For Heraclitus each end is identical, always the Sun of Fire; each time a counterfeit world will rise from the ashes; Earth is Phoenix. Collisionists concur. From nebula to sun and planets; crash, and then back to nebula; then back again, repetitional, iterative, ding-dong—and so forever.
Beyond all septillions and decillions, beyond life and death sempiternally recurrent, thrones the pure form of the Everlasting dogma. Without sensible change, without intervening destructions, without parcel or periods, the Earth abideth forever.
The phenomena of science and experience, the water and the cold, the maternal nebulae and paternal impacts that give birth and death and birth again, all matter and its manifestations, all visible tangible things, are pure illusion, a trick of the beholder’s brain. There is no world. The world is but the form or mode of a dream or vision. In that dream sense in which it exists now, it will exist forever.
Though Brahma pass from dream into a dreamless sleep, only apparently will the world come to end.
The world is God. God by His nature is eternal. The world is eternal.
Rome is deathless:
His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono.
Roma Aeterna: Mundus Aeternus.
Physics too, if sheepishly, is beginning to smile on metaphysics, and both to lend colour to the truth. Time has no independent existence. It is but a manner of conceiving things. Eternity therefore, time’s extension to the nth—to beyond the boundaries of the brain, the confines of sane beatitude or sane terror—has no existence either. All times being the same, because there is no time, anything that exists forever exists now; all that exists now exists forever.
From yet more orthodox throats the same witness is borne. The earth, whatever the precise way, came out of the sun and consists of what were originally the sun’s outer layers. These were made of the lightest atoms, the permanent atoms, the only ones not dissolvable into radiation atoms, the only matter not transformable into light. The sun, as after parenthood he remains, now consists of dissolvables only; whom the earth, consisting on the contrary of final-inconvertibles only, will outlive, and all his brothers the mighty stars.
Avoiding also collision. Space as well as time being infinite, an encounter with other bodies need never take place; to assume that in infinite time it must, is to forget that infinite space redresses the balance.
Sailing but bound for no port, from impact immune, of indestructible substance compounded, our globe will wander through the sunless starless universe forever.
Which First?
End of the World has so far been used indifferently to mean the end of mankind and the end of this globe he inhabits. The two are not the same, and except in a case like head-on collision, planet and people vanishing in vapour together, will not be simultaneous.
Either man will predecease his home. One of the great climatic climacteric disasters will suffice to destroy him while hardly more than ruffling the earth’s surface; or quite other factors, of a kind different from any yet alluded to, may, in conjunction with or independently of natural change, sweep life but not earth away.
Or, in certain strange circumstances, the race may outlive the world.
Man
Of Comet’s unlikely chances, those least unlikely—his chances of scorching, poisoning, flooding—are fatal only to life; the mass of him, arguable from comets known, could scarcely demolish the planet. Water or Drought, in drowning or desiccating her inhabitants, will leave the round earth, if discoloured a little for lunar and Martian eyes, all-unperturbed in her course. If Cold for man, Crash for matter, the interval between the end of the world in the one sense and the end of the world in the other is the interval between the millions of years for the sun’s cooling to life’s death-point and the quintillions, ere he encounter some galactic brother, for his crashing to his own.
Whichever the way, Earth’s journey with living passengers is like to be much shorter than her time as a tomb. Even though, through abrupt increase of our sun or premature grazing by some other, the interlude between the two destructions were less than in the likelier instances, it would still be considerable. Literal simultaneousness, crew and the ship down together, is one chance in Brahmanic zeros.
Man going need not mean all life going. Flood will not finish the fishes. Earth has her salamanders if it is Fire; aside from those microbes who riot and revel in the boiling point of water, what mere lizard will not outlive us? She has her parasites who dote on congelation, if it be the Cold; with polar moss and lichen to outstay the last tarrying bacillus. Yet those who could survive us (and most will succumb sooner) would survive for a space so short that here it will be ignored altogether, and human extinction held to imply and include the extinction of every living thing. Both will occur when the Chosen Way imposes them—if not sooner.
Will it be sooner? Without harm from the heavens, will the race fail? Shall we go, without compulsion from outside nature, before we must?
There are borderline cases. Astronomy, returning to the paths of her stepmother astrology, might cast a fatal horoscope; the sun, entering not this sign of the zodiac or that, but some field of unknown matter, could so transform the quality of his radiation as subtly, secretly, to kill the germ-plasm; we should die without will-to-live, without voice or knowledge to call Traitor to the skies. A slight axial shifting could unhinge and convulse the seasons. Then, even as that change in conditions that was the white man’s advent did silently and mysteriously, and more potently than his smallpox or syphilis or gin, deprive red men in North America and brown men in Southern Seas of their impulse to continue, so the
