@firstanointed: Regarding 1, that would be pretty amazing for a mammal.

@DaFron: @corpore-metal: More importantly, are orphans, malnutrition, and starvation scientific problems or political problems? In fact, world agriculture produces enough food to feed everyone, if allocated judiciously. The problem of hunger, at least for now, is one of distribution.

It's the Life Stream!

@Brangdon: I'm sorry you can't follow the reasoning.

@Brangdon: You're making a lot of assumptions.

@Manly McBeeferton: 'Fraid not. See several posts from earlier.

@nygenxer: I only heard about this a few months ago. It's really awesome that it's already in popular media.

@nygenxer: That completely makes sense, and was in fact exactly what I was wondering about.

@8x10: No. The Big Bang is the term for the origin of the expansion of the universe. The article presents a good deal of evidence supporting this theory. It is saying explicitly that the expansion is happening everywhere with no designated origin.

@tetracycloide: Yes. Like I said, "It's completely transparent except for its gravitational effects." These gravitational effects are observed both directly through phenomena like gravitational lensing and indirectly through the impact on the rotational velocity of galaxies.

@8x10: Sorry, I don't know where you heard that. It's not true. See, for example the [en.wikipedia.org] article. Read in particular the section "Hubble's law and the expansion of space".

@nygenxer: Well, that's a bummer! Still, isn't it possible that there's some maximum of photon flux between this time and the end (other than right now)?

@doctorhow: Thank you! I honestly have no idea how I received the star to begin with....

@Brangdon: I think the question is about how bright our sky (or what constitutes our sky billions of years from now) would be. In that case it's quite reasonable to consider deflection of photons. The distribution of matter and energy in the universe is not isotropic, so there's no reason to believe that the…

@quoththecraven: Yes, I think that's possible, at least with classical gravity.

@8x10: Actually, the "Big Bang" happened everywhere. There is no center.

@Mr_Academic: It's based on cosmology. Hopefully a cosmologist around here could answer this question more definitively, but here's why I suspect a finite universe model doesn't work.

@mariospants: I've heard people state quite confidently that the blackness of space is caused by "dark matter" and "dark energy"

@n3onkn1ght: It's dark because it doesn't interact with light. It's completely transparent except for its gravitational effects.

@doctorhow: I think that this depends on the rate of expansion of the universe. It's possible that the sky becomes darker because the flux of photons decreases.