The discovery of a rapidly expanding cosmos, which won the 2011 Nobel physics prize for three astronomers, suggests that the universe is going to hell. Through their study of exploding stars, Americans Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess showed that the universe is cooling as it expands and will end in ice, similar to the Ninth Circle of Hell envisioned in Dantes Inferno. In this deepest and final level of the nether world, traitors, including Judas Iscariot and the devil himself, are frozen in a lake of ice. The work of the Nobel Prize winners contributed to the theory of dark energy, a kind of inverse gravity that causes the expansion of the cosmos to accelerate. Dark energy and dark matter may comprise 95 percent of the universe. If scientific theories about this dark force hold true, there will be little doubt that the universe belongs to the Prince of Darkness.
You haven't been to my living room, so how would you know what dark forces lurk there? I do have uranium atoms in my living room.
I'm not sure describing it as hell is accurate, but all available existing evidence is that the universe will end in what's known as the Big Freeze. About 100 Billion years from now, it will have expanded to the extent that light from other galaxies, and the cosmic background radiation will no longer be visible from the Milky Way. (I don't say Earth, because it will have been devoid of life by about 96 billion years by then, and unless we figure out how to find another planet, humanity will be extinct. If the information we now know about the universe (that other galaxies exist, and that there was a big bang) is lost, any intelligent species that exist in the Milky Way will have no possible way of ever recovering that information. From their perspective, the Milky Way galaxy (in it's merged with Andromeda form) will be the only one in an infinite cosmos of nothingness. Countless billions of years after that, as there becomes less and less star formation, eventually the last ever will form, and die, and the entire galaxy will slowly, over millenia, cool to just about absolute zero. Cold, and dark, and lifeless for as long as the simulation continues to run.
The universe will continue as long as quantum foam exists to form hydrogen. If anything the universe will expand, although the part that exists now will deteriorate. BTW, our solar system isn't originally a part of the Milky Way. Therefore we can't say that there is life other than ours in the Milky Way.
Well Dante's Inferno was a work of fiction and has no bearing on what hell would be like, if it exists, which it does not. Hell was created by Christians to scare the Norse. It was named after Hel, the goddess of torture. The jewish bible does not ever mention Hell, because the Jewish punishment for sin is simply not being allowed to be with god. For any true believer, separation from God IS hell in and of itself. There should be no need for some eternal punishment to scare people into being good.
That's an interesting theory. The Christianization of Scandinavia took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Scandinavia. Therefore earlier versions of the Bible would not have any references at all to hell in them. The book of Revelation would have been really skimpy without it. I wonder if any 5th century Bibles exist?
The converting of the Norse took place before then, simply not on as big a scale. And the Bible was put together officially as we know it some time in the early 4th century.
The Latin Vulgate dates back to the late 4th, early 5th centuries. The oldest Bible is Codex Sinaiticus which dates back to the mid 4th century.
