While theories over the fate of our sun developed and were widely disseminated through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they took root in popular imagination, prompting some wonderfully gloomy examples of the end, perhaps most marvellously Byron’s long poem ‘Darkness’ (1816), which begins:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire – but hour by hour
They fell and faded – and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash – and all was black.
Byron’s poem ends unambiguously: it’s all over, and everybody and everything is dead. The last words of the poem are ‘Darkness had no need / Of aid from them – She was the Universe.’
Byron, a rock-and-roll rebel centuries before the concept was invented, is doing what any intelligent atheist might do: he’s looking into the future and seeing nothing but decay, death and extinction. Without something supernatural outside the universe to input newness, the cosmos will inevitably be governed by the logic of everything running down.
The question is, why should we find this scenario so gloomy? It’s the end of course but not one that is in any way imminent – it is trillions of years down the line. To astrophysicists it’s a mere flicker in the long duration of our collective future, but hardly of concern to the rest of us as individuals, or even as a species. Mammals have an average species lifespan of about a million years, which makes it unlikely we’ll even survive to the point when the increasing brightness of our sun makes our planet uninhabitable in about a billion years’ time. But perhaps there’s something about knowing that the universe is just as doomed as we are that makes us uncomfortable.
We might be able to accept the idea of our own mortality in the knowledge that it’s not the end of our collective story; humankind will carry on without us, marching towards its ultimate goal, whatever that may be. The survival of the human race is a key concern in nearly every apocalyptic scenario. But if all we’re ultimately heading towards is the end of something, then what, really, is the point of it all?
Such a line of thought can inspire quite the pessimistic outlook on life. Among philosophers, whose business is understanding how things are rather than telling heartening stories about how they might be, this ultimate pessimism is fairly common. The Romanian thinker Emil Cioran looked with an unfazed eye at a cosmos ruled by entropy: ‘someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart’, he noted passionlessly. ‘How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.’*
The grandfather of this sort of philosophical pessimism was Arthur Schopenhauer, a man who was so moody that his own mother wrote him a letter saying: ‘You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people.’ Schopenhauer saw the cosmos as a whole as vastly more miserable than it is happy, and so, on a cosmic level, his view was that not only is the non-existence of this world just as possible as its existence, but that the former is preferable to the latter. Had Schopenhauer known about modern physics’ vision of the cold, inert sterility with which our universe will end, he might have regarded it positively.
But most people shy away from the idea of such a final ending. There’s always a loophole to find: if our world is doomed, we’ll hop over to Mars. If our sun is set to go out, by then we’ll have travelled to some distant galaxy. But what Wells is really saying with his terminal beach is: eventually you run out of escape hatches. Eventually we will run out of time and space.
Are scientists sure that the universe will end this way? The short answer is that they’re not, because scientists don’t deal in absolute certainties. Science deals in hypotheses that are more or less widely held but never proved, because they are always open to falsification.* And science is a story, just as religion, myth and fiction also are. I don’t mean to suggest that it is no better at accurately describing the universe than those other things – I consider it to be in almost every respect a more truthful account of the universe when it is buttressed with data, experimental replicability and conceptual consistency, but scientists do nonetheless tell stories. So even if most modern-day astrophysicists think heat death is where we are heading, some of them believe the end will be something else, a version of the end in which rebirth and renewal may be possible. We’ve seen it in religious myth already, that vision of the end of the world where, instead of slowly dying out, the world springs up again after the apocalypse, reborn anew, but how could that work?
Well, it’s possible that the Big Bang will at some point
