Harvard Physicists Say They've Calculated the Exact Day the Universe Will End

Nothing lasts forever, not even the universe itself. Whether its sentient evil AI that comes to destroy us or a giant Higgs-Boson world-ending void bubble that may already be traveling to devour Earth at the speed of light, as Stephen Hawking predicted, we all know humanity has an expiration date.

But now, according to a group of theoretical physicists, we know the exact date. In an effort to figure out exactly when all of known creation will cease to exist, theoretical physicists have undertaken an experiment to assess when the laws of physics themselves will start to deteriorate, because, apparently, even something as simple as electromagnetic energy has a shelf life.

As it turns out, we've only got 10139 years left until everything breaks down and the rules of our universe stop applying in the same way that they do now.

Even sooner, though, is the likely moment that our universe itself will pop: Scientists involved with the study are 95 percent sure that we're 1058 years away from the end of the universe. So, if you've got that book you've been meaning to read or a jigsaw puzzle to complete, now you have your deadline set in stone.

Describing the recent research, Anders Andreassen of Harvard University has such a calm, the cool manner that it almost makes it sound as if he's picking a date for a dinner with friends, rather than for the moment of doomsday itself:

"We wanted to fix all the previous approximations and get the exact date as pinned down as we could."

Perhaps Andreassen is hoping to visit Milliways, Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, wobbles back and forth over the cataclysmic event in a special time traveling bubble, so that guests can enjoy a meal against the backdrop of exploding stars. This, of course, assumes that the entire event occurs in one big bang, which might not be the case.

In a time when the very rules of the universe stop making the sense, it's hard to predict that exactly what will happen either way, but the scientists have a good theory as to what might finally finish things off. Apparently, when this happens and the universe goes bang, we'll have God to thank for it.

Or, at least, the God Particle. Apparently, when things go south for this particular universe, it could well be thanks to our good friend, the elusive Higgs-Boson particle.

Apparently, the fate of the universe relies on the Higgs-Boson not dropping in mass—if, in years and years to come, the particle forms in an even lighter state, it would collapse, and generate an enormous bubble of negative energy which would swallow our universe up.

The God Particle giveth; the God Particle taketh away. There's a lot of guesswork surrounding this entire issue at present. We don't know exactly how the Higgs-Boson behaves and whether it might be capable of acting in the way the physicists involved with this study suspect.

Ultimately, as much as we'd like to figure out every nitty-gritty reality of the universe's ultimate demise, there's plenty of science at play right now throughout the cosmos that we still haven't learned to understand, and until we make sense of these rules, we won't be able to accurately predict when the universe will end.

This is probably for the best. The only people who really need to know what time the end of the universe will come, are the ones who are trying to make dinner reservations at Milliways.