The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)

by Katie Mack

Perhaps the promise of a final judgment serves to somehow make up for the unfortunate fact that our imperfect, unfair, arbitrary physical world cannot be relied upon to make existence good and worthwhile for those who live right. In the same way a novel can be redeemed or retroactively ruined by its concluding chapter, many religious philosophies seem to need the world to end, and to end “justly,” for it to have had meaning in the first place.

What that means for us as human beings, living our little lives in all this inconsiderate vastness, is another question entirely. We’ll present a range of perspectives in the epilogue, and address whether or not sentience itself could have any kind of legacy that endures beyond our destruction.

Linear time just seems so restrictive, even wasteful—why should all that time, all those possibilities, be lost to us forever, just because the clock has ticked forward a few degrees? We may have grown accustomed to strict chronological oppression, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

Every point in space is the center of its own sphere of ever deepening time, bounded by a shell of fire.

In an unchanging universe, you can never be far enough away from something to not feel its pull, at some level, and that pull should be bringing you together over time. Einstein’s own calculations said that any universe populated with massive objects should already have collapsed upon itself. The very existence of the cosmos was a contradiction.

entropy can only increase, not decrease. In other words, order does not spontaneously appear out of nowhere, and if you leave something alone long enough, it will inevitably decay into disorder.

None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one’s never thought of does. Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

“But if nothing we do here has any guarantee of lasting, if even the best gestures have only a slim chance of outliving us, is there any reason not to just give up?” “Every reason in the world,” Rudd said. “We’re here, and we’re alive. It’s a beautiful evening, on the last perfect day of summer.” Alastair Reynolds, Pushing Ice

“I think to leave a legacy for a hundred years is a bolder ambition now than it would have been for our ancestors,” he says.

“Does that upset you?” I ask him. “It upsets me very much. But why should the world be made the way we like it?”