A NYT summary of the state of string theory -- explaining the universe

One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers

In a series of conceptual and technical breakthroughs, a group of theorists at Stanford showed this year that string theory could describe a universe whose expansion was accelerating -- something that many experts thought impossible.... The new calculations suggest that this dark energy cannot last forever, that it will disappear sometime in the far future, according to the researchers ...

...When the variations are taken into account, the number of solutions and the number of possible universes can easily exceed 10^100.

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1. In an infinitely expanding universe immortality is theoretically impossible. OTOH if the dark energy is exhaustible, that might allow a way out -- for something :-)!

2. 10^100 universes is roughly a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion universes, and that's a minimum. Some of these are thought be potentially infinite in scope.

I love this stuff. It's so bizarre. It's numbers like these that make it mathematically conceivable that you have a twin somewhere in the megaverse.