How can an universe loop? It needs to be a circle / ball in my opinion, and when we fly through the universe and we really move straight forward we could rech the end in theory. To "avoid" this there might be a think which attracts the space shuttle so it automaticly moves in a circle...

Except that it doesn't work like that. There's no force that checks if you're close to the edge of the universe, and if you are, pulls you back/away. Spacetime itself could be shaped oddly (we'd never be able to tell). The consequence of this might lead to a "repeatable" universe, though I highly doubt that would be testable on any degree. The amount of time it would take to traverse even just the galaxy is very large. I remember reading a book that calculated it as several million earth years time to reach the galactic center and back. A World out of Time by Larry Niven, it was. Great read btw.

Even barring time constraints, some of the more far galaxies are receding at a rate faster than the speed of light, so in order to get there, you'd have to travel faster than the speed of light, which under current theory is impossible.

According to common theory, the big bang started everything. Since then, stuff has been flying away from everything else--expanding. What happens when you release the pressure in a compressed air tank? Cold air comes out...meaning that when the pressure/volume drops, so will temperature.

What's stopping space from doing exactly that? It flies further apart--getting further away from other heat sources. Space, as a whole, has been and will continue to be, cooling down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

It'll take something on the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years to achieve total heat death. I don't think we have anything to worry about.

Haven't you heard of redshifting? It's the Doppler Effect: waveforms lengthen as they lose energy by traveling across the universe, and we know that certain types of supernova and stars emit constant levels of energy. By measuring the changes in their wavelengths, we know how far they are.

Saying you're "not buying it" on scientific discoveries pretty much discloses how unscientific you think about the world: if you just ignore facts because of your "gut feeling" you might as well eat lead paint because you don't "believe" in modern medicine.

Also, recent research has found that if you draw a triangle over the universe the angles add up to 180, it's not on a curved surface, so far as it shows now, it is indeed flat.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 27 2009, 11:40 pm by The Great Yam.

You're gonna need either a bunch of pens or a huge amount of lead...

I didn't look at the article, but I'm guessing it mentions that it's the basic result of entropy in a closed system. Assuming that the universe keeps expanding as it is now, the total heat energy on any given planet won't be very far off 0ºK...meaning that it will take a very long time, but it's the surest thing to kill off our 10^100th ancestor.

Thing is, we can't assume that the universe is a closed system. Something could be adding energy (or taking away for that matter) to the universe.

It sure as hell acts like one...but until someone observes the nearest universe [would be like discovering a black hole in my backyard--minus the gravity killing the entire Earth], I'm going to run theories under the possibility that our universe is alone.

Judging the way it's expanding, however, we won't know in our lifetime if ours is the only one. There's apparently a lot of space outside our atmosphere, and it just keeps getting more immense.

Actually, poison, it relies on creating a triangle from points of light from high-energy supernovae. It is fairly assured.

However, it may be so slightly curved and massive that we simply cannot observe the curve over this distance (as the observed universe is likely not the full universe).

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 29 2009, 3:13 am by The Great Yam.