When astronomers look into the night sky, they see back into time. The light from the most distant galaxies has taken billions of years to reach us. Astronomers can measure that these galaxies are hurtling away from us, as part of the Universe's expansion after the Big Bang. ...

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Nothing to worry; we would have collided with the Andromeda much sooner than that!

Speaking of colliding with Andromeda, I thought that galaxies were incredibly small compared to the space between them. Doesn't that make our impending collision with Andromeda a fluke of epic proportions? Or are galactic collisions more commonplace than I think?

Does your thinking include the fact that many current galaxies appear to be the result of galactic collisions?

Space.com: Galactic Collisions Fast and Frequent

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Galaxies tend to gather in clusters. Andromeda is part of the same cluster we're in. And they don't move in straight lines, they swirl and orbit and slingshot around each other.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Alway been curious as to if the Milky Way's two satellite galaxies (The Magellenic Clouds) might be the results of a near miss ripping or pulling those clusters into our orbit.

In billions of years, distant galaxies will be speeding away from the Milky Way so quickly that they will recede from us faster than the speed of light.

This is quote from the article. Now I'm confused. Is it really possible to have a speed faster than light?

Sure, if you play loosely with words.

Preposterous Universe: Cosmology Primer FAQ: faster than the speed of light

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Thanx 01101001, I got it now, even though I didn't get it

Hum,
So yes, it would be a milestone in the history of our universe, as important as the formation of hydrogen ... or the first stars lighting up, or the last blackhole evaporating... .

And because they have been distracted with some sort of anthropic argument it is that last point that they seem to have missed.
The last blackhole evaporating, or last particle transforming into radiation, is even further away in time, thousands of trillions of years in the future; But, when that happens, every single particle will be isolated. And it would be then that some would propose that all the conditions are met to create a new `bigbang` and a new universe. (Another milestone)

The Return to the Static Universe

See `Cyclic universe` or `time`

BTW, they have updated their original paper today (Version 2)
Read more (7kb, PDF)

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

This theoory of 'Island Universe" is fasinating as well as terrible.Regarding this collision I got a very interesting and precise summery for next few trillion years in John Baez's website(week 252)http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/this.week.html

Once an Island Universe is formerd we will be limited within a certain region of spacetime, will that volume be larger than now? , and after collision
can any part of it attain speed faster than light to enter other areas which we can't see now?

There is nothing to worry about. By the time 3 trillion years get here the earth might not even exist anymore because the sun is going to take over in about 5 billion.

But in 2-4 billion years i predict that we will be able to have close to light speed space travel down.