The Big Rip, the Ultimate Heat Death of the Universe

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In the heat death scenario, everything starts to rip apart. The universe has a tiny amount of radiation in it that is the waste heat of everything and that's it. Everything is so far apart that there's no like nothing can jump start anything. But really all of this depends on what dark energy actually is. We could just be fundamentally wrong about so much here.

In the early 1900s, Henrietta Leavitt made one of the most important discoveries in the history of astronomy: a yardstick to measure distances to faraway stars. Using this tool, scientists eventually transformed our understanding of the universe. They realized space was expanding, that this expansion was accelerating, and that ultimately, everything will end.

This episode originally ran on June 30, 2021.

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