/lit/ - Literature

>"As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years, Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will no longer be visible from one another. […] Upon reaching that moment, it will no longer be possible to understand the universe’s history—or perhaps even that it had one—as all evidence of a broader cosmos outside of one’s own galaxy will have forever disappeared. Cosmology itself will be impossible. […] In such a radically expanded future universe, Reynolds continued, some of the most basic insights offered by today’s astronomy will be unavailable. After all, he points out, ‘you can’t measure the redshift of galaxies if you can’t see galaxies. And if you can’t see galaxies, how do you even know that the universe is expanding? How would you ever determine that the universe had had an origin?’"

>Reynolds was drawing upon an article entitled “The End of Cosmology?” by Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, published in Scientific American (2008). This article summarized itself in the sub-head: “An accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origins.”

The extrapolation can be pushed further. If a far-future scientific culture can be seen to be structurally-deprived of evidence essential for realistic appraisal of cosmic scale, can we be confident our situation is fundamentally different? Is it not more probable that the absolute or unsurpassable locality of scientific perspective is a basic situation? How likely is it that we can see universally — in principle — when we can already see how others will in the future be unable to? On the basis of available evidence, we have to envisage a future civilization that is utterly deluded about its own structural parochialism, confident in its ability to finally shrug off perspectival limitation. The most esteemed scientific minds in such a culture might be expected to dismiss any suggestion of inaccessible cosmic regions as groundless metaphysics. It seems merely hubristic to refrain from turning this scenario back upon ourselves. If universal cosmology is to become impossible, the default hypothesis should be that it already has.[2]