Quote - i hate to alienate those whose "side" i'm on but i have to mention something about science.

science boosters tend to have the opinion that science is proving things and talk about what science knows.  they're pretty secure in this position.  i think this is an error.  science is not about what is known.  science is an admission that things are unknown, and that even today's comfortable "facts" will become yesterday's misinformation or disproven scientific theory.

I agree mostly with what you said, but I didn't want a full page for a quote so I cut it. ;-)

RE what science knows and doesn't know, I was watching a lecture on teh interwebs by an astrophysicist from the University of Arizona (I think it was UA), and he was talking about how we came about our knowledge of the universe in terms of modern science and the history of astronomy and physics and all that.
Pretty interesting stuff if you're into all that. ;-)

So anyway, he said that 100 billion years from now, which will still be long before the universe has died from chronic entropy, all the galaxies of the universe will have moved so far apart, not even the strongest and best radio telescopes any civilization could ever have, will be able to see them.
Obviously Earth and its sun will have been long dead by that point, but any civilization anywhere will have this problem , since all the matter clusters (galaxies and galaxy clusters)of the universe have been all moving away from each other and accelerating since the Big Bang.

And the problem is that there will be a "wall" of impenetrable radiation between anybody's position anywhere in the universe and all the other galaxies which is what will make it impossible to see anything.

So, an astronomer on any planet anywhere in the universe 100 billion years from now will see only his own galaxy's stars and nothing else. Even his civilization's most powerful radio telescopes will show nothing but utter nothingness "out there". Their own galaxy will give them all they need in terms of observation and testing to determine all the basic laws of physics, and they will be able to speculate of course, but they will never be able to come to the Big Bang conclusion definitively - there will be no supporting evidence whatsoever about how the universe began or even IF  it ever had a beginning.

I thought that was all pretty interesting. If we were in that situation now, our universe would for all intents and purposes be utterly empty, aside from us and our own little galaxy, floating along in a vast sea of nothingness with no idea how large it is, and no idea how it began, and no way to determine it.

The religious people of the far far future will have a much easier time convincing people of their own versions of Creationism, and science won't ever be able to refute it. ;-)

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