how the universe will end.

according to TIME Magazine, the big question is:

"Will the galaxies continue to fly apart forever, their glow fading until the cosmos is cold and dark? Or will the expansion slow to a halt, reverse direction and send 10 octillion (10 trillion billion) stars crashing back together in a final, apocalyptic Big Crunch, the mirror image of the universe's explosive birth?"

hell if i know.
this article talks about "mind-bending discoveries about dark matter, dark energy and the flatness of space-time..." i remember reading a book called "THE DANCING WU LI MASTERS" in high school physics class that talked about the same thing, and i didn't get it back then, either.

"If the latest results do hold up, some of the most important questions in cosmology—how old the universe is, what it's made of and how it will end—will have been answered, only about 70 years after they were first posed. By the time the final chapter of cosmic history is written—further in the future than our minds can grasp—humanity, and perhaps even biology, will long since have vanished. Yet it's conceivable that consciousness will survive, perhaps in the form of a disembodied digital intelligence. If so, then someone may still be around to note that the universe, once ablaze with the light of uncountable stars, has become an unimaginably vast, cold, dark and profoundly lonely place."

sucks... disembodied digital intelligence? better start downloading my brain onto my new 20 tetrabyte hard drive with super compression...

TIME.com - End of the Universe