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The Universe is expanding, rapidly from the big bang still. At some point, it will slow down, and then stop. Then begins a catastrophic cycle of collapse with massive black holes coalescing into one universe eating black hole that compresses every bit of matter into a single point of almost infinite density. At this point the black hole destabilizes, and all of the stored energy is released in one colossal explosion. A Big Bang of sorts.
The Universe is an Ouroboros.
There's no proof the universe will end in a Big Crunch. Apparently there's some measure of the universe where if it's less than 1, we'll get a Big Crunch, and if it's greater than 1, we'll get a Big Rip where everything just falls apart. I may have those backwards, but the important thing is when it's exactly 1, it implies a universe that continues forever, getting colder and colder. And as best as science can determine for our universe, the value is precisely that.
But here's another, well, dimension to that: There's a popular but unprovable conjecture that our universe is the inside of a black hole that exists in a higher-level universe. In our universe, black holes boil away due to Hawking radiation, a process that can take trillions of years for very large black holes.
Once the black hole we're inside of stops consuming matter in the level above, that spells a very slow but alternative end to our universe. One day it will simply cease to exist.
"This the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper." -- T.S.Eliot.
That is interesting but I reject the alternate theories of the Big Rip and the Silent Extinction because they are scary and I don't like them.
I've become a fan of the "We're already in a black hole" theory. The Schwarzschild radius for the mass of the known universe is larger than the radius thereof.
It's probably not correct but I do like it.
Sometimes I think our universe is just an explosion in a big ass combustion engine.
So everytime I drive a car I create and destroy countless universes just to get some nuggets. Worth it.
Somehow I find the Big Crunch more comforting than Big Rip...
All of the current scientific evidence disagrees with this. 1) There is a velocity such that you can go faster than gravity will be able to slow you down: escape velocity. So, it's possible even without any new, weird physics. 2) The hubble constant shows that the universe isn't slowing down, but the opposite: it's accelerating. Physics doesn't know why (see Dark Energy). It's physically measurable that things farther away are accelerating even faster scaling with distance.