How the Universe Ends
Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Gizmodo
October 22, 2018
(This post was last modified: 2018-10-24, 02:43 AM by Ninshub.)
Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Gizmodo
October 22, 2018
Quote:Somewhere between a second and a millennium from now, you will die. Your body and all of its parts will cease functioning and rejoin the Earth as regular, lifeless stuff. The Earth, too, will die, engulfed by an expanding, aging Sun. The Sun will burn off all of its fuel and end up a white dwarf, then burn out and die. The Milky Way will collide with nearby Andromeda, and form a large, elliptical galaxy, which will die by losing all of its stars to intergalactic space. The corpses of those remaining stars will die, decaying into their constituent parts. The universe will age onward until all matter is either stored in black holes or floating as free elementary particles. Those black holes will evaporate, and the universe will die. All that was will be an icy cold nothing, forever. (...)
But not every possible cosmic conclusion is one of utter desolation and emptiness. Maybe in some distant, post-heat-death future, the energy in the universe’s vacuum could spontaneously jump back upward at a point, initiating inflation at that point in space from which entirely new universes form, Alan Guth, MIT physicist who invented the theory of cosmic inflation, told Gizmodo. Perhaps that’s how our universe formed, and perhaps there are an infinite number of universes forming in the same way, decaying out of an infinitely inflating grander universe. Maybe there are places beyond the reach of our own universe that won’t be impacted by the demise of our own.