I know. You’re supposed to start these things with the bad news so as to make the good news seem better, but believe me, it’s just more fun to approach this one the other way around.
So with that in mind…
The good news: You know that whole mysterious thing about how the most distant parts of the universe are accelerating? Remember how it threw so much scientific thinking into disarray? Remember all the problems and confusion it caused? Well, the good news is that maybe the outer edges of the universe aren’t really accelerating at all. Some clever scientists have come up with an alternative explanation.
Which leads us to…
The bad news: So, okay, their alternate explanation is that time itself may be slowing down. At first, time slowing down doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. But it’s one of those things that sort of catches up with you eventually. Still, it probably isn’t something that we need to get all that worked up about:
In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether – and everything will stop.
“Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Prof Senovilla tells New Scientist magazine. “Our planet will be long gone by then.”
So to recap: the good news is that maybe the universe isn’t weird in a way that we thought, and the bad news is that maybe it’s weird in a completely different way that will eventually be the end of everything. But the other good news is that this will only be a problem for those of us planning to live many billions of years. And since most of us planning to do that a also plan to end up functioning in a different substrate — probably silicon, for starters — we can look forward to much faster mental function, which will give us a bit of a subjective offset where time coming to an end is concerned.
Plus, we can’t rule out subjective immortality kicking in there somewhere down the line. Could happen. We just need to get it started at some point before that final tick of the Big Ticking Clock.
Oh, well. Nothing like a deadline to inspire productivity, I suppose.
