Tonight I was sitting outside, under a Waxing Gibbous 96% of full Moon, and I got to thinking about how the universe is going to end. This isn’t a depressing notion, mind you: in fact, as I sat there with my F=12.5 mm telescope eyepiece jammed up against my right eyeball, I found great comfort in the knowledge that everything and everyone I have ever loved will face the exact same fate: “heat death”.
The atoms which comprise this body I inhabit are only borrowed. They were born of stars originating 13.7 billion years ago. I’m grateful that they were created in the fires of distance stars and that they managed to merge together into the living Homo Sapien that I’ve been lucky enough to become.
But the ultimate fate of the universe from which those atoms were created will one day grow very dark and cold. Most of the evidence to this fact is based on measurements of the rate of universal expansion and mass density. We now know that the universe is expanding (and that expansion is getting faster) but the fact is that it’s going to continue to expand, until every single atom in every single physical object is as far away from each other as is impossible to imagine. This seems comforting to me somehow.
Think about this for a minute. See that fingernail on your right hand thumb? Pick any two atoms of carbon from the very tip of that nail, and there will come a day that those two tiny bits of matter will be billions of light years apart from each other and static in space. In other words, they’ll be far away and unmoving.
How’s that for cool?
Here is the undisputable fact: The universe will fade to black, cold nothingness in 1,000,000,000,000,000 years. This so called “heat death” is the “final state” of all matter: it’s inevitable and inescapable. If the last human being was to stand on the last floating rock in the universe in the last few million years before this final “heat death”, she would look to the sky (it would have to be a woman, men couldn’t possibly survive without blowing each other up) and see: NOTHING: just a black inky zero.
Need another example?
Imagine you had a bag of marbles and you dumped it on the floor. Those marbles would bounce, roll and hit each other for a while before coming to a stop. The same is true of all matter. Everything bounces, rolls and stops. Welcome to the "Heat Death" of the universe.
All matter in the universe will one day reach a state of “maximum entropy” where there is no longer any motion of any kind; forever. Sit around a ga-zillion years after that moment, and everything would look exactly the same: no movement, no energy: no potential for energy: NOTHING.
There’s a certain kind of beauty in that image; and it’s the spiritual and religious side of me that really finds this ultimate unmoving state of the universe fascinating and appropriate.
I don’t claim to understand the way that God intercedes in the Universe; although I believe He is the greatest poet of all Creation (and we’re all part of His greatest poem). I believe that the Word become Flesh, and I understand why He had to die on a cross (although I struggle with some of the mysteries, but then I’m no theologian ); but with only 5,000,000,000 years to go until the Earth dies in a solar explosion, scattering our clumpy ashes across and around the Milky Way Galaxy…we need not worry too much about the fate of the Universe, as humanity will no longer exist well before that cold, dark day.
With this understanding of the fate of all things doesn’t it boggle the mind as to why we fight and kill each other in wars?
Why can’t we just wait it out as we’ll all go together in the Universal Heat Death of the universe?
I sat under the beautiful New England Spring sky tonight, looking up at the cold, dusty-dead moon in the sky and contemplated what Buzz Aldrin called its magnificent desolation.
I think I like where God is going with this epic poem of His.
- Steve
