Not in fire, but in ice, said the poet Robert Frost, and up until recently, cosmologists have been agreeing with him.

But guess what? It looks like it's probably going to be fire after all.

Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Little here with Steve Green and Scott Ott.

And new results in from Cornell University.

These things are fundamental to the structure of the universe, the Big Bang Theory and so on.

And the big question is, is there enough stuff in the universe for there to be enough

gravitational pull to stop the expansion and eventually lead back to a collapse?

And now there's some new data that says, no, it is actually going to be enough of this stuff.

And it will end up stop expanding and then collapse back into a giant crunch, a big crunch,

and a big fireball. And I find this to be extremely comforting.

No, Bill, I was, that's exactly where I was going to go with this. And I'll tell you why.

There's a remarkable video on YouTube by a remarkable channel called Melody Sheep,

and it's called a time lapse of the future, and it's a journey to the end of time.

And in this video, it's making the assumption, which was apparently about 109 million views, too.

At the time it was recorded, it was believed that the universe would continue to expand

forever. And when you see how time just runs out, and it's like a logarithmic scale, and what you

end up with is, to condense it, imagine that there's a million-year period, and at the start of that

million-year period, there's a photographic strobe, and that is the total

existence of life period.

And everything else in that million years is just the gradual cooling and decaying and

neutron death.

It's the most bleak and depressing possible future, and and it it simply goes on forever this whole

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