You might think a Bush win in November would be the end of the world, but according to some scientists, the world will last until about three months before the end of the universe:
This version of doomsday would start slowly. Then, billions of years from now, as phantom energy increased its push and the cosmic expansion accelerated, more and more galaxies would start to disappear from the sky as their speeds reached the speed of light.Dr. Caldwell's doomsday agenda? There's gotta be a Jerry Bruckheimer film in there somewhere. But actually the article lists this as only one possible cosmic demise - exactly which one we get depends on the constant w, whose value is somewhere between -0.8 and -1.25.But things would not stop there. Some billions of years from now, depending on the exact value of w, the phantom force from the phantom energy will be enough to overcome gravity and break up clusters of galaxies. That will happen about a billion years before the Big Rip itself.
After that the apocalypse speeds up. About 900 million years later, about 60 million years before the end, our own Milky Way galaxy will be torn apart. Three months before the rip, the solar system will fly apart. The Earth will explode when there is half an hour left on the cosmic clock.
The last item on Dr. Caldwell's doomsday agenda is the dissolution of atoms, a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a second before the Big Rip ends everything.
MORE: Speaking of scientists, this has to be pretty embarassing...
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