It can be said that humans have a bit of a short term view of things. We're concerned about the end of summer, the next school year, and maybe even retirement. ...

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I don't think there's really an end to anything, it's just what our human brains perceive. If one were to think in terms of what there was before "anything" come to be, then it only makes sense that this very same "stuff" exists eternally, looming infinitely to spark everything into being again.

I found it kinda funny about the inset picture of "The Dark Ages", click to enlarge for a close-up view of absolutely nothing......lol.

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"Take a look out at the deep emptyness of everything you could never imagine". --- Molecular

Somehow I just love the theory of the Heat Death of the Universe. I much prefer it to the Big Crunch or other possibilities.
It's so dark, so Nordic, existentially bleak and abysmal, that it can't help have but have a certain romantic appeal about it, like listening to early The Cure records, or reading a Kafka book or an essay by Sartre on phenomenological meaningless.
The idea that everything will just slow down, cool down and eventually pop out of existence at random is somehow paradoxically comforting (like Sartre's analogy of fireflies locked in a dark box flickering out); due to its overwhelming inevitability, in that nothing lasts forever, that eventually the Cosmos itself will rest in the peace and oblivion of the absence of existence....anyway I'm getting carried away...who knows, maybe when the Universe loses its very memories and track of time and space itself, conditions will be just right after all for another Big Bang to happen. So there's always a glimmer of hope left (I just heard Roger Penrose talking about this idea and it sounds really interesting).

Excellent article. Let's hope that scientists from the future don't forget why we are so fascinated with the Universe around us, even if, they don't even know where and how everything that matters came to be.

I read something like this on Wikipedia, about the fate of the universe.
This timeline assumes proton decay exists.

I can only wonder if there is a way we can confirm if proton decay happens, aside from waiting until the nessesary time passes.

If it does happen, would this mean whatever life forms exist at that time will go to pieces? Ouch.

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This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

SO................................................ ....

Something we have NEVER 'seen', measured, tested in ANY experiment, or understood in any sense of the word...and supposedly makes up 70% of the universe...

Anti-Gravity........wins the battle???

It sure is a good thing that the Universe does not have to adhere to the way that the 'best theory(s) on the planet' "THINK" that it should be working.

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RussT
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Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

I'm prepared to accept that the universe 'popped' into existence out of nothing, perhaps in the same way that a pair of virtual particles pop into existence, exist for a few nanoseconds, and then annihilate one another.

I feel intuitively (which usually means I'm wrong!) that within our Universe - expansion and gravity will eventually cancel out and the universe will stop expanding. And for a fleeting instant - we will have the Steady State Universe of Fred Hoyle. Then gravity becomes the dominant force and the contracting phase begins. Perhaps one fewer proton in the universe might mean this contraction phase will never happen - I find the notion of a perfectly balanced universe appealing and 'tidy' - more so than the Heat Death idea where dead Universes litter the higher dimensions for eternity! (Although I suppose the Big Crunch could happen after Heat Death)

Also - regarding putting a time scale on when Heat Death might happen: With an almost flat gravity field, and almost no energy or movement or changes occurring (other than perhaps the occasional theorised proton decay) can we really measure time in a Universe in this state? Would time not virtually 'stand still'?

We have measured it (with some substantial error bars), otherwise we would not be talking about it today. It is because of the coarseness of these first measurements that leave us in such doubt as to its nature.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Well written; but perhaps a bit too much faith is placed in the scenario predicted by the LambdaCDM model.

My question is about the rate at which Hawking radition evaporates black holes. I suppose I'm just trying to wrap my mind aroud the numbers but if it takes ten to the hundrenth power years for the big ones to go how much mass are they losing say per year? or how long does this rate of loss take for them to lose a single hydrogen atoms worth of mass?

Interesting story

and i believe almost none of it
when i see aritcles about new things discovered (not only space stuff) it's nearly always below or above what they expected and nearly never exactly what they thought. also just putting a number on the universe TTL seems funny in the article but i'm really having a hard time believing it all. Perhaps in about 10 years they discover something completely new that all of a sudden makes the universe 10x older (or younger) than they think it currently is.. and WHERE did they even got the 60 billion people number from!! that's just hot air... like there is a counter somewhere that counts down from 120 billion to 0 and explodes when it's at 0

What i do believe is that the sun and this solar system are gonna die one day but i don't believe the numbers.. the estimates are kinda rough.

Sorry for making fun about the article but i'm not buying it.. but it's a nice article

Here we go again

You do mean 'inferred' it...right?

Please show me 'one' measurement of Anti-gravity.

It is all inferred from the bookkeeping of the L-CDM model. And in that model exists a "Hypothesized" particle...the WIMP, which is assigned a value of ~22%, which left the universe missing ~74% until magically in 1998, that missing mass was found, and a very convoluted form of the Cosmological Constant/Lambda/Anti-Gravity was re-introduced.

[otherwise we would not be talking about it today.]

When the WIMP CDM model was first introduced, because it was figured out that the Non-Baryonic DM HAD to be treated as Mass is Mass Is Mass, otherwise SR and GR would both be in peril...in other words, the Non-baryonic DM could NOT be treated as "Hot" and therefore "Fast/Relavistic", and so MUST be treated as though it were 'cold/slow' and 'more massive', so as to be able to be 'affected' by baryonic Matter, even though it goes right through ALL baryonic Matter, so it could be 'tied' to the galaxies rotation curves and cluster dynamics.

BUT, that could only account for the ~22%, and so left the Missing mass of 74%...enter Lambda/Anti-Matter...something that has NEVER been 'seen', measured, found in ANY experiment, and NOT even understood in any sense of the word, to win the final battle of how our universe is working

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RussT
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Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Mark

Its bad science to 'disbelieve' on the principle that an idea is probably going to be superseeded at some point in the future. If we took that stance then Newtons (ultimately incorrect) theory would have been dismissed on the grounds that it would someday be shown to be wrong.

I like these ideas - but I don't know if they're right or wrong. I simply don't know. You on the other hand DO seem to know - you know they're wrong. Definate unshakable views on scientific thinking are a dangerous thing - it leads to stagnation and dead ends. Open mindedness - thats the key.

After the Earth merges with Sun and the Sun becomes a white dwarf - the Gravitational field of the Solar System gets whacked.

The concept of a Year as we know - gets completely obliterated, since no Earth exists and nothing like an Earth Year exists.

So all the timing information - after that event does not make sense

SumitPal, welcome to the BAUT forum.

Well, something here doesn't make sense.

Wikipedia: Second

No Earth? No problem. Seconds and years still exist.

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I don't understand why we should accept the asumptions about the human species at the beginning of the article. The assumption that half of all human have already lived seems presumptuous.
We are a relatively young species and a rather successful one. Who's to say how long we can hang in there. Soon we will have control over our own evolution, through genetic manipulation. I have no idea how that will be used (though I'm not optimistic). Our biggest threat is our own doomsday weapons, which is unique in evolution. I guess the future is up to us.

All I can say is this story made me sad and lonely...but not scared like the collapsing universe story does.

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If you look hard enough...you might hurt it!

This is a very nice article. However, when I was coming toward the end - of everything going into darkness and cooling down, I suddenly thought - wait a minute. Something produced the Big Bang and inserted a mega heap of energy that made the Unverse run for trilly-trilly-trillions of years. If it did, it should be somewhere around, this source of energy...
But I like the feel of completion the article gives. Saying good-bye to our lives, the planet, the Sun, the galaxy and the whole Universe... Suddenly you get a feeling that the world has something more important than what we see. Something that is forever.

He-he. Nice words. True, too.
There are a lot of things we yet do not know. And it's good to know. =)