The Most Nihilistic End of the Universe Theory Ever...

No fire. No ice. No flitting spirits and sprites, explosions, earthquakes. No ghosts. No...nothing. Less than nothing.

And I love it. It appeals to a very nihilist core in me.

What am I talking about? Well, I'll link to the paper below, but here's the bottom line:

The discovery of so-called dark energy has been kind of a problem for the lab-coat guys. They can't seem to get a grip on what it is, where it's coming from, or what it's doing. And in what at first seemed to be an unrelated matter (so to speak,) it was discovered that galaxies were rushing apart, not at ever-slowing speeds as had always been assumed, but actually accelerating. This means that a distant object on the edge of the observable universe screaming away from us at near-light speed today will be going even faster tomorrow, and will shortly (in cosmic terms) drop out of our observable universe altogether when the relative speeds between us exceed the speed of light.

(Side note: Yes, relativity theory says that two objects cannot move faster than the speed of light relative to one another. But it doesn't say that two chunks of space containing objects cannot move faster than the speed of light relative to one another. In fact, it predicts it. This is the basis for some ideas concerning making a real warp drive, by the way. But that's for another day. For the moment, just go with it.)

It took a bit to sort out that these two things (accelerating expansion of the universe and dark energy) were related. But it now turns out that dark energy, which makes up around 75% of the energy in the universe, has the practical effect of being anti-gravity, which is to say instead of causing objects to be attracted to one another, it's driving them apart. Thus, an expanding (and accelerating) universe. In fact, not only is it driving the objects apart, it turns out that it's actually creating more space between the objects - or, more accurately, more dark energy is appearing between objects. This is why they continue to accelerate - there is more "pressure" from the dark energy because it creates more space containing dark energy as it goes.

Now, here's the fun part: New space/dark energy is being created EVERYWHERE. It's really obvious when viewing objects on a cosmological scale, where the creation of new space and energies has macro effects on galactic-sized interactions, but it turns out that space is actually expanding between every single object in the universe. 

What, you thought "expansion of the universe" meant "stuff on the edge of the universe?" Nope, it's all expanding. 

Our universe is like a rising muffin, and our galaxies and stars and planets are just little bits of embedded blueberry, all getting further and further apart, and at increasing speed, the more the muffin rises and expands. But here's the cool part - space doesn't just exist between galaxies and stars and planets. It exists between each of us. Between our molecules, and atoms, and all the way down to (at least) quark level - there is space, that bubbling energetic STUFF that everything exists in, is embedded in. And ALL of it is expanding, and each of those little blueberry bits are accelerating away from one another, undetectably at the moment, but sooner or later, as with galaxies on the edge of our observable universe, the expansion and acceleration approaches - then exceeds - the speed of light. 

Each quark is, in fact, the center of its own universe, and from its point of view, everything else rushing away from it faster and faster, with more and more of the observable universe falling over the FTL event horizon into non-existence - until only the single, lonely quark, that bit of wave-form, is all that's left in the storm of its infinite universe of dark energy.

In this view of the universe, the universe came into existence as a routine quantum-level event in negative energy space. For about 10^-43 seconds it continued as an energetic Planck space after which it began expanding (about 10^-37 seconds after the anomaly/fluctuation appeared,) and resulted in where we are now about 14.7 billion years later. And this infinitesimal fluctuation will continue to expand into non-existence for about another 20 billion years or so (essentially zero-time in terms of its overall impact on the negative energy space - our universe is, after all, only a near-zero level, very local event on that scale.) 

Since the expansion is accelerating, that means that our event horizon will continue to shrink, as more and more objects appear to rush away from us, disappearing over the FTL horizon. The bigger the muffin, the more its expansion drives the blueberry bits further and further apart, faster and faster. 

As the event horizon gets closer and closer, we will see galactic clusters beginning to disappear, more and more, faster and faster (in about 19 billion years.) As the end approaches, about 60 million years from the end of time, we will watch our galaxy red-shift and disintegrate, as the stars are (from our point of view) sucked into the oncoming wave and accelerated away from us at light speed.

In the last three months, our most distant planets will suddenly begin to disappear, then, finally, about a week from the end our sun flashes a moment of blood-colored light as it red-shifts toward the infrared, then disappears in hours, running away from us so fast that even light can't keep up. In the last 30 minutes, our entire planet will disintegrate, and we all rush into nothingness from one another. In the last 10^-19seconds all of our atoms, subatomic particles, and every smallest division of matter or energy will disassociate down to the quark level as they suddenly "see" everything else almost instantly disappear from their universe at FLT speeds.

And that's it. No pain, no tidal forces, no John Cusack running around dodging chunks of Yellowstone falling from the sky. Until that split instant that you disassociate into basic sub-atomic waves that no longer exist in the same universe with one another, you'll be fine - except for watching that crushing wave of darkness putting the stars out, eating your universe, unstoppable, in the millions of years before it finally comes for you...

...and you've only got about 20 billion years left before it happens, so have a beer with a JD chaser, a cupcake, and bang a redhead while there's still time...

(Here's the paper for you geeks who just can't live without this sort of thing: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0302506v1.pdf)

In Our Next Episode: Redhead banging recommendations for the end of time: