The End

Atrios wonders why people are convinced that Ragnarök is right around the corner. Amanda thinks she might know:

I think apocalypse scenarios capture the imagination because they’re a projection of our anxieties about mortality, but they also address our anxieties about not being very important in the scheme of things at all.  Considering not just that you’re going to die, but that life will go on without you is humbling—which means, if you’re egotistical, humiliating.  Think about it.  After enough time passes, even the most famous people are forgotten, except for a few extremely unique ones like Julius Caesar, who probably didn’t even realize at the time that he was creating the sort of fame that outstripped other sorts of fame.  How many of you can name all the kings of Europe throughout history?  We can name all the Presidents, but that’s because our history is relatively short.  Given enough time, you’ll be lucky to be a character in a history book that only a fraction of a percentage of the population will read.

Indeed. Armageddon ends all that worry that you’ll be forgotten — because there will be nobody left to forget you. When you die, the world dies with you. It’s the ultimate in solipsism.

If you have a bit more humility, you know that you matter to the universe far less than one protein in one cell in your appendix matters to you — and you realize that whatever role you play on Earth now, you’ll likely be forgotten in a few generations even by your own family. But you also realize that your family that forgot you will still be influenced by how you lived in your life, you realize that history will be affected by the small pebble you tossed into the ocean of humanity. And you realize that though you’ll be forgotten soon enough, your life has meaning to you, and those who love you, and that’s the greatest gift you could be given.

Now, both Amanda and Atrios point out that millenial angst is not just confined to the Rapture-ready set. More than a few on my side of the aisle are convinced that global warming will lead to the end of humanity, and right quick. But as Amanda notes, it won’t; barring some sort of nuclear or bioweapon catastrophe, the worst-case scenario for humanity over the next 10,000 years is a slow slide back to the stone age, with the metals and energy sources already pulled from the ground in the previous 10,000.  From there, we will eventually go extinct — but it will take a long, long time, as humans are smart, and we survived without oil, electricity, and metal for much longer than we have lived with it.

That does not mean that the end will never come. Over the next 100,000 years, the odds of humanity surviving are probably 50 percent, though species that evolve from us could last longer. The odds of us surviving the next hundred million years are roughly nil. Earth itself will become inhospitable for human life within the next 250 million years, certainly by the time the continents come back together into Pangea Ultima, and it will be inhospitable for all life within the next billion years. And our sun itself will burn out roughly 5 billion years from now. And even if we escape to Mars, and then beyond, the universe itself is expanding too fast to recollapse. Two trillion years from now, all galaxies outside of the local supercluster will be beyond detection, too far away for light to reach us. 10¹⁴ years from now the stars will run out of hydrogen, and the skies will go dark, save for the occasional short rebirth of a carbon star. No matter what, we and everyone else in the universe run out of all energy sometime around the time the last supermassive black holes evaporate, roughly 10¹⁰⁰ years from now. After that, the universe is just a thin gruel of photons and leptons, one with no entropy, and therefore, no life. Heat death lacks the panache of Armageddon, but it is the future of all life, no matter where in the universe it exists.

No matter what, every creature, every sentient thing in this vast, incredible universe will ultimately be forgotten. But not on the timescales we humans live. Homo sapiens is but 300,000 years old (and modern H. s. sapiens only about 100,000), and the oldest members of our genus, H. habilis, first walked the Earth 2.2 million years ago; if one wants to trace the entire lineage of the hominins, all the way back to Ardipithecus ramidus, our close relatives have trod the earth for but 5.5 million years. The Earth will continue to be habitable for life such as our own for another thirty times that long; the universe will still have stars burning for twenty million times that timeframe. Heat death won’t come for another 10⁹³ times as long. There is enough time for humankind to die off on this planet, be supplanted by another intelligent species that evolves in our absence, one that dies as well; time for life to evolve on Titan, and die. Time for intelligence to evolve millions of milions of times, over and over, each species rising, learning, and falling. In that vast panorama, it matters not whether one chordate species on one mid-sized planet orbiting a mid-sized star in a spur arm of a slightly-bigger-than-average barred spiral galaxy in a small, out-of-the-way galactic cluster lives or dies.

Even if our species finds a way to kill ourselves off tomorrow, there will be others out there who not only will not remember us, but who will never know we existed. History will not end when we do, not unless we find a way to transform ourselves into some form of transhumanist superbeings who will be as different from H. sapiens as we are from Drosophila, no more “us” than intelligent trees or sapient octopodes. Even their species will be hard-pressed to live a googol years. And even should they, those creatures will not remember you or me, any more than we remember our distant single-celled ancestors.

Now, being a sentimental sort, I hope that somehow, our descendants do make it to that distant future, that they make it as long as they can. But I know the odds are against us, and I’m okay with that. Each of us individually is born to die; our species is born to die as well. We can look for meaning in the hope that somewhere out there, some Big Guy in the Sky is watching us and taking notes, and maybe She is. We can hope that the Big Guy will whisk us all off the planet like a magician pulling a tablecloth free from a table, but She probably won’t. We can hope that there is life after this one, for ourselves, for our species. But even if there is, forever is a long, long time, and I don’t know if, even in the lap of luxury, with all my needs tended to and everything happy and joyous, I’d want to live forever. And in that crowded forever, with every creature who ever lived in this immense and unfathomable universe, what are the chances you, or I, or even humanity would be particularly noticed?

Meaning does not come from being remembered. The mother and father tending their family somewhere in 5th century Mongolia are not remembered, except as a concept. Their lineage may have died out long since, through chance and bad luck. The echoes of the relationships they forged may long since have gone silent. If through some sort of temporal anomaly they were erased from time, it is possible our world would be exactly the same today.

And yet they laughed. They sang. They played with their sons and daughters. They looked up at the sunset and sighed at its beauty. They held each other close in the cold of winter. They danced. They ran. They played with their grandchildren. They laughed some more. And they loved.

Their lives had meaning, deep meaning, no less deep because their names are not recorded in history, no less deep because they have no living descendants. Their lives had meaning because life has meaning, the life we lead, now. It will end, for each of us, for all of us, someday. But whether our species’ actions are recorded in the Great Book of Time or scattered eventually when the very molecular bonds that hold Earth together break down, our existence matters. Not because it will be meaningful to others. But because it is meaningful to us.