Rasputin, Durandal Rebooted? (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 15:20 (3352 days ago) @ General Battuta

Technically the Vex and Oryx want to escape the heat death via entropy in the universe. We know now the universe won't close, but will keep expanding forever, until all energy is uniformly distributed and no work can be done.

That's up in the air. For a long time we've actually believed the end state we were headed for was Big Rip - the accelerating expansion of the universe would reach a critical threshold and tear everything apart.

I think that consensus has been questioned lately but I haven't followed the research.

The current best guess is this:

In several billion years, the universe will collapse into it's lowest (or lower) energy state since we are most likely in a false vacuum. Studies on the Higgs suggest this very strongly. This would destroy everything in the universe at the speed of light making life impossible. After that, either the big rip or the big freeze as what remains continues to expand, grow apart, and go cold.

As for the big rip, it's not so much tearing everything apart as it is space eventually expanding faster than the speed of light at microscopic scales, making subatomic interactions impossible.