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‘Why empty space itself should be more than just
nothingness and have these complicated properties is indeed
a very deep mystery’
Martin Rees
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5. Cosmic
enemy
It took several hundred years
for explorers and navigators to map out Earth. In the last couple
of decades we have done something analogous for the vast universe
we are able to measure – a universe extending ten billion
light years from us. But having figured out the story of how
we came to be, of how everything in the entire universe, including
dark matter, played a role in our creation, cosmologists set
out to discover for how long this unique complexity will continue.
To understand what fate the universe has in store for us, they
looked to the past to see how the universe has evolved so far.
Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding outwards,
but it was assumed that this expansion has been slowing down
as the gravitational pull of all matter attempted to draw everything
back together.
By studying supernovas, stars that had exploded some 10 billion
years ago, it was possible for scientists to gauge this expansion
through time. But what they found alarmed them. Instead of slowing
down, the universe appeared to be expanding faster. Nothing
that we knew about the universe could explain this. Eventually
they had to face facts: a force existed that could counteract
and overcome all the gravity in the entire cosmos and drive
it to expand faster and faster – they called this ‘dark
energy’.
While we understand very little about dark energy, physicists
have concluded that its role appears to be to destroy everything
that dark matter has helped to create.
By making everything expand faster and faster, dark energy will
eventually tear everything apart. It will annihilate complex
objects and the atoms that compose them. If they’ve got
this right, the grim truth is that the future for us, for complexity,
for anything made of atoms is total destruction.
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