gullybogan

Dear Reader,

You have probably heard by now that the Universe is doomed.

Technically, it’s only the Knowable Universe that’s doomed. The Unknowable Universe is doing something that’s destroying it.

And we don’t know what. Know why?

Because whatever it’s doing is unknowable.

I first heard about this the way i get all my news about science: from webcomics.

XKCD ran a strip based on the discovery that every galactic supercluster in the Known (aka ‘Visible’) Universe was being sucked towards a point in the sky near the constellation Centaurus at two million miles per second.

We don’t know what’s doing the sucking, and we *can’t* know. Ever.

Does that freak you out? It freaks me out.

Here’s how it works (as i understand it):

1. The Known (Visible) Universe began at a single point in space-time with a sudden explosion we call the Big Bang;
2. The K(V)U spread out from that point at pretty much the speed of light;
3. The Big Bang was about 13.7 billion years ago;
4. This means that – since we’re somewhere near the middle of the K(V)U – we can only ’see’ (using either optical or radio telescopes) about 13.7 billion light years in any direction;
5. Beyond that is the Unknowable (Invisible) Universe;
6. There is something in the U(I)U that is so supermassive that it’s attracting all the galactic superclusters in the K(V)U toward it;
7. It is entirely possible that our K(V)U is simply a bubble of dust particles in a much, much larger system that we cannot see.

Which freaks me out.

The girls tried to reassure me that it was OK, and that we don’t have to worry about anything happening in our lifetimes.

Sure. Tell that to the amoeba living in the water inside that water balloon that they burst in super slo-mo on YouTube.

For all we know, our K(V)U is like an egg plummeting toward some footpath somewhere in the U(I)U.

I was getting exasperated at their apparent inability to feel the terror that any sentient being should be experiencing in the face of this awful knowledge. So Sybylla calmed me down by promising me that – assuming there was time – if the K(V)U bursts open like an exploding water balloon, she and Princess’ll and me’ll threesome our way into oblivion on the front lawn as space-time rents asunder in the sky above us.

So, brightside.

Yours,
Gullybogan