Supersight, superspeed, superstrength, (superhumor,) and even superhearing get too much recognition in the "If you had one superpower, what would it be?" game.  What about supertouch or superfeel?  (Ixnay on the upertastesay.)

If I had supertouch, I would expect to be able to feel when people were looking at me.  Is that plausible?  Probably not, but neither is telekinesis.

Cosmology is the study of the cosmos, which is basically everything cool, or at least everything involving the universe from when it began to what it contains and to where it is headed.  Not surprisingly, few of these questions are answerable.  In fact, I'm inclined to liken it to the Hydra: whenever one question is answered, at least two more spring up in its place making it very difficult to come to any concrete conclusions.

Last night, I had a riveting conversation with Del about this very topic and I'll try to provide some Cliffs Notes on the matter.  There are three possibilities for how the universe is expanding.  The universe is either a) expanding at an increasing rate (accelerating), b) expanding at a constant rate, or c) expanding at a decreasing rate (diminishing).  Of the three, I find the first to be most exciting.  B is boring and doesn't allow for much imagination and C seems likely, but equally scary because then the universe would eventually collapse in upon itself.

Right, so.  The most popular theory for the beginning of the universe is the big bang theory which most should be familiar with.  It is widely regarded that this singularity of mass and energy existed in a place that had no previous matter or energy or even time.  In the first seconds of the universe, matter and energy filled the rapidly expanding cosmos, but now, billions of years later, the universe is still expanding at a growing rate.  How cool is that?  We currently don't know what the universe is expanding into because we can't travel faster than light and as soon as light touches it, it is no longer nothing, but something.

Del said that he learned that there is no center of the universe.  That everywhere in the universe is expanding in all directions, but I have a problem with this.  Maybe it is just my terrestrially-bounded mind, but this is how I envision the universe expanding.  Imagine you are the fifth car at a red light on the highway, and that you are the center of the universe.  Now, the light turns green, but you cannot accelerate yet.  The first car in the lane must be the first to react and can accelerate to a certain speed to a certain distance away before the second car can begin its own acceleration and so on until you, the fifth car, can accelerate.  You, the fifth car, therefore, cannot accelerate or expand into the abyss until the matter in front moves and expands.

Because of all this, inter-galactic communications is greatly inhibited.  We cannot send information even near the speed of light, let alone at the speed of light, so information would take millions to reach its destination making it invariably worthless.  The solution to this seems to be wormholes.  A wormhole is a hypothetical cosmological phenomenon that avoids having to travel at the speed of light.  It is similar to tunneling through a mountain as opposed to traveling around it.  NASA provides "directions" for constructing the wormhole: collect superdense matter in the shape of a ring with circumference approximately equal to the earth's orbit around the sun.  Spinning it at speeds near the speed of light creates a void in matter and energy similar to a whirlpool in the ocean.  You enter one spinning ring and come out another.  Creating one superdense ring and accelerating it to speeds near the speed of light is difficult enough but then to have a second ring where we want our destination would just be ridiculous.  That's why, with the laws of probability and infinite universes, there is another race of living things that are constructing a superdense ring to be accelerated at speeds near the speed of light in hopes that someone else is doing the same thing.  This phenomenon is thusly happening all across the universe.  So, in theory, creating our own wormhole would be like installing a ramp to an interstate in our town.  Another problem, though, is that a ring that large and that dense would have its own gravitational pull.  It would have to be located way the hell out in space somewhere or we would face having our entire earth being sucked into the wormhole, which might not be a bad idea if we could secure it in a biosphere or something.

::deep breath::