Expanding universe

Not trying to be a cynic, but I believe that even if it did stop expanding, we wouldn't know about it til ages later.. but I did do some maths for shits n giggles.
 
To my understanding, the universe expands out from galaxies. I could be wrong, but that's how it appears to me.. and space is still expanding between The Milky Way and Andromeda. According to the Hubble constant, space expands at a rate of about 67 km/second per million parsecs. So that would mean for every 3.26 million light years, space expands at a rate of 241,200 km/hour or about 150,000 mph for us Americans.. but Andromeda is only 2.5 million light years away from us, so space should be expanding at a rate of 185,000 km/hour or 115,000 mph, but it's not moving away from us. We are approaching each other at about 1,080,000 km/hour or 670,000 mph. It's one of the few galaxies that are blueshifted because of the overpowering of expansion due to gravity and momentum.. but if expansion were to stop, our speed of approach would increase by 185,000 km/hour and we would be able to see it in the blueshift. Thing is though, if today we were to see a shift in the blueshift of Andromeda to signal the universe stopped expanding, that would just mean that it actually stopped expanding 2.5 million years ago..

 

 
 
Yup, "Now" is a bit of a red herring. It's the "lol" part of "so what's the proof it's expanding NOW? lol"
 
Cool, reading about this on wiki it says that, we will merge with the Andromeda galaxy and then probably in the Virgo cluster which it says consists of about 1300-2000 galaxies. Crazy to think that after a long time, out of billions of galaxies we can see today (in principle is estimated at 100 billion, est. via sampling), Ours will be merged in a cluster of only a few thousand...with physically nothing else outside this cluster.
 
I wonder how newly evolved astronomers on planets in that cluster will determine the size of the universe with nothing to see beyond the cluster of galaxies they'd be in.

 

 
I would like to think that as galaxies die off or merge together, new ones will be constantly forming as well.. so hopefully they'd still have a ton of awesome galaxies to look at and be amazed by. Kind of a depressing thought though because if the laws of physics are pretty much constant throughout the universe, there will always be a vast universe that is outside of observation.
 
Would be cool if the human race was still alive and kicking in one form or another when the time comes, it'd be an event to see.. slowly..

 

is the universe expanding or being absorbed into the void of nothingness?

 

 
I'd go with expanding. There will always appear to be nothing so far out from one's relative point in space. The further you look out, the faster the rate of expansion of space. When you get so far out, there will be a point where expansion is faster than the speed of light.. so anything from that point on will never be visible to us. That point is pretty far out there though.. but there could be a void of nothingness outside our point of view, though I would believe that outside our view is pretty similar to what we can see.

 

 
Yea as a kid I loved the idea that there could be aliens out there traveling around and such.
 
though now after lots of reading and a less fanciful mind, I see/believe the physics of that kinda of travel is physically impossible though believe even more so that intelligent life is out there.
 
For me that's the too bad part; is we're so isolated on this planet in the context of the vastness of space.

 

For thousands of years, astronomers wrestled with basic questions about the size and age of the universe. Does the universe go on forever, or does it have an edge somewhere? Has it always existed, or did it come to being some time in the past? In 1929, Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at Caltech, made a critical discovery that soon led to scientific answers for these questions: he discovered that the universe is expanding.
The ancient Greeks recognized that it was difficult to imagine what an infinite universe might look like. But they also wondered that if the universe were finite, and you stuck out your hand at the edge, where would your hand go? The Greeks' two problems with the universe represented a paradox - the universe had to be either finite or infinite, and both alternatives presented problems.