Image via WikipediaThere is little to do but wait, now. The universe is expanding. We are all getting stretched, perhaps imperceptibly now, but ever increasingly as time goes on. Yet, there are problems that one wonders won't interfere with that dooming process.
For instance, right now we might be expanding at, say, 100,000 mph. (I don't really know for sure, but that's a good starting point. But the rate of acceleration might be like gravity on the earth, but instead of 32 feet per second per second, maybe it is only 1 inch per second per second.
Yet, there would an expansion rate of millions of miles per hour after only a few hours. So, unless we really are expanding rapidly to apocalypse, it probably isn't that rapid. Perhaps it is only 1 nano-meter per second per second. That would slow the expansion quite a bit, and give us some breathing room. Yet, no matter how slowly the acceleration is pegged, it is still accelerating, and all the stuff will be pulled apart like a giant blob of taffy by two elephants. Eventually the fabric of space would be torn, atoms would be unable to remain stable, and all life and physics as we now it know would be gone.
But maybe there is no such thing. Maybe the stretching is only local, so that galaxies that seem to be receding away from each other will simply be pushed together at some distant place that we are unable to view from this vantage point in space and time. Perhaps they will die from crushing gravitation instead of uncontrolled expansion. Yet, whatever it is, however it happens, I'm not too worried that it will happen anytime soon.
Let's say that we began to expand all the way to a speed of c, the speed of light. At that point time would stop for us (as well as other problems plaguing our existence, like having been reduced to cinders by the sandblasting effects of hydrogen atoms in space.) But the expansion, no matter how it advanced after that point, would cease to effect us. Yet that is no great win, for nothing else would effect us either.
I can't be sure of this, of course. No one can be sure of such things so far in the future, and so far into the outer bands of physics. We don't even know what all the dark matter and energy really is or does. We barely know that stuff even exists. We barely understand that we exist, and certainly cannot understand why.
For instance, right now we might be expanding at, say, 100,000 mph. (I don't really know for sure, but that's a good starting point. But the rate of acceleration might be like gravity on the earth, but instead of 32 feet per second per second, maybe it is only 1 inch per second per second.
Yet, there would an expansion rate of millions of miles per hour after only a few hours. So, unless we really are expanding rapidly to apocalypse, it probably isn't that rapid. Perhaps it is only 1 nano-meter per second per second. That would slow the expansion quite a bit, and give us some breathing room. Yet, no matter how slowly the acceleration is pegged, it is still accelerating, and all the stuff will be pulled apart like a giant blob of taffy by two elephants. Eventually the fabric of space would be torn, atoms would be unable to remain stable, and all life and physics as we now it know would be gone.
But maybe there is no such thing. Maybe the stretching is only local, so that galaxies that seem to be receding away from each other will simply be pushed together at some distant place that we are unable to view from this vantage point in space and time. Perhaps they will die from crushing gravitation instead of uncontrolled expansion. Yet, whatever it is, however it happens, I'm not too worried that it will happen anytime soon.
Let's say that we began to expand all the way to a speed of c, the speed of light. At that point time would stop for us (as well as other problems plaguing our existence, like having been reduced to cinders by the sandblasting effects of hydrogen atoms in space.) But the expansion, no matter how it advanced after that point, would cease to effect us. Yet that is no great win, for nothing else would effect us either.
I can't be sure of this, of course. No one can be sure of such things so far in the future, and so far into the outer bands of physics. We don't even know what all the dark matter and energy really is or does. We barely know that stuff even exists. We barely understand that we exist, and certainly cannot understand why.
