster than light speed—and it’s accelerating too, how could anything reach it?"
Isn't c the upper bound of speed in our universe?
Nothing can travel through space faster than light. But space can travel as fast as it likes. This is the idea behind warp drive.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
How can that be? I thought nothing could go faster than the speed of light.
Or does the universe not have to obey it's own rule?
We're talking about expansion of space itself, not about a body traveling in that space.
no, I don't have a sig
Much of the idea of wormholes came from the idea that universe might be spherical in topography --- like a hypersphere --- and a wormhole could poke through the hypersphere to create a shorter distance than even a line segment from Point A to Point B.
http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question35.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe
But measurements are looking like the universe is flat.
You never know what scientific discoveries the distant future could hold, but at the moment it looks bleak for the concept of wormholes since the universe doesn't seem to be a hypersphere at all.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Well, space is a whole mess of nothing. If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, no reason it can't expand faster than the speed of light. Also, that's faster than light where "faster" is measured in spacetime. Stretch the spacetime and light travels differently than it did.
Everything is moving away from everything faster and faster.
Thought experiment: Remember when the comet hit Jupiter?
Before it hit, it broke apart and stretched out. Imagine you are living in that comet traveling through space.
It suddenly breaks apart. How many comet diameters away from Jupiter was it, when it broke up?
So, you do not see Jupiter that many more times away than you have ever looked before.
Each part of the comet is pulling away from every other part faster and faster.
That would also explain why the universe as a whole is not a spinning disk, like most other structures within the universe.
Honest question here, I thought the expansion was still accelerating. Is it or it's really slowing down as the summary says?
That means we're out of their reach.
Likely the more correct statement is the maximum speed of light is the speed of gravity. So there are quite few particles that travel faster than the speed of light. Now when it comes to reaching other galaxies, seriously who really cares, there is just so much of this galaxy to explore, even living to really ripe old age of 10,000 earth orbits and travelling really fast from sun to sun, there are so many places, likely so many species and societies to explore, even allowing only 1 luna orbit at each location, let alone travel time, likely you won run out of 'interesting' places, just like our own, to explore just in this galaxy. All you need to do is slip on by gravity.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
it's running away from Windows 8
Odds are pretty high that we will never reach the next star, worrying about the next galaxy is a bit too much
Now I'll never find the missing socks
Is anyone else tired of Slashdot constantly posting the submissions of people promoting their own websites?
That's why my car disappeared! It wasn't stolen, it just redded out!
It's completely hypothetical. It's a placeholder for unexplained data and formulae that is a convenient fit. We'll know the real answer in about 25,000 years ( which is enough time to get meaningful measurements of the expansion of the universe )
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall!! We built the PYRAMIDS!
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the BIG BANG!
BANG!
Likely the more correct statement is the maximum speed of light is the speed of gravity. So there are quite few particles that travel faster than the speed of light.
I think you missed a few logical steps out there. Also, the names of these faster-than-light particles would be good to know.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I agree.
An expanding universe is the aging mind watching his own fail to time...but the ego, that gets bigger. A black hole is fascinating to a thief, a new star is a proud dad. A shrinking universe to a thinker, is dying. Perpendicular minds think the world is flat, and an inline four engine is economical.
All in the universe.. its got every answer. Let an idiot describe it for himself.
Alas the interesting places will stop being interesting after about a day as they just become clones of Earth based locations, rows of Starbucks going on to infinity.
I've always thought that essentially galaxies are mini (!) universes, as the distances between them are so staggering as to be permanently out of our reach. Even individual stars are so far apart (even in binary systems!) as to make space travel in the Sci-Fi sense permanently unworkable.
http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q306.html
Hopefully this will change in the not too distant future but expect evolutionary not revolutionary changes.
Can you imagine designing a vehicle to last 18,000 years? What if it gets there and we have nobody here to listen to it. You cannot command it remotely as even light would take 4.5 years to get to it.
Someone prove me wrong. Please.
Okay, I know almost nothing about relativity, but as I understand matters, the speed of light is the maximum possible speed; if you had two cars, rear bumper to read bumper and they both then moved foward at the speed of light, each we see the other car receeding at 1x the speed of light, *not 2x*. The rate at which time passes will have changed, for this to be so.
As such in the article, I see this;
"If something is receding from us right now at more than 299,792.458 km/s—faster than light speed—and it’s accelerating too, how could anything reach it?"
And it seems to me this cannot be true. NOTHING can be receeding from us faster than light speed. A photon (and other massless particles) will receed AT the speed of light, even if we are in turn moving away from them at the speed of light.
We're still thinking too linear, everything is in reach.
Given current technology we can never leave our own galaxy, let alone reach another.
Given future technology whose limitations we don't know make this article total bull.
Basically this article assumed that we would discover how to to everything we can almost do now - specifically antimatter fueled STL spaceships combined with solar sails, and life extension technology. But failed to even consider that we might discover NEW ideas - and new technologies with new capabilities.
I am not saying we will find FTL travel method - but they are assuming we won't which is foolish.
There are several theoretical ways to get around the FTL issue, chief among them negative mass (thereby negating the relativistic limits). Not to mention the possibility of artificial or natural shortcuts "wormholes". Given our such limited understanding of Dark Energy and Dark Matter is totally reasonable for us to laugh at the ridiculous anti-innovation assumptions of this article.
Also, the names of these faster-than-light particles would be good to know.
They are called "tachyons".
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Now, if this hypersphere were expanding in radius at a fixed rate, then all points that are on the hypersurface of the sphere would recede from eachother at some fixed rate that is a linear function of their distance from eachother at some other point in time since the big bang. If the hypersphere were growing in radius at a speed = c, then any points on the hypersurface that are exactly as far apart from eachother as the radius of the hypersphere at any given moment would always be receding from eachother at speeds exactly equal to c. Objects which are closer would recede from eachother at speeds Not that I'm saying that's how things actually are, of course.... but I think it's interesting how well it lines up with observation.
He supported rule of law, just not laws that benifit the People. He supported low taxes, in fact he lowered them on all his golf buddies. He was a huge fan of protecting us from tyrannical government, just not our own. So basically the same kinda neo-con that Obama is.
Statism is a lynchpin of both parties. It isn't a liberal ideal by any strech. But, you want rule of law, not rule of men as your primary demand, so I assume your a statist too.
Andromeda will collide with Wilky Way, we will get our chances.
They are called "tachyons".
And that almost certainly don't exist, which was my point.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Where can I get paid to come up with this crap?
Is it not also accelerating? Are we not riding the same wave from the big bang?
"Warning: if you subscribe too heavily to these ideas now, you'll be way, way off base later when science starts finding better answers to the accelerating universe and other open questions. "
Every damn hypothesis we have are only good as long as we do not find any better answer. Even the one you call better supported. Heck, 150 years ago you would probably have put newton in your list.
It is the basic reality in physic that we use what we have as hypothesis until a better theory or falsifying data come up and disprove that theory. By *specially* asking us to hold off for dark matter/ dark energy you are specially pleading against those, which is a nono, or you misunderstood science in general which is worst.
Even classical gravity or electromagnetism are a temporary hold on until something better come up. Something better MAY never come up. Or it could next month. This is the beauty of science. Adapting.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
So if everything comes from something. But the Universe came from nothing. We are nothing and don't exist. But yet we exist so there had to be something to create the nothing to create somthing? So it comes down to the nothing was something?
At least in astronomy beyond naked-eye observation.
The universe is so vast that it boggles my mind. Just the distance between star systems in our galaxy is huge, then when you start thinking about the distance between galaxies, and then that there are clusters of galaxies... and the distance between clusters of galaxies. It's too much.
Not to mention that it pretty much puts the kibosh on things like intergalactic travel, probably even interstellar travel too.
It means Matt Lauer can suck it!!!
The movement away from the timeline is expected in alternate universes. The other universes are what could have been, but in a different timeline.
Obviously I'm no astrophysicist, but how many galaxies could we potentially have already lost sight of? How many could be just beyond this horizon already?
Just use an Alcubierre drive.
So we have areas of the Universe that allow entire galaxies to travel faster than the speed of light. That's a good reason to think that all bets are off when trying to apply standard physics to this area. Just like quantum physics has its own laws and eccentricities, continuum (I guess that's the opposite of quantum?) physics needs its own set of rules that don't apply here in "regular" space-time (or our relativistic bit of it). The Big Bang was a soupy mess of space-time, maybe out there at the fringes it's the same sort of weird state where the universe writes its own rules. IANAA (I Am Not A Astrophysicist), so what the hell do I know.
Hi bhagwad,
I think your post needs some clarification.
You wrote:
> After a while, space itself would expand meaning that the ruler will now be longer than what it was.
The expansion of space must be measured with respect to something. The usual idea is that space is expanding with respect to other properties of the physical world, e.g., the mean distance between electron and proton in a hydrogen atom. So, because your hypothetical ruler is made of atoms, the claim is that tomorrow it will take more of those rulers laid end to end to reach distant galaxies.
In contrast, one kind of "ruler" that _is_ changing when space expands is the wavelength of photons and other ultrarelativistic particles. If space expands by 1%, photon wavelengths increase by 1% (as measured w.r.t. your hypothetical 1 meter ruler made of ordinary material) and thus photon energies decrease by 1%. This change is the explanation for the redshift of light from distant galaxies.
> After a while, the space between the nucleus and electrons or within the nucleus itself will become too large, ultimately ripping apart for the fabric of reality itself.
I suspect you are referring to cosmological models that end with a "Big Rip". In these models, the amount of dark energy in a constant volume of space (as measured with an ordinary ruler) increases with time. Eventually, the density of dark energy becomes greater than the density of other kinds of energy, e.g., the binding energy of atoms. Then fluctuations in this dark energy will rip apart atoms.
Because the properties of dark energy are hard to measure, it is not yet clear how its density changes with time. The current so-called "standard model" of cosmology, Lambda-CDM, takes the density of dark energy as constant, and this assumption is consistent with our best current measurements. So, as far as we can now tell, we are not living in a "Big Rip" universe.
Breaking news there, slashdot.
This is all a lot of fun with lots of counter-intuitive results. One of my favorites is observed speed of regression.. how is it that we can see stuff moving away from us at hundreds or thousands of times c. Relationship between redshift and these "FTL" velocities a bit counter-intuitive as is difference between hubble sphere/volume and distance at which universe can actually be observed...expanding space sapping energy from the universe.
For anyone really interested recommend this paper which thankfully is more explanation than math http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/...
Tachyons are theoretical and have never been detected in the real world.
Back in 5th grade I remember the same thing being said about something called a "neutrino".
My point being that if the current theories say a particle can exist then, IF the theory is correct, that particle WILL exist. If not then the theory needs to be reworked. Case in point; dark energy and dark mater have not been detected directly.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
True words have seldom been spoken.
At the rate humanity is going, our species will be gone in 100 years. If we somehow pull ourselves together & survive beyond that, then we'll still have about 600,000,000 more years to prepare for the end of living conditions on earth. Of course, it's possible a meteor or volcano could produce another extinction level event before then. All we need though, is 1 habitable planet IN our galaxy, to escape the coming extinctions. This planet doesn't even need to exist for another 400,000 years or maybe even 600,000,000 years. By then, we can move there and watch the earth comes to its end. If the planet is new, then we just wait about 3,500,000,000 years, when the Andromeda galaxy collides with the Milky Way. That'll be fun. It may also expose us to new civilizations and habitable planets that could be nice to visit 'til the heat death of the universe comes along.
But first, we have to survive to that point in order to worry about whether we can go anywhere else anyway. At the rate humanity's going though...
Scenario 1 where gravity wins is completely idiotic mathematical fantasy. It clearly shows the author has no idea what they're talking about. Mass farther away from each other results in less gravity attraction on each other. So if there was enough mass to cause a big crunch then right now, everything would be contracting. Otherwise what the hell do they think is slowing down the stars' outward momentum, wind resistance? So to review, gravity is getting weaker and the velocity is staying the same...and it's supposed to all come back together. Right.
He must have played golf almost as much as Obama given that he lowered income taxes on everyone paying them.
There are regions of the universe you can't reach. Wouldn't that be the case if you are in a black hole? Are we in one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBr4GkRnY04
"We can always hope that some type of controlled wormhole, or spacetime-bending faster-than-light travel can save us, but there’s no evidence that such an innovation—despite our best science fiction dreams—can ever be practically realized"
Okay, let's break that down. Nobody can travel faster than the speed of light except for 30% of the universe that's already traveling faster than the speed of light, according to this idiot author. Then "no evidence?" Really, no evidence that we can bend space? We discovered this thing called gravity that bends space. There are mathematically sound theories of how black holes bend and compress space or fold it or punch through it. There's this other thing that bends space that we invented called "moving." If you do a lot of it, you dilate time and bend space. We've pretty much proven the existence of higher dimensions as well.
In fact, I already invented faster than light travel. Pretend we're on a planet on the opposite side of the universe. From their perspective, we're moving away faster than the speed of light. So I, right now as I sit here typing this, am violating the laws of physics and traveling faster than the speed of light. Maybe I'll get some kind of nobel prize! Yay! This moronic author certainly won't. Maybe a literary award for science fiction.
Best description I have is that dark energy isn't the explanation, it's the description of the problem.
The number of Hs in your post is still encouragingly finite.
We're Doomed. Dooooomed.
Space is nothing and nothing can go faster than the speed of light :-)
This was deep... I'm going to have to spend some time staring at the stars tonight and contemplate this. Thank you.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Depends on what you mean by "lost". We've seen the Cosmic Background Radiation in all directions. This predates the first star. Now if by "lost" you mean unable to communicate with, even if each relay has massive amounts of time inbetween, then yes, many galaxies are already lost. Some are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light (or will be right before any photon we send could hope to traverse the distance). Some are just close enough they could intercept a signal, but the reply back wouldn't make it due to expansion. There is also the possibility of younger galaxies that formed in a region of space that is expanding away from us too fast.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The idea is not that things *cross* space at greater than the speed of light, but that space expands so that the distance increases faster than the speed of light.
(Admittedly I've never heard a good explanation why that would make any sense without bringing back the luminiferous aether or a universal stationary frame of reference.)
Most of that is still theory, but we need a mathmatical proof before we can accept it as fact. We also need a proof regarding other spacial dimensions. If we can traverse them, could we in effect get to the far reaches of the universe in a few short hours, all without excessive speeds?
We need a proof of that, one way or the other.
You have a whole planet you've barely explored. I guarantee that there are more places you could go and more things you could see than you'll ever get to in a lifetime.
I'll bet there are places within ten miles of where you live that could amaze you, if you were suitably prepared to be amazed. Unfortunately most people could go for a walk in the woods and not see trees, just green blobs on sticks. Well of course if you're so ignorant you can't even name the tree, you won't see how amazing that tree is, and how it connects to other plants and animals. How much could you really expect to get out of visiting an alien planet if you aren't interesting in exploring *this* one in person?
And as for alien cultures, what about those immigrant neighborhoods people are always griping about, the ones where the residents are "too lazy to learn English"? There's an alien culture right there for the exploration, practically on your doorstep. You could spend a few weeks learning a few foreign phrases and see whether you can navigate that Haitian neighborhood, or order dinner in Chinatown using Mandarin. If that doesn't strike you as an adventure, if it sounds like it's just too much trouble, what makes you think you'll find civilizations on *other* planets worth the bother?
The only people who'd really get much out of travel to an alien planet are the kind of people form whom *this* planet remains an inexhaustible source of fascination and adventure.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For the benefit of others:
While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than light with respect to each other when they are in a local, dynamical relationship, it places no theoretical constraint on the relative motion between two objects that are globally separated and out of causal contact.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Seriously? I stopped reading the article when I got to the following text:
If something is receding from us right now at more than 299,792.458 km/s—faster than light speed—and it’s accelerating too, how could anything reach it? Even a photon, moving at the speed of light, wouldn’t be able to reach such a galaxy. Instead, anything beyond that point will do something that cosmologists call red out, which means they’re sufficiently redshifted that anything we do today could never, ever reach them, and only the light they emitted in the past will ever reach us. We are already causally disconnected from them.
This author obviously lacks the knowledge ladled out daily by the SyFy channel and internet on faster-than-light (FTL) drives and wormhole technology!
If one planet is traveling at .51c and another planet is traveling the exact opposite direction at .51c then the two planets are separating at faster then the speed of light.
No dice, simple vector addition only provides useful answers for small relative velocities. At relativistic velocities you must include Lorentz transform or your answer will be uselessly wrong.
We can best be described as `Meta-Mollusks', possessing the best qualities of both the clam and the Dravatz, which is not native to your world. We are intelligent and clever, though you would never call us cunning.
Each day when we awaken we call forth the traditional Spathi prayer: "Oh God...Please don't let me die today! Tomorrow would be so much better!"
IF this theory is true...
IF it is not possible to travel faster than the speed of light..
IF there are many space-faring, expanding civilizations...
THEN it may be that we would not end up with one giant all-encompasing civilization...instead we might end up with many civilizations that can not reach each other due to the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Of course, this is total Sci-Fi fantasy. We don't know any of the IFs with any degree of certainty.
Of course they're unreachable now
They cancelled Stargate Universe.
Some theories for the end of the universe say that if the expansion of the universe keeps accelerating, eventually the expansion even between subatomic particles will be greater than the speed of light and everything will be ripped apart. This is long long after the skies are black because all objects and space have moved too far away.
Dude, if we're ever in Denver together I would like to smoke weed with you.
More music, fewer hits
Quick, somebody call The Doctor.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
it's not like dark energy and dark matter aren't there either. something is giving gravity, we can measure it the same way we can measure black holes... and something is making it so that the universe doesn't give a fig about gravity, we can measure that by the expansion of the universe. saying they don't exist just because we have no friggin clue what the hell they are, is like saying fire doesn't exist because we have an incomplete understanding of plasma.
they may not actually be things, but incomplete understanding of the relation between matter and energy on a cosmic scale, artifacts of an inaccurate mapping etc. but something is giving our galaxies additional gravitational pull over what can be expected by stuff we know about... and something is making those same galaxies fly away from each other even though gravity should make them contract.
Actually, wormholes break the Bianchi identities that are inherent in geometry. Wormholes are also mathematically equivalent to the existence of exotic matter - which would violate conservation laws.
Michael J. Burns
We're talking about expansion of space itself, not about a body traveling in that space.
Apparently the CSI-people should have been more careful with what they wished for when they said "Zoom in and enhance".
We don't know. The universe could even be infinitely large. But it is almost certainly much bigger than what we can see. Estimates range from 250x bigger to 10^23 times bigger.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
Most of that stuff disappeared from sight almost right away, right after the big bang, long before galaxies even formed.
It's just like saying "the speed of a shadow is infinite"
we didnt even leave our spec of dust (in a sustained way), let alone our solar system or universe.
The Disappearing Universe-
Even at the speed of light, youâ(TM)ll never reach these galaxies: so what's all the bruha about. It's an article based on the current scientific understanding of the universe. It's like any purely naturalistic understanding of the nature of things - it's incomplete. The naturalistic understanding of life is never complete, because it fails understand one thing: life. They try to see beyond the veil. It like a man sitting in a dark room saying that's all their is, trying to contemplate the meaning of existence, when right behind him is the outline of a door, and he can see it because of the light on the other side, but he has to get up from where he's sitting, because he's facing the wrong way, to open the door. He hear's someone knocking, but instead of getting up and turning around, he just sits there in darkness, and tries to reason why we're here. That's what Jesus meant when he said: look, I stand at the door of your heart and knock, if anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come in and eat with him and he with me. The light behind the door is his radiant glory. Some people are afraid to open the door, because the are afraid the light will expose who they really are, but for those that open the door, they find that they're forgiven, and it's the best decision they've ever made. They run around the room saying I see, I see, and they sit down to eat with Jesus, and Jesus explains the nature of life and of things to him, but they taken up that their eating dinner with him, that the nature of things does not compare with him.
Hominids started bashing stones together about 3.4 Million years ago and the Stone Age only started to end about 6000 years ago.
We aren't going anywhere far any time soon -even if the infinite improbability drive is discovered tomorrow. What we can do now, as real science, is to observe, calculate, hypothesise, catalogue* and publish.
What we could also think about is engineering. You don't get off the ground without engineering and engineers are very, very expensive. So keep up the day job and keep paying the taxes.
*yes, catalogue, I'm English.
If there is a convenient nearby conservation law/premise/nightmare,
we can assume/deduce/panic -- the few remaining terrors are getting much more terrifying.
Nighty night, and pleasant dreams.
--
International Code of Signals - ZQ - Your signal has been received but not understood
It's not slowing down. It's expanding, and accelerating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe
See one of the several videos from Lawrence Krauss talking about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EilZ4VY5Vs
As it's expanding faster and faster, in a few billion years the lights from other galaxies won't even come to us. So if we miss or destroy all the knowledge from this age, future inhabitant in our galaxy will think they're alone in the universe. And there won't be a way to even figure out there was a big bang empirically. So finally, finally creationists will be able to say that with no contest.
If we limit ourselves to present technology yes its impossible. To say "even if we go at c" is silly too... because if we travel at c, we essentially will die from relativistic effects. But using simple general relativity, FTL travel and time travel seem very likely if not certain to a future civilization and I am sure more technologies will be discovered that will let us travel instantly to other galaxies in new and innovative ways. To say they are out of reach, is good in a way, as it will force thinkers to develop these essential technologies. We already have the equations and physical laws for wormholes... they are far from imaginary for any serious student of relatvistic fluid mechanics. What interests me is what happens when we time travel not if it is possible.