Screw the Earth and its smoking habit. The end of 2023 approaches, so let’s talk about the whole universe, which is its own special kind of mess. As I’ve related before, our current cosmology, LCDM, was established over the course of the 1990s through a steady drip, drip, drip of results in observational cosmology – what Peebles calls the classic cosmological tests. There were many contributory results;