Sen自己的回复:
A note (April 6, 2015)
A few days ago I wrote an essay with the title `Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday'. In this essay I discussed the best possible future course of action for the humankind to prolong its life given two assumptions: 1) that our universe is not absolutely stable and could undergo a phase transition in the future, and 2) that the accelerated expansion of the universe that we see today is due to a cosmological constant. The first one is a theoretical possibility that has been discussed since 1970's by many people and current experimental knowledge could at best put an upper bound of one in ten billion per year to the probability of such an event. The second one is the most widely accepted interpretation of the observed expansion rate of the universe although there are certainly alternative proposals. Both assumptions are natural in string theory, but can be discussed independently of string theory.
Few days after I submitted the essay to the arXiv, one of my colleagues drew my attention to a blog where some discussion on this essay had appeared. Upon visiting the blog, I was amused to see the passionate attack on eternal inflation and the multiverse that the essay had generated, while the essay itself was based only on the assumptions stated above and the standard rules of classical general theory of relativity. Indeed, a word search shows that none of the words eternal, inflation or multiverse appear anywhere in the abstract, text or the figure captions. Of course, many of the physical and mathematical results used in this essay are borrowed from the corresponding results in eternal inflation since our universe is now entering the same kind of accelerated expansion phase that is postulated to exist during inflation.
I do hope that some time in the future I'll be able to make some useful contribution to the subject of multiverse and eternal inflation, but this essay does not count as one such contribution.
The relevant links can be found below.
My article: `Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday'.
The blog with comments on the article.(
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7626)