Great News Y’all! The Universe Is Much Closer To Collapsing Than We Previously Thought

How’s your week been, dudes? Shitty? Awful? Terrible? I can’t imagine it has been anything close to approximating ‘Good.’ I know mine certainly hasn’t.

But cheer up. For I come bearing fine tidings. The Universe, the maker of all things, the be all and end all of our feeble, futile, frustrating existence, is much closer to collapsing upon itself than we previously thought.

Nice.

So skip work, light up a smoke and light up another smoke. Who knows? The heavens could come crashing down at any minute, crushing you and everything that ever existed. A new paper believes the end times are coming sooner than we thought, according to Phys.org (well, in ten billion years, but that’s soon when you think about the scale of the universe).

Physicists have proposed a mechanism for “cosmological collapse” that predicts that the universe will soon stop expanding and collapse in on itself, obliterating all matter as we know it.

Sext.

Their calculations suggest that the collapse is “imminent”—on the order of a few tens of billions of years or so—which may not keep most people up at night, but for the physicists it’s still much too soon.

Why are physicists getting all hot and ornery about this? They of all people should be fine with the laws of physics acting in accordance with … well, the laws of physics. But no, they are worried.

“The present epoch of acceleration may be evidence of impending doom. . . A detailed analysis to better quantify these predictions is certainly warranted,” said the author of a new paper, Antonio Padilla at the University of Nottingham

Why is this bruising death going to happen? Because I guess the universe is expanding too much?

According to the [cosmological  mechanism], the universe originated under a set of specific initial conditions so that it naturally evolved to its present state of acceleration and will continue on a path toward collapse. In this scenario, once the collapse trigger begins to dominate, it does so in a period of “slow roll” that brings about the accelerated expansion we see today. Eventually the universe will stop expanding and reach a turnaround point at which it begins to shrink, culminating in a “big crunch.”

Unfortunately, no one knows just what the Big Crunch may look like. Everything could condense into one super massive black hole ending time forever, or it could happen with such force that at the precise, final moment of complete collapse, all the matter explodes back out in a ‘new big bang’ and the universe starts again.

Which means we will have this conversation again in approximately 28 billion years. See you then. I bet it will suck.