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Space Science

A Snapshot of the Universe 3 Trillion Years From Now 197

Posted by Zonk from the really-gives-you-a-sense-of-perspective dept.
ultracool wrote with a link to a Science Daily article that requires that you think long term. Really long term. Case Western Reserve University physicists are theorizing that trillions of years from now the universe will become 'static'. Essentially, the information that we use to gauge our Galaxy's position in the universe will have moved beyond the 'visible horizon. "What remains will be 'an island universe' made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void ... The researchers followed up that discussion with one tracking early elements like helium and deuterium produced in the Big Bang. They predict systems that allow us to detect primordial deuterium will be dispersed throughout the universe to become undetectable, while helium in concentrations of approximately 25 percent at the Big Bang will become indiscernible as stars will produce far more helium in the course of their lives to cloud the origins of the early universe."
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A Snapshot of the Universe 3 Trillion Years From Now More

A Snapshot of the Universe 3 Trillion Years From Now

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  • reality is absurd (Score:4, Informative)

    by crow5599 ( 994334 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @02:43AM (#19281027)
    For a better look at points along the future timeline of the universe, see here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/universe.html [pbs.org]
  • Science/philosophy went through stages of flat Earth, Earth at the center of the universe, everything made up of four elements... Granted, we progressed a bit in what we can measure and observe these days, but current structure and workings of the whole universe now, much less a trillion years later is not one of those things. We are most probably spinning fairy tales on what happens inside black holes, on other planets, in the center of our own planet or even with temperature changes on the surface. It mig

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why don't we focus on getting more facts first? Better exploration of nearby planets and deep layers of the earth should be within our reach now.

      You sound like the people who say "why two desktop environments? we need to work together and focus on beating Microsoft". That doesn't make sense because the open source world is not a hive mind, and developers and projects are not interchangeable. People work on the projects that interest them, and they don't necessarily care about "beating Microsoft". If you t

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 )
      I'm not sure what happens on planets and the deep layers of Earth matter for the expansion of the universe, or to generalize, what geology have to do with cosmology, so I'm not sure what a better understanding of those things would help the understanding of this. It would be far less than the scale of how a golf ball affect the rotation of Earth. And as for this research, they're simply extrapolating from what's been seen to happen in the past. And when you think about it, there's not many end stations for
    • A score -1 Ignorant would be entirely appropriate. All the parent post is saying is that oooh, nasty little scientists got it wrong 500 years ago, therefore they're equally full of crap about things I don't understand. We got a pretty fucking good idea about the inner workings of our planet. We got a damn good understanding of meteorology and climatology, and we're progressing nicely in cosmology despite ignorance peddlers like you. Your post isn't even logically consistent--poor dumbass scientists got

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by sohare ( 1032056 )
        While the parent was a bit harsh, he really does characterize a certain sect of woo wooers out there who have never studied anything more than high school physics but somehow think that every working scientist is wrong and missing some crucial insight that they, of all people, are privy to.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by umbra_dweller ( 797279 )
      Yet somehow all that mucking about with four elements, geocentric models and alchemy led to what we now regard as science. Humans are constantly trying to expand their horizons, and it is a given that they will makes some mistakes along the way. You call this "an exercise in math and science fiction", but I think it is a necessary exercise. It's not like there is some magic point when we will have gathered "enough" information to make proper judgements, and if we don't try to apply our knowledge every st

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iamacat ( 583406 )
        Sure, even science fiction authors provided inspiration for scientists and engineers, as well as students considering to join these fields. But - I don't want this work to be considered science until it's underlying assumptions are more solid. At least I would expect a disclaimer like "If we plug in these numbers in our equations, we get some 0s, infinities and other wild results. These equations are derived from observations from a single vantage point and could be wrong at extreme conditions contemplated
    • >Science/philosophy went through stages of flat Earth

      here's a quick clue how (modern) science works: it's not about right or wrong but the consistency of models with observations, and about making the minimum number of approximations to adequately understand a system.

      science does not say the flat earth model is wrong, it just qualifies the situations in which it is a good approximation, for example if the characteristic distances involved in the process you are interested in are small in comparison with
    • Let the scientists play. They will bring us joys and worries.

      Many very interesting and useful advancements have come from what at the time looked like idle thinking.

      In our materialistic society nowadays many people forget that vacinnation, molecular biology and space travel started with people looking at bugs or at the stars for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iamacat ( 583406 )
        One thing for sure - now, as then, the society/governments do not seem to be interested in vaccination and space travel. A shame really, given that AIDS vaccine or a manned trip to Mars are within reach of our current technology, especially we accept a slight risk to a few informed volunteers inherent in such endeavors.

  • What about now? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Derling Whirvish ( 636322 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @03:02AM (#19281091) Journal
    Doesn't this mean that the universe may be much older than we can currently detect in that there may be a lot more of it out there beyond our current event horizon which drops off at about 13.7 billion years? Maybe it is 20 or 30 billion years old but we can only detect it to the 13.7 billion year line.
    • Soap bubbles. The froth of ocean waves.

      Still, I was hoping I could use this information to pick some stocks. I'm still not sure whether to short or go long on the universe.

    • Re:What about now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by tigerhawkvok ( 1010669 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @03:56AM (#19281249) Homepage
      Actually, no; we know this isn't the case because we can still observe the CMB, or Cosmic Microwave Background. When the universe was young it was very hot, and so normal matter was ionized and therefore opaque to EM radiation (ie, light). This cools off in a characteristic way until the temperature becomes cool enough that electrons re-bind to protons and the universe becomes (largely) transparent to light. Since we can see this edge, and we can furthermore measure the expansion rate of the universe (via white dwarfs, stellar clusters, etc), we in fact have pretty solid bounds on the age of the universe. This whole island universe thing (ironically what people first thought of galaxies) amounts to an excercise in seeing when expansion beats out light. Recessional speeds due to expansion can exceed someone's idea of "light speed" because space expands and essentially drags the coordinate system with it. The article basically says that the closest bodies will be outside our light cone in ~3e12 years, and the expanding coordinate system will red-shift it to nothingness to boot. Its nice to have it quantified, but its something that we've known for a long time. Hm, apparently the comments can't parse <sup> .

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by nih ( 411096 )
        God put the Cosmic Microwave Background there to test our faith!

      • Re:What about now? (Score:4, Informative)

        by (negative video) ( 792072 ) <.moc.ocax-ocet. .ta. .em.> on Saturday May 26, 2007 @07:30AM (#19282021)

        Doesn't this mean that the universe may be much older than we can currently detect in that there may be a lot more of it out there beyond our current event horizon which drops off at about 13.7 billion years? Maybe it is 20 or 30 billion years old but we can only detect it to the 13.7 billion year line.
        Since we can see this edge, and we can furthermore measure the expansion rate of the universe (via white dwarfs, stellar clusters, etc), we in fact have pretty solid bounds on the age of the universe.

        No! The CMB only tells us what was happening after photons decoupled from charged particles. Even if we had efficient neutrino spectrometers, we would only be able to trace expansion back to neutrinos decoupling from the quark plasma. What happened before that would still be wide open.

        And it might well have been exceedingly strange by modern standards. If you extrapolate expansion backwards from the quark plasma, general relativity says that the geometry of space becomes a foam. Does such a foam undergo sudden changes between many phases as it "cools"? Is the fantastic complexity of the space foam equivalent to a flatter space with a larger number of dimensions? Does the foam form meta-stable crystals that only rarely suffer a thermal dislocation, which expands to form a universe like ours at the site of the dislodged bubble, in the process cooling the surrounding foam so that subsequent universe births become less likely? Did the arrow of causality have more than two choices before our universe condensed?

        We don't even have the math to analyze lightly-whipped space, let alone a full fledged foam with 256-element tensors that vary sharply on the Planck scale. Making pronouncements about how that state evolved is unwarranted. Even using words like "evolved" is unwarranted when time may have been all loopy.

        • Nice quasi-scientific rant!

          I'm definitely going to use the term "lightly-whipped space" to refer to a problem that is just beyond our current capability ;-p

  • Ok that's it. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ravear ( 923203 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @03:15AM (#19281125)
    First idiot to mention a certain game with a protracted development schedule gets shot.
    • That's just silly. The sun will go Nova long before then. Unless they plan to move development off planet, Duk...... You don't suppose they're building spaceships just in case do you? Gotta wonder what the first people to play it will look like if it takes a trillion years? In a few billion years we went from bacteria to humans. They may have to search the Universe for another race that looks like us or face redoing all the artwork. On the brightside the computers then should be able to run it.
    • First idiot to mention a certain game with a protracted development schedule gets shot.

      Come off it. An intelligent entity evolved in my Spore game will have visited every star in the Elite 4 galaxy before that game ever gets completed.

  • who cares? (Score:2, Funny)

    by swell ( 195815 )

    Jackson: Of course our sun will expire long before then, in about 3 billion years.
    Mavis: [jumping from chair in panic] What's that you say?
    Jackson: [repeats]
    Mavis: [gradually relaxing] Oh, I thought you said 3 MILLION years, whew!

  • big crunch? (Score:2, Informative)

    by bodrell ( 665409 )
    Isn't the universe supposed to collapse sooner than that? If scientists are currently saying that the universe is 10-20 billion years old, why the hell would anyone assume the "Big Crunch" won't happen by then?

    I'd be much more interesting if someone had a theory about what the universe looked like before the Big Bang, assuming that isn't a bunch of bullshit too.

    Right now, Hindu creation mythology [wikipedia.org] is looking less silly than theoretical astrophysics. I'll be waiting for Kalki [wikipedia.org] to come destroy the universe

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by red314159 ( 826677 )
      While a dense enough universe could collapse into a "Big Crunch", that is not the hypothesized ending of our universe. The density of our universe is not dominated by matter, but by energy, such that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. You're right that it's difficult to extrapolate to a time several orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe, as currently-unknown physics could end up dominating. (Someone observing the universe about 8 billion years ago would have been un

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bodrell ( 665409 )

        While a dense enough universe could collapse into a "Big Crunch", that is not the hypothesized ending of our universe. The density of our universe is not dominated by matter, but by energy, such that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. You're right that it's difficult to extrapolate to a time several orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe, as currently-unknown physics could end up dominating. (Someone observing the universe about 8 billion years ago would have been unabl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anpheus ( 908711 )
        You're forgetting that the two are interchangeable, and that energy does indeed exert a gravitational pull, the concepts of velocity, mass, and energy are all interlinked in the famous equation "E=mc^2" and it's expanded momentum-including cousin.

    • Re:big crunch? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by renoX ( 11677 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @11:41AM (#19283501)
      >Isn't the universe supposed to collapse sooner than that?

      1) No, that's what we used to think before, but now our current measurement indicates that the expansion of the universe is accelerating not slowing towards a big crunch.

      2) We don't even have an interesting theory (as in a theory which gives testable new predictions) which is compatible with both general relativity and quantum theory, so asking for a theory for what happened before the big-bang is .. greedy to say the least.

      3) What is silly is comparing myths with science.
    • Does a "universe" require a container? A containing universe?

      Or is a universe an absolute fact, much like the God (Jesus) who created it?

      Hmmmmmmmmmm....

      Welcome to GUT my friend. Not as hard as they made it out to be, huh?

  • If it didn't happen by then... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Statecraftsman ( 718862 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @03:42AM (#19281207)
    All this stuff about microwaves and dark matter is cool but what I want to know is, will Linux have taken over the desktop?

  • Static Universe? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChemE ( 1070458 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @03:45AM (#19281221) Homepage
    I believe the summary is misleading. The researchers are not saying it will be a static universe, but that it will appear to be static.

    The universe will keep expanding, but we will not be able to tell.

    • Re:Static Universe? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @05:58AM (#19281705) Homepage Journal
      I'm not sure it will matter. That is a hypothetical observation assuming that human-descendants, whatever they are, or other form of life will be around that long. Political turmoil with respect to life right how makes it hard to plan for a hundred years from now. Then there is the potential ecological turmoil if the scientists are right about greenhouse gases and humanity doesn't curtail its ecologically destructive habits. For the moment, there is no alternative habitat. Even if Mars is terraformed, which is difficult and unlikely, there's no way to move billions there, and there's not enough gravity and other factors to keep a stable atmosphere there anyway.
    • We'll all be toast anyway when our Sun goes supernova. Game o-vah.
  • As far as I know, the universe is expanding and the rate of expansion is increasing. IIRC, this will result in a situation with a shrinking event horizon, where the universe basically ceases to exist as space-time tears itself apart, and once the event horzon Big Rip.

    So, from what I can gather, any speculation beyond 20 billion years is a waste of time.

    RS

    • Re:3 trillion years? Ummm, no. (SECOND TRY) (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @03:59AM (#19281259) Journal
      Ooops -I forgot about the html limitations here on slashdot. Sorry...

      I repeat in greater detail...

      As far as I know, the universe is expanding and the rate of expansion is increasing. IIRC, this will result in a situation with a shrinking event horizon, where the universe basically ceases to exist as space-time tears itself apart, and once the event horzon is less than the Planck Length [wikipedia.org], the universe itself ceases to exist. According to one study which, IIRC, has not been refuted, this will happen in some 20 billion years time. It's called the Big Rip. [wikipedia.org]

      So, from what I can gather, any speculation beyond 20 billion years is a waste of time.

      RS

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by VON-MAN ( 621853 )
      First 3 trillion.
      And now you tell us 20 billion!
      What's next? You're scaring me, man.
  • So, in this expanding universe, 3.000.000.000.000 years from now, we will seem to be in a dark void. Sorry, that's no suprise to me.

  • That radiation will 'red shift" to longer and longer frequencies, eventually becoming undetectable within our galaxy. Krauss said, "We literally will have no way to detect this radiation."

    How will the redshift increase? How far a wave travels doesn't affect how long its wavelength is. An increase in how redshifted galaxies are would require the galaxies to accelerate away from each other, but how could they? There is no force which allows them to accelerate. There is only gravity which slows them down.

    • Re:Redshift Increasing? (Score:4, Informative)

      by vertigoCiel ( 1070374 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @04:57AM (#19281447)
      The radiation in question is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, or CMBR. The CMBR is (analogously speaking) an "echo" of the Big Bang, in the form of electromagnetic radiation. As space expanded, the radiation's wavelength expanded with it, slowly lengthening from the Gamma and X-ray spectrums, through visible light, to the microwave spectrum (where it is now). As space continues to expand, so will the wavelength of the Cosmic Background Radiation.

      As an interesting side note, since analog TV operates in the same part of the radio and microwave spectrum that the CMBR is observed, if you tune an analog TV to a blank channel (static), about one percent of that static is the CMBR. Turn the TV on, and watch the Big Bang!

    • Re:Redshift Increasing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @05:02AM (#19281469) Journal
      From what I understand of it:

      Draw a sinewave on the surface a balloon. It has a set wavelength, right?
      Now inflate the balloon to double it's previous size. The wavelength's longer now.

      Same thing with the universe, except it's in 3D and in a trillion-year timeframe.

  • Just some point's I've thought of
    Can we actually change something in the universe's future? I mean, if we were on earth or not, would it have any impact on the universe's future? or we're just an ant in at a very big forest?
    If we can change something in the Macro level of the universe's acts, can we change the universe so it will fit our needs for a long term (billions of years)?
  • This is a related video. From Google Video website

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4258041398 583592305 [google.com]

    "Einstein's Dream," introduces string theory and shows how modern physics--being composed of two theories that are ferociously ... all incompatible--reached its schizophrenic impasse: one theory, known as general relativity, is fantastically successful in describing big things like stars and galaxies, and another, called quantum mechanics, is equally successful in describing small things

  • Case Western Reserve University physicists are theorizing that trillions of years from now the universe will become 'static'.
    Give us a break. Scientists can hardly predict tomorrow's weather, and now you want us to believe that you can predict what the universe will look like trillions of years from now? C'mon...
  • Luckily there is a magnitude of difference between a US Trillion (10e12) and a European one (10e18)...

    This being a mainly US site I assume the prediction is based on the easy one :)

  • Putting recent articles into perspective (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26, 2007 @05:02AM (#19281471)
    And now, a quick recap of four recent articles on Slashdot:

    1. Movies: Celebrate 25 years of TRON!
    2. Games: Players of EVE Online cry foul over preferential treatment by admins towards some players.
    3. TV: Fans of the TV show "Jericho" mail over nine tons of nuts to CBS in a desperate attempt to keep the show on the air.
    4. Science: In three billion years, the universe will just stop, everything you know and love will be no more, and here's a glimpse of the nothing it'll be.


    Hooray perspective! Now let's go out there and have some fun!

  • Oh well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rizole ( 666389 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @05:08AM (#19281487)
    ...Just enough time for another bath then...

  • Right Now, Dammit! (Score:3, Funny)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) * on Saturday May 26, 2007 @05:13AM (#19281497)
    At what point do we stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies?

    At Slashdot, individuals that probably are new to having their own pubes are seen agonizing about whether the human existence will be around in 500 years. These usually are the types who demand this sort of thing:

    1) stop global climate change right fucking now, or else (no matter what it takes) before we all die
    2) let's get off this crappy rock and populate new planets before we all die

    Both are absurd notions, but apparently crying wolf again and again works when manipulating hungry-for-hype mass media.

    It *is* important to be forward-looking and responsible about the future but those who make environmentalism into a sort of religious crusade are not doing themselves nor their descendants (assuming they ever bother to have any, given the catastrophe now! mentality) any favours.

    • At what point do we stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies?

      ...

      It *is* important to be forward-looking and responsible about the future...

      Those two sentences cannot be reconciled. Either one is wrong or irrelevant or the other is. Personally, I think that its the first one that's wrong or irrelevant. It implies that we should only attach value to things that are eternal, which implies that neither your life nor mine has any value.

      ...but those who m

      • When one side of a discussion is yelling that the debate is over and appeals to emotion that's a good indicator of intent. When that same side refuses to listen to opposing views, shouts down "deniers" and smugly announces that "they have won" that's another indicator. "Global Warming"...oops, "Climate Change" is something that absolutely MUST be corrected RIGHT NOW! And if there's any dissent, well, we'll march in the streets as if it was some kind of civil rights issue and be indignant. Help, help, I'm be
        • You accuse environmentalists of being extreme, but from my position, here is how this thread has proceeded. It started with an interesting article about astrophysics that had nothing whatsoever to do with global climate change. Then you jump in with first, a chilling statement of apathy: "Everything ends so there is no need to worry about anything" and then a series of ad hominem attacks on environmentalists. So your logic is: "The UNIVERSE will end three trillion years ago and so people who worry about the

  • Horizon Chasers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @07:53AM (#19282131) Homepage Journal
    There's no way for them to know what will be "undiscernable" to instruments and intelligence in 3 trillion years. Scientists a century and a half ago would have limited our universe to detection by optical telescopes. In just a decade from now, "dark matter detectors" (for example) could push that "horizon" beyond today's wildest imaginings. "Only" a trillion years from now, if we could possibly keep a consistent identity with whatever intelligence descends from us to then, "we" will likely have intelligence of even subtler, more distant phenomena.

    Or we'll have returned to optical telescopes, or much more likely, won't exist to know anything at all. At which point the "discernable" universe will be more or less infinitessimal, or zero.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm sorry, c and the Planck length say "no." In fact they say "not no, but HELL NO." Improving optical telescopes and using neat tricks to infer dark matter's presence from visible effects are both examples of doing something that's fairly hard, which is quite different from doing something that's impossible.

      As the cosmic expansion accelerates, the light cone that defines our universe will shrink. Anything that was beyond it will no longer be part of our universe. You're not talking about seeing stuff that'
      • As far as you know. If you were an expert from 3Ty in the future, you'd be lying.

  • Mouse (Score:3, Funny)

    by innot ( 582843 ) on Saturday May 26, 2007 @09:55AM (#19282759)
    Well, at last the Mouse will finally become public domain at about that time.
    I'm looking forward to get my free copy of Steamboat Willie..........

  • cloud the origins of the early universe


    Isn't the origin of the universe a little cloudy at the moment? TA indicates that there will be no information about how the universe expanded a long time from now. We don't know exactly how the universe is expanding now. If we did, we would know exactly how it formed, right? If this is an attempt to enhance funding for the study of the physics of space, they had better round off a couple zeros.
  • 3,000,000,002,007: the year of the linux desktop!
  • Just a little question i've been asking myself for ages: Why do current theories postulate the the universe will NOT contract back to a singularity after a (long) while? I thought i kind of understood the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory that used to popular, since gravity works at infinite distances, and should thus, ever so slowly, decelerate the expansion of the universe, or at least the fact that galaxies are traveling away from each other. AFAIU (understand), the constant acceleration of things in the univer
    • because from recent calculations, not only is the universe expanding, its rate of expansion is increasing.

      I posted earlier about the Big Rip. From what I have been able to gather, it has not been refuted, and the evidence is still the same. The conclusion is that the universal expansion rate will go vertical in about 20 billion years. At that point the light cone will be smaller than the Planck distance - the universe then simply disappears. It will hit the universe everywhere at the same time. No big cru


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