Adramelech wrote...
The Universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate going against the laws of gravity.The force at work is dark matter and eventually our universe is going to be so spread out that no new stars or planets will be born.
That is only a theory, called the "Runaway Universe". Which in my opinion is wrong. For the runaway universe theory to be correct, it means that all dark energy has a constant rate of positive charge. But myself like many others who have studied physics do believe that dark energy would become negative. This would give dark matter a negative mass. Which means one thing, we expand and then we collapse. In approx 10-20 billion years, we will see that our universes expansion will stop as the positive dark energy begins to turn negative losing it's outward push and falling prey to gravity pulling everything back into a central mass.
Think about it this way. The central universe is a giant bubble, and our universe is a bubble that was produced by this bubble. Eventually our bubble will collapse and a new bubble will be made.
This is the new prevailing theory that physicists are adopting called "Big Crunch".
We have to remember that dark energy only operates at a quantum level, and at a quantum level, anything is possible.