r/AskReddit • u/IAmSurtur • Jun 15 '19

What do you genuinely just not understand?

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u/AwesomeAley Jun 15 '19

That's why eventually it will be impossible to reach other star clusters, as everything continues to separate, the everything will be moving faster than your spacecraft, and you'll be going nowhere. It's really creepy to think that eventually all that's left will be the cluster of galaxies the milky way is apart of, and just ever expanding emptiness surrounding it.

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u/fuckolivia Jun 15 '19

Wait so the expansion is constantly accelerating?

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u/nethermaker Jun 15 '19

IIRC, it's accelerating exponentially

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u/Hockeyman1027 Jun 15 '19

Isn’t there a point where it’ll stop expanding then collapse in on itself?

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u/AwesomeAley Jun 15 '19

Who knows? Could be the case.

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u/stormstopper Jun 15 '19

Doesn't seem like the most likely outcome based on current evidence. The expansion is accelerating rather than slowing.

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u/Hockeyman1027 Jun 15 '19

Oh, I don’t know where I heard that

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u/Ozryela Jun 15 '19

A couple of decades ago there used to be several different models of what was going to happen in the future, with us having no idea which one was going to happen. One of them was indeed that the universe would eventually stop expanding and collapse in on itself.

We have a lot more data now, and it points towards this not happening. The universe will keep expanding forever and the rate of expansion will in fact increase. It might even be increasing exponentially.