Talk of how and when the world might end has always fascinated scientists and sparked curiosity among the public.
For decades, researchers believed the universe would expand forever, slowly stretching into a cold, empty void. But new findings suggest that vision of the future may be changing.
Scientists studying data from multiple cosmic surveys have noticed that dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe’s growth, might be weakening.
This shift has led to a chilling theory: the universe could one day reverse course and collapse in on itself, a scenario experts are calling a “cosmic hell.”
Dr Ethan Yu–Cheng from Shanghai Jiao Tong University offered a simple analogy, saying,
“It is just like throwing a basketball vertically upwards. The negative cosmological constant acts like Earth’s gravity, which pulls the basketball downward. The basketball will deaccelerate until reaching the maximum height and start to fall.”
The study, led by scientists from Cornell University and other institutions, suggests the universe’s expansion will peak in the distant future before beginning to contract.
Henry Tye, one of the lead researchers, warned that this event, known as the “Big Crunch,” could unfold far sooner than many once believed. “The Big Crunch could begin in around 11 billion years and would take another 8.5 billion years to complete,” he explained.
While that timeline may seem unimaginably far off, experts have already begun to question what this would mean for life. Dr Hoang Nhan Luu said, “Intelligent civilizations at the scales of solar systems or even galactic scales would not notice any obvious phenomenon because these changes happen at much larger cosmological scales.”
Even so, some believe preparation is possible. Tye added, “To survive, human beings have to move to the edge of our solar system or beyond. We have a few billion years’ time to prepare for that trip.”
The unsettling truth is that the universe may not drift into endless expansion after all. Instead, it could collapse in a slow but unstoppable countdown leaving mankind’s distant descendants facing the ultimate end in a devastating “cosmic hell.”
Featured image: (Canva)
