When I was a kid in the sixties I often read up on astronomy. I would borrow books from the local library to supplement my meager resources (there being no internet in those dark times!) and got my first little telescope at around the time of the first Apollo landings. My Uncle Sam helped me mount it on a crude wooden pole that was inbedded in the back-yard at Killarney Heights, one that shook the delicate instrument in the slightest breeze!

Theories about the origins and likely outcome of the Universe were less well-developed then, with the Big Bang vying for at least a short while with the Steady State. The former is still in favour whilst the latter, which postulated that the Universe had always existed and was in a kind of equilibrium, was eventually shown the door. The observational evidence was simply too strong.

Today a far more developed version of the Big Bang Theory competes with a number of exotic options, our knowledge of space having expanded somewhat over the past 40 years. Lawrence Krauss's comment above reflects what we actually know now, how things stand at the present moment. He goes on to make some startling, though perfectly reasonable, conjectures. The dark sky that will greet our ancestors 5 billion years hence, should there be any, will replace the Sea of Heaven. The sparkling trail of great beauty that stretches across the nightly dome will be no more, though the planets and other objects of our Solar System will still be there, reflecting the light of the only star we can see, or ever know again, the Sun. The Moon will have parted company with the Earth (for entirely different reasons). Without artificial light it will be dark indeed.

But even when you cannot see, you can imagine. Memory too will play a part, with new mythologies and creation stories. But it is tricky, this getting to though the next 5 billion years, to reach a moment that we can barely grasp, at a time so changed in every way.

ps. See following post for mea culpa.