The world started with a ‘bang' but will end in a scary ‘big crunch' — and scientists think they know when that will be
Now, according to astrophysicists and cosmologists, Earth and all of its celestial siblings will likely be swallowed back into the super-small singularity they came from, in what is known as the 'big crunch' theory.
Alarming as it sounds, physicists say there's no reason to fret just yet.
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4 In recent years, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has repeatedly predicted that humanity's doomsday is inching closer and closer, echoing the sentiment that humanity likely won't be around to see the big crunch.
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According to leading experts on the matter, the big crunch theory supposes that the universe will eventually stop expanding and everything will be pulled back together.
Cosmologists at Cornell University predict that the big crunch is billions of years away —19.5 to be exact.
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Henry Tye, a lead researcher at the institution, suggested that the big crunch will begin in 11 billion years, and will take another 8.5 billion years to conclude.
4 'Civilizations like us typically exist on time scales of hundreds to thousands of years while the changes happen on billion–year time scales, so we wouldn't notice any obvious day–to–day phenomenon until the very last moment,' added Luu.
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Supposing humanity is still around billions of years from now, scientists say it's unlikely we would notice any distinct changes while the big crunch takes place.
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'Intelligent civilizations at the scales of solar systems or even galactic scales would not notice any obvious phenomenon because these changes happen at much larger cosmological scales,' Dr Hoang Nhan Luu, a researcher at the Donostia International Physics Center, explained to the Daily Mail.
However, one of the warning signs would be a rising cosmic temperature.
In a few billion years, it's probable that the universe, including all of its major celestial bodies, will be the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
'Needless to say, all humans will burn up in the furnace of this cosmic hell,' Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told the Daily Mail.
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4 Scientists suspect our universe's lifespan is around 33.3 billion years.
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The theory has been swirling among academic circles for decades, but fell out of favor among some camps of researchers several decades back.
However, after dark energy — a repellent force that pushes things in the universe apart — was discovered in the '90s and research has progressed, it seems more and more experts are reevaluating their stances.
Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Dallas, told Discover Magazine that dark matter research has revealed that the universe isn't slowing down, but rather, its expansion is accelerating less, and eventually, it will come to a slow halt.
'To survive, human beings have to move to the edge of our solar system or beyond. We have a few billion years' time to prepare for that trip,' Tye explained to the Daily Mail.
4 Dark energy is essentially the opposite of gravity, which pushes things together.
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The big crunch theory spells trouble for humanity in several ways, but it's far from the first scary-sounding phenomenon that our planet has undergone.
Earth's magnetic poles reversed 780,000 years ago. Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany created a soundscape of the geological gymnastics routine, which they dubbed a 'disharmonic cacophony.'
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A similar problem exists with the all-encompassing Standard Model, which features a whopping 18 free parameters that need to be sorted out every single time. Physicists 'expend lots of blood, sweat, and tears (and money) because most people are convinced that there must be a better, more powerful model which has two or three parameters instead of 18,' Kosowsky said. And indeed, finding a simple, compelling explanation for early cosmic inflation is what motivated the new work, Jiménez told Gizmodo during a video call. The strength of this theory is that it is 'fully falsifiable' in the sense that it either can or cannot explain observational data, he said. However, this is also the theory's weakness, which Jiménez acknowledged: 'Maybe nature didn't choose this theory as the way things work.' Of course, the most valuable thing about falsifiable theories is that they tell us what doesn't work, he added. (While this might seem sketchy, physicists often employ something akin to a process of elimination for unknown phenomena, such as dark matter.) As for Jiménez's newly proposed theory, it's fair to ask whether it will hold up to observational data and survive further mathematical scrutiny. What Is Dark Matter and Why Hasn't Anyone Found It Yet? 'I like the overall philosophy driving this paper, [which is] 'let's see if we can come up with a situation where inflation arises naturally out of some basic physics,'' Kosowsky said. 'If we can, this is both more elegant than adding some speculative and, in some sense, arbitrary physical elements and also is likely to make more specific predictions, which can then hopefully be compared with observations.' 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Liddle and Cortês, both uninvolved in the new work, said that while cosmologists (including themselves) often disagree on how to best interpret cosmic inflation, the evidence seems to support the notion that inflation did in fact take place. Many physicists have devised alternative explanations, but practically everything has ended up in a 'dustbin' of discarded ideas, Liddle explained. 'But there's no limit to people's imagination,' Liddle said. And the next few decades should see no shortage of new ideas and models—just like this one, according to the two cosmologists. 'Cosmology right now is mostly about these things called tensions, or hints that things are not quite well aligned with the standard cosmological model,' Liddle said. Several questions threatening to usurp what we know about the physical universe—dark energy, the Hubble tension—appear to be coming together in one paradoxical package for scientists, and inflation could be a part of that, Cortês added. No matter what happens, it goes without saying that we're witnessing a time of excitement, chaos, and discovery for cosmology—a sentiment that all the scientists agreed on. 'Not only is the data growing at exponential amounts, but the quality of the analysis is also growing at an exponential quality,' Jiménez said. 'I think that we are living a golden age of cosmology.' 'When we are thinking about inflation, we are trying to take the next step and answer the question of why the universe looks the way it does, and not just describe how it looks,' Kosowsky said. 'Is this due to some deep physics principle yet undiscovered? It could be, and this is what keeps us working hard to push back the boundaries of our understanding.'
