Neil deGrasse Tyson’s nightmare

Posted on January 4, 2022

I already wrote some of my thoughts about Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, but there’s one thing I didn’t mention in that post that I’ve still been thinking about.

On a chapter about Dark Energy, Neil is talking about how the universe is expanding. That part I knew.

He goes on to say that in a trillion years, the universe will have expanded so much that people will not realize that there are other galaxies because they will be too far away by then. People will only be able to see a few stars in the Milky Way and after that will just be darkness. That’s interesting.

Then he says,

Behold my recurring nightmare: Are we, too, missing some basic pieces of the universe that once were? What part of the cosmic history book has been “access denied”?

That’s the part I’ve been thinking about.