>I have heard this being called the Heat Death.

I think alternative 2) was called that, and this was the Cold Death. Makes more sense: In 2) the universe dies in heat, and in 3) in cold. It's been a while since I've read anything on the matter, though.

> Anyway, astronomers have done some fancy research and while it is practically impossible for us to determine the true mass of the universe right now, they have made some estimates that suggest that the universe contains much less than 1 omega's worth of matter. They had to make estimates on the amount of dark matter--the matter that isn't in stars and, therefore, isn't lit up for us to see--but even large estimates didn't bring the total up far enough.

Don't you know? Dark matter consists solely of packaging material, especially those little styrofoam pellets.

-Fuzz"some time in the future scientists will discover that the dark matter they've been searching for with ever more complicated devices was all the stuff their machines were packaged in, and that wasn't my idea, of course"pilz