Sure, that's fine. So is the upshot that I should feel ashamed for even posting the link?
What annoyed me (and I was annoyed) is the utter hypotheticalness of phantom energy. That is a disputable point - as they point out, there are models in which fields with the properties of phantom energy pop up, it wasn't invented solely for the purpose of ending the universe in finite time. You could counter that by saying, are those models physically motivated, or are they just exploring mathematical possibilities? Ultimately, I think "death by phantom energy" belongs on someone's exhaustive lists of "possible causes of human extinction&qu...
No, not the kind of Singularity usually discussed here... I'm referring to the possibility of phantom energy-driven rips in the cosmos caused by accelerating expansion, or "sudden future singularities of pressure". (Technically: "a momentary infinite peak in the tidal forces of the universe.") A recent paper by Ghodsi & Hendri shows that cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), and type 1a supernovae data is consistent with the possibility of a sudden future singularity as soon as 8.7 million years from now.
"Cosmological tests of sudden future singularities"
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.6661v1.pdf
As I understand it, the authors are not saying that a SFS is likely 8.7 million years from now, just possible. This puts a dampener on the notion that the only plausible scenario of cosmological breakdown is Heat Death.
Here's another paper that outlines other exotic cosmological singularities which have been under discussion in the cosmology community for the past decade, and the behavior of pointlike particles and strings as they approach such singularities.