Deep Time

Reading about cosmology can be kind of depressing. I don't see right off-hand how any of the possible outcomes are in any way pleasing. If the universe is sufficiently massive, expansion will slow down and stop, then the universe will begin to contract. Everything gets mashed together, ordinary light gets blue-shifted, X-rays and gamma rays bombard everything, and then everything gets compacted into a singularity in the so-called Big Crunch.

That's not so fun. Are there alternatives?

If the universe is insufficiently massive, the expansion continues forever, even accelerates under the influence of dark energy. Galaxies recede from one another and eventually pass from view entirely, stars die, everything becomes cold, dark, and impossibly far removed from everything else.

Well, that's not so fun either. Anyone got any other ideas?

Maybe expansion will accelerate to the point that space itself fails, ripping apart like a too-small latex glove on a too-large hand, in an unimaginable cataclysm called the Big Rip. I can't begin to imagine what that would be like, having space itself rip apart, but I don't think one needs to be The Amazing Kreskin to guess that it would be bad.

So where are the cosmological outcomes where everything remains more or less groovy in perpetuity? I confess that I always preferred the Steady-State Universe model on emotional grounds, which at least offers the notion that the universe is eternal and continually renewed. Too bad that it turned out to be wrong - among other things, it can't explain the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant. But on strictly emotional grounds, it seems a lot more palatable than any of the extrapolations of the Big Bang, all of which are about as cheerful as the movie Event Horizon. Without popcorn.