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WASHINGTON: The end of the world as we know it cannot be avoided, but it can be predicted, according to a group of astrophysicists who see a 50% chance of the final countdown ending in 3.7 billion years.

"Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50% chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years," according to the team of U.S. and Japanese scientists, who are challenging a long-standing theory of the universe.

While scientists have long concluded that the universe is expanding, and will do so for an infinite period of time, the researchers say the very rules of physics suggest that "an eternally inflating universe" is far from given.

Rules of physics cannot go both ways

"The point of this paper is to show that certain methods and assumptions that have been widely used by physicists for years - most prominently, the use of a time cut-off in order to compute probabilities in an eternally inflating universe - lead to the conclusion that time will end," said Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley.

"In other words, the time cut-off, which we may have thought was just a calculational tool, actually behaves like a physical event, whether we like it or not," said Bousso, lead author of the study published on arXiv.org.

Current theories of the universe begin with the ‘Big Bang,’ which cast our living space into being some 13.7 billion years ago in a massive explosion. Since then, theorists have assumed the universe will simply continue to expand forever, but have also used a theoretical expiration date to help calculate the laws and rules of physics.

Not so crazy after all?

But Bousso and his colleagues says the discipline simply cannot have it both ways. He cautioned however that the complex thought experiment and calculations proposed by the research could not be used to draw definitive conclusions.

"It's very important to understand that we are not saying that we are certain of the conclusion that time will end (though we cannot rule out that it may be correct)," he wrote.