Accelerating Expansion of The Universe

So, if the Big Bang occured (and it probably did), and they have now realized (or maybe even proved) that the universe is constantly accelerating (btw, is it accelerating at an increasing rate, or a decreasing rate? Gotta assume decreasing rate, no?). I am wondering if the universe is going to continue accelerating for infinity, eventually reaching expansion velocity that approaches the speed of light or very close to it, will the forces involved in that kind of "momentum" kill off all life, and destroy worlds, and other bodies such as stars, etc? Like a massive blackhole that surrounds the entire outer boundary of the universe. Or is it all "relative" and Earth could still sustain life even though we are zipping through space at lightspeed?
And (I know; never start a sentence with "and", but I can't help it...), if the universe is expanding at the rate of the speed of light, then wouldn't the universe's mass be infinite, then the force of gravity of the universe would be infinite, and the entire universe would just instantly turn into a universal size black hole swallowing itself into oblivion... No?
(btw, just so you know, I am not smoking anything... )
Anyway... Comments? Answers to my questions? Links?

uh, well...Im not gonna get too in depth because almost everyone on here can teach me a thing or 12, but.....here I go...

btw, is it accelerating at an increasing rate, or a decreasing rate? Gotta assume decreasing rate, no?).

Actually, scientists found a few years back that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. The general consensus right now is that the universe will keep on expanding reaching the speed of light until everything is so far away from everything else that we will see nothing in the night sky....all the suns will eventually die and the universe will just.....well....freeze to death...even lightspeed travel will be useless because all the objects would accelerate to the speed of light and it would be impossible to catch up to them.

If you can....buy/check out the book "Alpha and Omega" by Charles Seife. its a pretty mind bending book, but it's a good gateway book for this kind of stuff. It is also what I'm basing the above statement on.

[edit on 20-1-2005 by degoat87]

The rate of the expansion of the universe is supposed to be increasing. Its also supposed to have started increasing 'recently' (relative to the time of the universe anyways) and thats after a period of dramatic slow down. Vague theories suggest its anything from dark matter ot dark energy to the quintessence or, when all else fails, 'strings'.

I read a short article on the fate of the universe under that system of increasing expansion. Instead of the 'Big Crunch' where gravity overpowers expansion and everything collapses, over time, into a single black hole, and instead of the 'Big Chill' where the universe has expanded so much , but there's no extra energy input, that everything slowly slowly freezes down to nothing; they proposed a new idea. That the rate of increase keeps increaseing, and the universe literally rips itself apart, space-time cleaves into proportionally smaller and smaller peices as the expansion of the peices gets faster and faster. They suggested that in the last seconds, any humans around or whatever would see the breakup occur between, say, super clusters, then galaxies then within galaxies to between stars all the way down to ultimately the subatomic level.

Wish I could recall where I read that tho, it was Nature or Science maybe. Perhaps national geographic.