If there are galaxies that have an age older than that of the universe, does that mean that they escaped the last Big Crush? Does that also mean that they'd also be excluded from this one? I'm a bit new at this and I'm still trying to figure this out. :confused:

Correct me if I am wrong, but i believe most of these galaxies were likely part of the big whatever but are perceived older than most of our visible universe due to the expansion of the universe, giving these galaxies extreme redshifts and bringing them on a estimated 45 billion lightyears/age distance from us, while the universe as we know it is calculated about 13,7 billion (light)years old (I do not rule out that some galaxies escaped the influence of some previous big bangs/rips/crunches). So while the distance of these far away galaxies, does not correspond liniar to their actual age due to interference of what we call dark energy at present.

My personal guestimate is that the yet to be explained dark energy, IMO is maybe like a dissolving force, like our universe is a drop of relatively cool darkblue ink dripped in a warm liquid (aether), which due to Brownian movement will strive for a balanced entropy, giving the whole liquid a lighter and lighter blue appearance, until equillibrium is reached, likewise I can vision particles of high energies (such as neutrinos and more exotic stuff) interacting sporadically with what we experience as everyday normal fermionic mass and transferring some of its energy, either in kinetic mechanical movement of the lower energy particle (wich imo accounts for a lot of what we perceive as non-liniar quantummechanic behaviours on atomic scales), or somehow transfer part of that energy into space, remember einstein said that if we would fly a spaceship near lightspeed, our mass would increase. Such mass increase would implie the massive spaceship having more gravity effect on its surrounding, likewise I expect collisions of really high-energy particles with lower energy particles to sometimes lower the kinetic energy / relativistic mass of the resulting debris and therefor lower the gravity of these particles, effectively uncurving/uncrunching the surrounding space to compensate for that and store part of the perceived lost energy as another string harmonic curled up in a larger space, what we perceive as expansion could maybe just be the relaxing of tensed strings and orbifolds, like we release a metal spring that we pinched between thumb and fingers....

the fact that these high energy particles have relatively little interaction with lower energy fermionic mass, could explain why the dark energy manifests itselve only on gigantic cosmic scale .

the good news, is, that if such would be the case, that our universe would not be fade away in a Big Rip, but that the expansion / dissolvement at some point could reach a bslanced state or after wich gravity could cause another a big crunch etc. The question is, can we reach that balance before our universe dissolves into quark particles, how dissolvable is fermionic mass, how hot is the solvent aether etc ?

Maybe string theorists, should, appart from their math wizzardry, study music, these musicians express in their way all their knowledge about non-linear behaviour of acoustic energy behaviour in accords / harmonics / strings and you gotta agree that if your hear some really good music/song it is allmost like it contains a deeper divine message.