THE UNIVERSE MIGHT LAST FOREVER, ASTRONOMERS SAY, BUT LIFE MIGHT NOT from The New York Times
In the decades that astronomers have debated the fate of the expanding universe - whether it will all end one day in a big crunch, or whether the galaxies will sail apart forever - aficionados of eternal expansion have always been braced by its seemingly endless possibilities for development and evolution. As the Yale cosmologist Dr. Beatrice Tinsley once wrote, "I think I am tied to the idea of expanding forever." Life and intelligence could sustain themselves indefinitely in such a universe, even as the stars winked out and the galaxies were all swallowed by black holes, Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, argued in a landmark paper in 1979. "If my view of the future is correct," he wrote, "it means that the world of physics and astronomy is also inexhaustible; no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory." Now, however, even Dr. Dyson admits that all bets are off. If recent astronomical observations are correct, the future of life and the universe will be far bleaker. Full article at: <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/01/science/01END.html>
