The End of the Universe Sooner then Expected

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Interesting article on technology review on the end of the universe occurring with in the next 3.7 billion years

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25807/

i believe there are some flaws in their reasoning. no one agrees on rate of expansion or will the mass of universe actually stop expansion at some point and cause collapse into singularity and KLAAAA-BLOWEEEEEE.

in the spring the garden will bloom and all will be right with the universe.....chance the gardner

OhMyGod! 3.7 billion years. Oh! Wow! How terrible!

ruveyn

I always found apocolypse predictions unsettling. I like thinking that after I die the human race will continue to exist and the things I did will continue to affect it, potentially forever, but I know that is unlikely. But I still believe that the universe will be destroyed through a heat death rather than through some sort of philosophical anomaly, and that's not supposed to take place for another 100 billion years or so.

Perhaps the 3.7 billion years referred to the time when our planet will no longer be livable. The sun is getting hotter as the hydrogen in th sun is fused into helium. Before our sun becomes a red giant the water on earth will be boiled (or evaporated) off making the planet unviable. 3.7 billion years sound just about right for that to happen.

ruveyn

I think you need a model to say anything about the fate of the universe. I can't see how you can claim that "there's a 50% probability" that the universe will end in 3.7 billion years time if you don't know any mechanisms that could suddenly cause the universe to end. Other possibilities like the Big Rip, or the heat death are seem more plausible to me because they result from an actual model and describe mechanisms that could end the universe.

Don't worry about that - the Milky way will have collided with M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) long before that, possibly resulting in cataclysmic destruction of many star systems in both galaxies.

About two billion years to collision. Galaxies move slowly compared to the speed of light. And when two galaxies collided it is like two smoke rings colliding. Most of the interaction is gravitational, not contact collision.

ruveyn

I'd imagine that with the two galaxies existing within one another will make everything a bit cluttered and that gravitational interaction will cause everything to go out of routine and everything is tugging on each other and ripping stuff apart.

3.7 billion years is a long time, considering life on earth has only been around for about 600 million years. I am not being doom and gloom as this is still a vast amount of time, its not like we will be around for this or the Andromeda–Milky Way collision in approximately 4.5 billion years. I would be more interested in the cosmology in how this new theory pans out wither the universe is open / closed, saddle shaped or doughnut shaped, anyhow its just one more theory and there will undoubtedly be many more. I was curious as to how the universes demise will happen, as they implied it will happen with no warning, such as the impact of another brane into ours, a brane collision is theorized as the event that created our universe.

Let's worry about this first, shall we?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB3G0rvCIJc[/youtube]

well, i asked jesus, and jesus said it will be approx.one billion years when the temp gets so hot that the oceans will start to boil away and all sorts of crap happens. if humans haven't vacated the old homestead by then, well they can just kiss their butts good-bye.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo................. I might possibly have descendants of the creatures that evolved from the stuff that will grow in the shoes of the creature that was once the stuff growing on the shoe of one of my descendants! (last one is shuman! lol wordplay I'm sorry )

That is the Steinhardt-Turok hypothesis which has some physical evidence backing it up.

As to the 3.7 billion year date for the demise of this planet, I am reminded of a story. A professor gave a lecture in astrophysics in which he states that the Sun will become a red giant in five billion years. The Sun will expand and vaporize our planet. Well, one of the students at the lecture is very disturbed and he is unable to sleep. Finally he calls the professor up in the middle of the night and asks him - Doctor, how long did you say it would be before the earth is vaporized. The professor rather angrily tells him it is going to happen in five billion years. Thank God! says the student. I thought you said it would be five million years!

ruveyn

Jesus is dead, your prediction is void.

He got better....

More seriously, reviewing the article tells me that these gentlemen, while probably quite brilliant physicists, know about as much probability theory as your average lottery player. It's a basic rule of probability that the number of observations has no bearing on the outcome of future trials; no matter how many times you flip that coin and get heads, the odds it'll come up heads next time are 50/50, because in the memorable phrasing of Larry Niven, "Lady Luck has no memory."

Even should Freeman Dyson's calculations (that the last proton will decay, and thus the universe will effectively end, in 10^10^40 years) prove inaccurate, and the universe should somehow continue into a true infinity, that will not in the least require that "every possible outcome" of every interaction must occur. No breakdown of physics is implied.

Besides, their assumption that this must somehow cause time to suddenly end before their hypothesized "probability running out" scenario occurs smacks rather clearly of some sort of interventionist Editor belief - "It will never happen, because the Great Senior Professor will put a stop to it!" Pure philosophizing, bordering on religion, and having no place in a serious scientific paper.