jeffbridges:

I’m not one of those Christians who condemns evolution, or thinks that God put dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith—I don’t think humans ever ran screaming from a T-Rex. However, I think it’s important to consider the limits to the kind of knowledge we get from various ways of knowing, including science.

Take, for instance, the edges of our universe. As Columbia professor of physics and mathematics Brian Greene points out in his New York Times piece, “Darkness on the Edge of the Universe,” we can only see as far out from our planet as light can travel in the amount of time the universe has existed. For example, if the universe were five light years across, but had only existed for one year, then only objects one light year away or closer would be visible to us—meaning a great deal of the universe would simply be unobservable.

To complicate matters, according to Greene the universe is currently expanding at an ever increasing rate, meaning that eventually space itself will be so big that distant stars will move away so quickly and so far from us that they’ll simply disappear. Eventually, this will lead to a night sky entirely devoid of starlight. (Don’t worry, our sun will have almost assuredly burned itself out by then, and our great-grandchildren will have long since passed away.)

Future astronomers, then, will be left to wonder whether to believe stories of night skies filled with twinkling celestial lights, or to trust their own observations of an “island” solar system—an observation we now know to be factually wrong. (more after the jump…)

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