Unless something happens to reverse this expansion, within 150 billion years our Milky Way galaxy will become quite lonely, with 99.99999 percent of all the nearby galaxies speeding past the edge of the visible universe. The familiar galaxies in the night sky will be rushing so fast away from us that their light will never reach us. The galaxies themselves will not disappear, but they will be too far for our telescopes to observe them anymore. Although the visible universe contains approximately 100 billion galaxies, in 150 billion years only a few thousand galaxies in the local supercluster of galaxies will be visible. Even further in time, only our local group, consisting of about thirty-six galaxies, will comprise the entire visible universe, with billions of galaxies drifting past the edge of the horizon. (This is because the gravity within the local group is sufficient to overcome this expansion. Ironically, as the distant galaxies slip away from view, any astronomer living in this dark era may fail to detect an expansion in the universe at all, since the local group of galaxies itself does not expand internally. In the far future, astronomers analyzing the night sky for the first time might not realize that there is any expansion and conclude that the universe is static and consists of only thirty-six galaxies.)
The "smoking gun" that would finally verify or disprove the inflationary scenario are "gravity waves" that were produced at the instant of the big bang. These gravity waves, like the microwave background, should still be reverberating throughout the universe and may actually be found by gravity wave detectors, as we see in chapter 9.
The EPR experiment, although it does allow you to know something instantly about the other side of the galaxy, does not allow you to send a message in this way. You cannot, for example, send Morse code. In fact, an "EPR transmitter" would send only random signals, since the spins you measure are random each time you measure them. The EPR experiment allows you to acquire information about the other side of the galaxy, but it does not allow you to transmit information that is useful—that is, not random.)It forces us to hold a different picture of our universe. There is a cosmic "entanglement" between every atom of our body and atoms that are light-years distant. Since all matter came from a single explosion, the big bang, in some sense the atoms of our body are linked with some atoms on the other side of the universe in some kind of cosmic quantum web.
Some physicists have argued that before this occurs, we should be able to use advanced technology to move Earth to a larger orbit around the Sun, if we haven't already migrated from Earth to other planets in gigantic space arks. "As long as people get smarter faster than the Sun gets brighter, the Earth should thrive," remarks astronomer and writer Ken Croswell.During the several billion years before the Sun bloats into a red giant, our descendants could snare a passing star into an orbit around the Sun, then jettison the Earth from its solar orbit into an orbit around the new star," adds Croswell.
At this modest rate, we can estimate that our current civilization is approximately 100 to 200 years from attaining type I status. It will take us roughly 1,000 to 5,000 years to achieve type II status, and perhaps 100,000 to 1,000,000 years to achieve type III status. On such a scale, our civilization today may be classified as a type 0 civilization, because we obtain our energy from dead plants (oil and coal).
