future civilizations, the big bang, and seemingly endless voids... oh my!

[Jakigi]

Stick with me, as I'm more intrigued by the subject than I am an expert of it.

An article entitled "The End of Cosmology" from the magazine Scientific American intrigued me.

It suggested that 'the big bang' is only recognizable in a small time frame. One that we happened to be a part of. Apparently, the acceleration of the expanding universe is going to remove all traces of how it was formed. Eventually, all expanding matter will be outside of the "event horizon" (an area in space we can determine matter is moving outwardly), leaving only the nearby Andromeda galaxy and other nearby matter to continue its decent towards our galaxy due to gravity. So... our galaxy and other nearby matter will appear to be in a lonely super-galaxy in a seemingly endless void.

Essentially, this is going to turn the big bang from fact to a belief that will fade as human kind develops, much like a religion. Of course, there will be records, assuming they won't be destroyed through war etc. Think from a future perspective... would you believe something recorded with such primitive devices? The Hubble telescope will be how we view the spear thrower in thousands of years.

I am not certain of the time frame of any of the above mentioned. The article also mentioned inside-out blacks holes, and dark energy. Explaining those is a bit out of my realm of understanding.

[bkadoctaj]

Originally Posted by Jakigi

Stick with me, as I'm more intrigued by the subject than I am an expert of it.

An article entitled "The End of Cosmology" from the magazine Scientific American intrigued me.

It suggested that 'the big bang' is only recognizable in a small time frame. One that we happened to be a part of. Apparently, the acceleration of the expanding universe is going to remove all traces of how it was formed. Eventually, all expanding matter will be outside of the "event horizon" (an area in space we can determine matter is moving outwardly), leaving only the nearby Andromeda galaxy and other nearby matter to continue its decent towards our galaxy due to gravity. So... our galaxy and other nearby matter will appear to be in a lonely super-galaxy in a seemingly endless void.

Essentially, this is going to turn the big bang from fact to a belief that will fade as human kind develops, much like a religion. Of course, there will be records, assuming they won't be destroyed through war etc. Think from a future perspective... would you believe something recorded with such primitive devices? The Hubble telescope will be how we view the spear thrower in thousands of years.

I am not certain of the time frame of any of the above mentioned. The article also mentioned inside-out blacks holes, and dark energy. Explaining those is a bit out of my realm of understanding.

Thanks... and I found a link to the article as a .pdf file:
http://genesis1.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/0308046.pdf

[JesusC]

Originally Posted by Jakigi

Essentially, this is going to turn the big bang from fact to a belief that will fade as human kind develops, much like a religion.

.....from fact to belief?

[chiefMOJOrisin]

huh??

[Medicine Al]

You mean in only 100 billion years, even THIS TOO SHALL PASS?

Shocking.

[Zylark]

Well yes, in due time, the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, will reach so high veloceties, that all residual evidence of big bang will be unobservable from any point in the universe.

Already today, it is estimated that we can only observe about 5% of the universe. Luckily that includes background radiation and far away galaxies moving away from us. So at least we know there was a big bang, and a huge number of galaxies. Future civilizations (think in the order of tens of billions of years from now) won't be that lucky. to them, the universe will look as it contains just the galaxies in their local group. Everything else, just a big black void.

[bkadoctaj]

For some reason I feel like the main point being made is that immortality and eternity are fantasies. But, yeah, give humans a hand for living in the only time (within their knowledge) that the Big Bang would have occurred. In other words, thank God we were in the right place at the right time.

[Zylark]

It's more like we live in an age where we can observe the remnants of big-bang. And that age existed before humanity (we're just some 150.000 years old, a mere nothing on a cosmological scale) and will still exist after humanity.

I mean, we're talking tens of billions of years into the future here. Even if our particular branch of life do exist then, it will be more different from us than we are from, oh I don't know, frogs? If I'm allowed to speculate, I'm guessing humanity will exist until the end of the universe, but not in biological form. It's so, hmmm, inefficient

So this might be a time to observe these facts of nature, but it is a pretty large window of opportunity.