The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology, a paper just published online in the Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, argues that in 100 billion years, everything else we can see will have been pushed so far away by the universe’s expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them. All evidence of the big bang will have disappeared and all matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible. Indeed, our view of the universe will look suspiciously like it did in the pre-Hubble days.

The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that’s got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there’s another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!”

http://arstechnica.com/