I mentioned the Big Rip a while ago. Now there's a new model too. It's a funnel. Quote: "Universe is curved like a Pringle, shaped like a horn, and named after a Star Trek character. You could not make it up." Which Star Trek character? Picaaahhhhrrrrd of course. Send complaints about the curvature of the universe to Captain Picard, Starship Enterprise, somewhere way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere, 90210.

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On a more serious note, doesn't that funnel model look suspiciously like a graph of expansion of space of a universe with the y-axes representing the outerlimits of space and the x-axes representing elapsed time? If we accept the big bang model of the origin of our universe, then at x=0 or x=0+infintesimal, the volume would have been finite. And then as x increases, so do the limits of y (space). Going out the flared end would be going faster than the expansion of the universe, at which from a photon's view you'd be able to see events at the beginning of the universe (going outside the light cone). But of course, if the big bang were plotted, the greatest increase in Y limit would be at lower value of x. The funnel model starts with slower rates of expansion and then moves onto higher rates. What confuses me is the representation, the graphic in that article. What are the axes? Usually we can impose time-space onto a 3-d graph for some kind of crude understanding of various higher dimensional concepts (like time-space contraction/dilation). But what is this graphic saying? Whoa...I'm confused...