Raise your hand if you live in a stable universe thats rapidly expanding to support its own vastness.
Not so fast Earthlings.
We might have an end-game level crunch-time problem on our hands.
Up front:Everyones heard of the Big Bang.
And long-time Neural readers will certainly be familiar withthe Big Rip.
But its long past time we talked about theBig Crunch.
This hypothetical event would be our universes final act.
It would essentially be the exact opposite of the Big Bang.
Findingnothingwould be a difficult pill to swallow.
More background:The Big Crunch is, of course, only theoretical.
But the recent discovery of these dark matter-free galaxies could lend some credence to the idea.
This is because many scientists believe thatdark energy and dark mattermake up the majority of the universe.
We believe our universe started expanding the moment the Big Bang happened and hasnt stopped since.
And we believe that this expansion is fueled by dark energy.
Dark matter (theoretically) works diametrically to dark energy.
Its believed to be a force that holds space together.
Its a pretty good bet than anything living wouldnt survive the Big Crunch.
And the lack of dark matter in observable galaxies could be a major cause for concern.
An unstable or even mostly stable universe could be potentially catastrophic for the future of its inhabitants.
This may have something to do with the fact that the universe hates entropy.
According to Sutter:
The apparent metastability of the quantum fields of the universe is a little unsettling.
This sounds like a form oferror-correctionat a fundamentally universal level.
Sutter hypothesizes such a transformation could be entirely mundane, leaving our observations of the universe mostly unchanged.
Ultimately, this could be nothing.
Science is hard and sometimes the answers to big exciting questions are boring.
Maybe the dark matter is there and we just arent looking for it the right way.
This process could have already begun.
That region of new universe would then propagate outward at nearly the speed of light through the old universe.
The Big Crunch, or some other universe-altering event, could be happeningright now.
And wed have no way of knowing when its effects would reach our neck of the cosmos.
It could be trillions of years from now or before you finish reading this sentence.
Glad were all still here.
Maybe our entire universe is justa time crystalexpanding and contracting inside a giant quantum computer.
