Instabilities of certain empty Robertson-Walker space-times

Results are established concerning perturbations of each empty Robertson-Walker space-time (M, g) with a nonvanishing cosmological constant. The perturbed space-times have the general form ( ) with an extension ofM, and lying in an open neighborhood of g in a type ofW ^m topology. These results indicate that large classes of such perturbations give rise to space-times which suffer from one of two types of incompleteness.