I was under the impression that the it was more that remote galaxies would redshift toward invisibility rather than simply leaving us with a black sky. Not that (given enough time) it makes that much of a difference.
I'm less troubled by the implications for future scientists, though. It's not too much of a stretch to assume such scientists can figure out that there's a cosmological constant, and ponder what the consequences might be like if the universe had once been much more compact. If they have historical records, that makes it that much more plausible.
To make an analogy, we have some pretty good estimates for how much the earth's rotation is slowing, but the best of those is due to a historical record. Some ancient Greek was born on the day of a solar eclipse, but the location doesn't match where a straightforward model says the eclipse would have been. So the updated model includes the Earth losing 30 degrees of rotation over a few thousand years.
A lack of good independent observations does slow down our understanding of cosmology. The problem may still be tractable even so.
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I'm less troubled by the implications for future scientists, though. It's not too much of a stretch to assume such scientists can figure out that there's a cosmological constant, and ponder what the consequences might be like if the universe had once been much more compact. If they have historical records, that makes it that much more plausible.
To make an analogy, we have some pretty good estimates for how much the earth's rotation is slowing, but the best of those is due to a historical record. Some ancient Greek was born on the day of a solar eclipse, but the location doesn't match where a straightforward model says the eclipse would have been. So the updated model includes the Earth losing 30 degrees of rotation over a few thousand years.
A lack of good independent observations does slow down our understanding of cosmology. The problem may still be tractable even so.