Around 14 billion years ago, a big bang happened, and out of it popped us, the hairy apes with huge egos. Those same overdeveloped monkeys have become so advanced that they have not only hypothesized the beginning but now, also the end date of the universe.
As a solar system, we only have so long before the sun expands and engulfs the closer planets. In around 4-5 billion years, the sun will destroy the Earth, making it uninhabitable. So, we have about that long to figure out interplanetary travel and terraforming.
Provided we have managed that, and the stars are open to our habitation, scientists say the next countdown we need to fear is the inevitable end of the universe.
That’s All Folks
The Big Bang is the name for the explosion that started the universe we live in. The end of the universe is creatively called the Big Crunch. The Big Bang is still making the universe expand outwards, but eventually, it’ll lose energy and start coming back in again, like an explosion.
We have only 33.3 billion years before the universe collapses enough and the whole thing ends. No more Netflix, no more Big Macs, no more mortgages. Just a return to the vast nothing that fills whatever lies outside the universe.
This Big Crunch is theorised to happen when the Dark energy that is constantly expanding, caused by the Big Bang, spreads too far. Once this happens, they presume that it will all snap back. The universe will end with a great collapse. Snap, back to the singularity.
“Whatever the nature of dark energy is, it will shape the future of our Universe,” Michael Levi from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said. “It’s pretty remarkable that we can look up at the sky with our telescopes and try to answer one of the biggest questions that humanity has ever asked.”
So, it turns out we only have around 33.3 billion years until this whole thing we call the universe comes to an end. It seems like a long time, but things like this really creep up on you.