Friday, June 03, 2011

Thinking about the End of the World

I smiled on the morning of May 22nd when I woke and heard birds chirping. The world had not come to an end! Okay, I know that Harold Camping, the biblical numerologist, hadn’t said the world would end that day. Instead, all the bus and billboard ads announced Judgment Day. God would destroy the universe five months later. But there had been no signs of any of that. I was in the clear.

Sitting down to a heap of pancakes, I felt pleased with myself for about five minutes. That’s when I realized that the danger wasn’t really over. If the world could end on May 21st, couldn’t it also end on May 22nd? From a scientific perspective, what seemed certain is that it would end at some time. It can’t last forever.

I remember attending a lecture by an astronomer who pointed out that the galaxies were drifting apart faster and faster. He said it seemed clear now that the mass of the universe would not be great enough to pull the whole thing back together again. After billions of years we would be left with a lot of dark cold open space. No way to renew the old spark. In the question-and-answer period, I asked him how he felt about that. I said it seemed like a depressing outcome. I wondered if the string theorists could save us. One of them pointed out to me that I didn’t need to worry about that, because our sun would go dark first; and, actually long before that, human life was likely to be destroyed by a giant meteorite or by our own stupid actions. Compared to that, the Judgment Day scenario is at least a human drama.

My pancakes were getting cold, but that didn’t stop me from losing myself in a series of depressing thoughts. I recalled a college philosophy class in which my professor, a real kill-joy, made us read about the problem of death. Now, I know what you’re thinking: death is a pretty obvious sort of problem. But it isn’t that simple. The problem is this. 

Although people accept death as a fact and don’t deny that death will come, nobody believes that it will come very soon, like right now. So, one’s death is a definite event without any possible “now.” By this convenient logic, I can die any time but the present, and so I never have to face the fact of death as a reality – at least not until it happens. But by then, I won’t have time.

The same kind of fantasy protects us from the idea of the end of the world. The end of the world is not so laughable, either, not so improbable. It’s unlikely to occur tomorrow or the next day, but that in no way negates the fact that it will happen – and can happen at any time.

It will happen. Does it matter whether it happens on a nice day in May in the early years of the twenty-first century or at some other time? Does it matter if the end of the world rains fire on your parade instead of your great-great-great-granddaughter’s parade?

This problem is given to us to think about. It isn’t given to any other animal. This question, the “to be or not to be” of our world and of ourselves, is one of the questions that defines humanity. The end will come. We know this.

Think about it.

As I sat there with my pancakes, I must admit, I could only barely hear the question. And in a matter of hours, it seemed that I no longer had time to ask it, let alone to try to answer it. I had too many things to do. I was too busy.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on June 03, 2011 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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