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[Judas Maccabeus]

The Big Crunch. Eventually all matter in the universe will recompact, according to one theory.

A theory that's been discredited for about half a century, unfortunately.

(There is well below the amount of matter necessary for gravity to take hold according to the "Big Crunch" calculations, and that's before factoring in "dark energy", which is actually causing the universe's expansion to, apparently, increase.)

[blah28722]

There's also that one theory that everything is going to spread so far apart that everything becomes really cold and dark.

Universal Cold Death, I think.

[Vester]

The Big Crunch. Eventually all matter in the universe will recompact, according to one theory.

A theory that's been discredited for about half a century, unfortunately.

(There is well below the amount of matter necessary for gravity to take hold according to the "Big Crunch" calculations, and that's before factoring in "dark energy", which is actually causing the universe's expansion to, apparently, increase.)

Awwww I'm out of date.

That cold death thing sounds interesting though.

[TheNewerMartianEmperor]

So am I, curses. In any case, I believe that we shall achieve interdimentional travel before that becomes a problem.

[Vester]

(Pssst - don't bring up dimensions again. Things got messy and my head started to hurt)

But yeah, that's like 12 billion years away. Or more.

[Armok]

Nobody knows for sure how the universe will end, either in the big crunch, or in the heat death of the universe. The heath death of the universe does involve things getting further apart, but more importnantly it's abaut entropy reaching it's maximum, meaning time becomes esentaily a obsolate concept as it is defined by an increase in entropy. There is also the posibility of the big rip: the universe expands faster and faster due to dark matter and such, untill finaly first gravitational systems like galaxies and star systems, then chemical compuds and solid objects, and finally the very components of matter itself are riped apart by the rapidly stretching spacetime.

[TheNewerMartianEmperor]

It's so far away that we have no right to worry about it right now.

[Judas Maccabeus]

The amount of time before "the end" depends on what you expect to be ending.

Leaving aside the fact that the sun appears to be getting slightly hotter over time and thus within 1-2 billion years the oceans will boil away (or the fact that the earth is getting hotter on its own at an alarming rate *cough*), normal life on earth will become impossible around 5 billion years into the future when the sun either balloons out and swallows the earth, or (if it doesn't reach it) becomes a white dwarf that doesn't provide enough light and heat.

I'm going from memory here, but I believe it would take around 100 billion years for the universe to run out of enough hydrogen to make star formation impossible, from which point planets capable of sustaining life will become ever rarer and rarer.*

After that, we're talking timescales on the order of trillions of years, as black holes wander around swallowing everything/protons spontaneously decay/a few other random things.  Supposedly the black holes will decay eventually as well, but Hawking radiation is still rather debatable at the moment.  Okay, to be fair, the rest of these things aren't absolutely set in stone either, but most are still fairly well-supported.

I'm not a scientist myself, mind, so all this could itself be rather out-of-date by now.  Speculation on the future of the universe is running at a fast clip at the moment.
__________
*One thing to note is, that it seems possible for complex life** to exist on a planet around a red dwarf under ideal conditions.  Red dwarfs sustain their fusion reactions for a VERY long time.  Some for possibly a trillion years or more (in general, cooler and smaller stars live longer), though these are a bit less likely to be able to sustain life.  They also tend to produce loads of radiation, but that's why it's "seems" possible and not "definitely is" possible.
You wouldn't think something that's blood red/the colour of magma and called a "dwarf" would be good at sustaining life, but there you go.
**Simple life (archaeobacteria and the like) can live just about anywhere if it's adapted to it, the difficult part is getting it to form in the first place, though even that can occur in places more complex life would die a horrible, horrible death.

[Zironic]

The true end is in proton decay - protons literally falling apart - then after that - due to no new warmth (black holes disappear via quantem tunneling - run out of things to suck in and radiate away, suns are long gone) every single atomic particle slowly slows down until it reachs 0 K, absolute zero - no energy left. This takes you know 10^33 years. So really, We don't have to care.

[Jackrabbit]

Yes. The end of the universe is a closed book to me and it can stay that way.

[lastofthelight]

Speaking as someone with a degree in astrophysics, the whole dark energy thing is absurd. Usually, in good physics...or good modeling...when you make a prediction and you get the /sign/ wrong, you discard the entire model. Thats what we did with the acceleration of the universe thing, but we didn't discard the model...mostly because too many careers depend on it.

Also, the Supernovae study which measured the acceleration - assuming I remember properly -  had like 8 supernovae, 2 of which were discarded as statistical outliers. It was less 'good science' then it was 'quick science'.

[Zironic]

Isn't most science some what bullshit until one scientist comes along and turns theory into viewable and tangible fact. Like Oppenhiemer to Einstein.

[lastofthelight]

I think there is a distinct difference between types of bullshit. Einstein was revolutionary in the sense that he was a heretic. He destroyed many, many careers and overturned a lot of common sense. What he said was, by the standards of the time, rubbish. The only thing it had going for it was that it was true.

There is a difference between a revolutionary paradigm that destroys careers and leads us in new thoughts and new directions, and a revolutionary paradigm that does not lead us in new thoughts or new directions, but has a function equivalent to duct-tape. It holds faulty things together so old, important men can keep their tenure and reputation.

Frankly, at least half of all professional scientific journal articles published these days (at least in physics and chemistry, which is what I keep up with) are bullshit, meant less to 'discover' anything then to make someone look good.

[Solifuge]

I think there is a distinct difference between types of bullshit. Einstein was revolutionary in the sense that he was a heretic. He destroyed many, many careers and overturned a lot of common sense. What he said was, by the standards of the time, rubbish. The only thing it had going for it was that it was true.

There is a difference between a revolutionary paradigm that destroys careers and leads us in new thoughts and new directions, and a revolutionary paradigm that does not lead us in new thoughts or new directions, but has a function equivalent to duct-tape. It holds faulty things together so old, important men can keep their tenure and reputation.

Frankly, at least half of all professional scientific journal articles published these days (at least in physics and chemistry, which is what I keep up with) are bullshit, meant less to 'discover' anything then to make someone look good.

If a scientist is more concerned with their career and reputation than research and discovery, then they are hardly scientists. They've lost sight of the purpose of their career, which is to further our understanding... at that point, their career is merely a title, not a commitment.

As an aside, this is oddly similar to a religious person, or even a Holy Woman/Man, who are more interested with the ritualized aspects of their practice, or even position or power in the Church, that they lose sight of the values and truths on which their religion was founded.

[Leafsnail]

Sorry, but I'm gonna actually respond to the initial post.  Anyway, I think that consciousness simply ends when you die.  After all, your brain is gone, your brain stops working.  It may be difficult to imagine, but it happens every night when you go to sleep.

There is, I suppose, a possibility that "consciousness" moves on to someone else, or possibly just goes back to the start of your life.  If this does happen, however, your memories would be gone, as they are stored within the brain, and therefore "You" (the collection of memories and cultural things that create your personality) would be irretrievably lost.