Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

The Universe Of The Future

A.D. 100 Billion: Big Bang Goes Bye-Bye: Scientific American
Cosmologists have put themselves in the shoes of their future counterparts by pondering the consequences of dark energy, an enigmatic force discovered in 1998 that seems to be pulling galaxies apart at a steadily increasing clip. Eventually, this accelerating expansion of space will yank galaxies away from each other faster than light can travel between them, leaving our galaxy and its immediate neighbors isolated in a vast darkness.

In the process, all current evidence for the big bang would either vanish or become so diluted as to be imperceptible, says cosmologist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, who has studied the idea with Vanderbilt University physicist Robert Scherrer. “It will lead them to the wrong conclusion about what the universe is doing. The universe will look static, and that’s vastly wrong, because the universe is expanding so fast they can’t see it.”

This is all very interesting, but it’s based upon a very unlikely scenario where the intelligent beings of 100 billion years from now are just like today’s humans in their sensory abilities, intellect, and tool-making skill.

Assuming earth still exists in 100 billion years — and at the rate we’re going that’s no sure thing — there’s no way we can even begin to guess what any life on the planet (assuming that still exists) might be like.

If there’s still life, if it’s intelligent, if it is sort of like us in its thirst for knowledge and if it’s been around long enough to have evolved beyond where we’re at right now (a whole bunch of “if”s), then it will probably have a MUCH better understanding of dark matter and dark energy than what we’ve currently got. (And that’s pretty much zero.) SO — who knows what will be happening. It’s fun to speculate but it’s meaningless. There’s just no way to know what “we” might understand in 100 billion years.

Here’s my prediction, though: We’re going to discover that “dark energy” is a manifestation of some of those otherwise undetectable dimensions predicted by string/brane theory.

Remember you read it here first, folks.