Four thousand million for the past. Now the evidence, though technical, that the earth is a comparatively young earth, with noontide and meridian far ahead, is described as overwhelming. So put her future at whatever figure you like; put it at nearly double her past: put it (with almost any other integer instead of the seven fairly acceptable to 1930 theory) at
7,000,000,000.
Last of all, to crown us with length of days, come the sidereal actuaries, who place the Sun’s own birthday—that he shared with his brethren in the Galaxy, at the parturition of a great spiral nebula—in a far remoter past, reaching twelve digits, and who make his expectation of life, as the earth-assessors ours, proportionately still longer; make it, with their new notions of matter, of star-centres more radial than radium, of energy subatomic sub-eternal, of ions bombarding each other into outlandish senility, a wild fourteen-digit thing: some
10,000,000,000,000.
It being not known, nor to be sanely guessed, for how much of this ten million million period his radiation will be sufficient to keep earth’s creatures alive, nor what share of his future will be ours also, as earth’s Ultimate Figure choose one somewhere, anywhere, between this outside limit for the sun and the seven thousand million chosen for the earth’s chance on its own.
Choose
1,000,000,000,000—
that is, a million million, or (as in England we say it) a billion.
The World Will Last a Billion Years
What of it? What upshot of this our longevity?
Scarce any. A time so far away cannot be comprehended, and is not comprehended. It has no reaction on human understanding, leave alone human conduct. It hides so distant that it holds no fears, no more than death for a hopeful boy. It holds no interest either. Who wants to hear about it, read about it, think about it—do anything at all about it?
Certain tendencies are no doubt strengthened by, after strengthening, this postponement: the decline of fear, the decay of religion, rising ambitions for man’s destiny. Distance lends enchantment. The Delectable Mountains are ahead. We shall become supermen, then gods. There is time for anything, everything.
This adjournment, like all adjournments, like all optimism, in practice discourages action and defeats its own desire. Time for everything means time for nothing. Dwell careless. Eat, drink and be merry. You’ve till the year one billion ere you die.
Being built on the quicksands of contemporary speculation, the far-off dogma may crumble of course tomorrow. Choked by the armour of many dimensions it is forging for itself, strangled by the mathematical network it is getting entangled in, Science will suddenly be seen (unseen) for the dream, outside God’s reality, that it is. Then its prorogations will be denied, and a new vision of hope or despair, or neither, be revealed.
Till then why not trust the naturalists? They tell so little. Not what the world is, nor where its first substance first came from, nor what the men upon it are or mean; only when this globe as real in the way they suppose, and when life upon it as the physical thing they describe, may, with most fantastic margin for error, be guessed—may appear—to disappear.
Not soon. And not signless.
What shall the sign be, the sign of Thy coming and of the end of the world?
The reappearance of the two men who have lived but not died: Elijah, prophet and Tishbite, and Enoch father of Methuselah—himself no ready dier? How shall they be known?
The sign of the Son of Man in heaven? What shall it be?
The destruction of Rome? While she lives, aureal, imperial, leonine, capitoline,
O fior d’ogni città, donna del mondo,
city of cities, Babylon the third city, Caput Mundi, then lives the world. When she falls, the world falls. To this day the Romans will have it (I am husband of a Roman and know) that when the statue of Marcus Aurelius shall turn golden again then the sun shall turn black; that the last sunset over the Colosseum will be the last sunset over earth.
Or, not rather, the slow signs that Science will discover? For if not soon, not sudden.
Flood will advance painlessly and to programme; there’ll be time to plant gopher-trees. The brains of those latter days will compass every chemical trick to combat Drought and postpone his hour, then to foretell the hour beyond which postponement cannot go. They will raise batteries against the Cold, using devices and deftnesses we cannot conjecture, eking out the reduced rations of radiation according to a timetable corrected continually in their favour, and accepting defeat, accurately forecast, only when the sun as ally indispensable can help them no longer. Centuries soon, by high celestial mathematics crash with comet or star will be deduced. Striking-chance, size, speed, noxiousness, all will be published generations in advance. Stellar waverings inconceivably far will constitute the first warnings, and will continue and increase through the first period. The mathematical stage, concluded by disturbances in the orbit of Neptune or of Chronos, named but still to be found,1 will be followed by the stage of telescopic visibility, then by the naked-eye stage, as the foe moves through the six magnitudes till larger than Sirius or the Morning Star at her brightest. Then the seasons will begin to go wrong, and the thermometers, and the clocks. If the first warning is given today, that is at a moment when,
