Here is a spooky thought. Physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University calculates that three trillions years from now -- about the time the federal budget is expected to be balanced -- dark energy will have accelerated the universe to such speeds that no galaxy will be able to see any other galaxy. Intercourse between galaxies will become unimaginable, even if Captain Kirk's warpdrive is invented. Each galaxy will perceive itself as the whole of creation, a lonely cluster of stars surrounded by infinite emptiness. At this far-future point, all traces of the Big Bang will have dissipated from the cosmos. Any intelligent beings evolving under those circumstances would not be able to figure out how the universe formed. We're lucky, Krauss thinks, to have come into existence while the cosmos is "young," and dark energy has not yet hurled away all the clues about why we are here.
Things never seem to happen the way you'd expect.
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