However, it seems likely to me that the velocity of expansion, like everything else in nature, goes in cycles. We are accelerating now, but who's to say we won't be slowing down and contracting in the future. Eventually, there will be a Big Crunch, then another Big Bang, and Slog will begin anew.

anyway, though i am in no position to argue with the theory of the end of cosmology, i do think it is a bit of hubris to expect that more of the mysteries of the universe will not be untangled in the distant future.

though the universe will look completely different and current clues to origins will be erased, what is to say new clues will not be uncovered?

perhaps a distant (in space, in time) intelligence will uncover the mystery of time's arrow, will discover the string and M-threories' other dimensions, will experimentally validate what our time calls a Higgs Field...

and in doing so find other means of unlocking the puzzles that lie at the creation of the current universe.

and i'm not sure we really "know" it even then...

The quickening expansion will eventually pull galaxies apart faster than light, causing them to drop out of view.

Unless this article is challenging the theory of special relativity and everything we know about how light travels, this is more of the same overly simplified pseudo-science that's pretty common from Scientific American.

Light travels at a constant speed, regardless of the speed of its origin. Light is also observed at a constant speed to all observers, regardless of their respective speeds.

If galaxy A is moving left at 0.5c and galaxy B is moving right at 0.5c, the light leaving galaxy A still moves at 1.0c and will catch up to galaxy B. It will be red-shifted, though.

If I'm reading it correctly, the article is saying the galaxies *will* actually approach the speed of light. It's different than someone throwing a baseball 30mph from a car moving 30mph in the opposite direction, though, where the baseball would end up with zero net velocity. It's not that the photons will be left standing still due to the galaxy moving close to the speed of light (since light travels at a constant speed regardless of the source velocity), it's just that they will be red-shifted into something non-observable, or at least something completely non-cogent. Page 4 has the goods:

Just as the event horizon of a black hole emits radiation, so, too, does our cosmological event horizon. Yet the temperature associated with this radiation is unmeasurably small, about 10–30 kelvin. Even if astronomers were able to detect it, they would probably attribute it to some other, far larger local source of noise.

The author's tendency to sensationalize the trickle of ultra-red-shifted radiation into a "void" of "nothingness" is merely a consequence of Scientific American being a somewhat silly pop-sci periodical.

Hope this helps.

OK, but it's my completely amateurish understanding that traveling faster than the speed of light is impossible.

but there is this Proust at the end of Remembrance of Things Past:

"...to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is alloted to them in space, a place on the contrary immoderately prolonged--- for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days-- in the dimension of time."

fwiw