[evolved_rage]

But when the vacuous heads of all of DU implode, won’t that stop the expansion???

[Timesink]

If that is true and the universe goes on accelerating, astronomers say, rather than coasting gently into the night, distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another.

Why can't the "inexhaustible world of physics and astronomy" eventually come up with a solution to that, too? The writers on "Star Trek" come up with solutions to tougher problems than this after three-day drinking binges.

[RightWhale]

I saw this, but was so bummed out I couldn't post it. In just a few billion years there won't be anything left in our neighborhood but a couple dozen galaxies, the same ones there now, and they will be old, tired, and voting straight Democrat to save their Social Security bennies.

[jodorowsky]

Dr. Dyson argued in his 1979 paper that life and intelligence could survive the desert of darkness and cold in a universe that was expanding infinitely but ever more slowly by adopting ever slower and cooler forms of existence.

Well that's how I do it.

[butter pecan fan]

Damn.

[A6M3]

Reply to post #1: What these scientific types always fail to realise is, is that all of their galatic research is really quite irrelevant and futile, man's knowlege is finite, and that God rules the universe and he alone knows what its ultimate conclusion, if any, will be.

[Pistias]

starved finally of the energy even to complete a thought or a computation, the domain of life and intelligence would not expand, but constrict and eventually vanish like a dwindling echo into the silence of eternity

Is this what happened in Florida?

[Pistias]

In about two billion years Earth will become uninhabitable...In five billion years the Sun will swell up and die...About 150 billion years from now almost all of the galaxies in the universe will be receding fast enough to be invisible...about 100 trillion years from now, when the interstellar gas and dust from which new stars condense is finally used up, new stars will cease to be born...The galaxies themselves, astronomers say, will collapse in black holes within about 10^30 years...Black holes the mass of the sun would take 10^64 years to explode. For black holes the mass of a galaxy those fireworks would light up space-time 10^98 years from now...

...It is too soon to start panicking, he counseled in an e-mail message

Well thank goodness for that! I was really getting concerned, especially when my Palm Pilot seems to be having trouble formulating a calendar message for 10^98 years from now...

[alcuin]

Infinity on Trial

First they have to catch it.

Or will it be in absentia?

[Phaedrus]

The more the astronomers and physicists learn, the less they seem to know. Dark matter, dark energy, expanding, contracting, fudge factors and then rank speculation. There are erroneous fundamental assumptions being made here and massive resultant misinterpretations.

Maybe the universe expands like an idea. Maybe quasars are massive energy emitters. Maybe the universe blinks on and off at an incredibly fast rate. Maybe there is a matrix of points infusing the universe that keep it "pumped" with energy. Why not? The scientists certainly have no clue.

[PatrickHenry]

"All our knowledge, civilization and culture are destined to be forgotten. There's no long-term future."

If Hillary becomes president, there's no short-term future either. Still, however bleak the ultimate fate of the universe may seem, I shall continue to work for a better immediate future (say, the next billion years or so). After that, it's someone else's problem.