🖖 The end of time

What’s the last thing you read that made you think?

I mean really made you lean back from it all and look at everything with new eyes.

That’s what I’m going through this week.

I’ve been reading Brian Greene’s, Until the End of Time.

He’s a theoretical physicist and mathematician who’s written a few books on astronomy, astrophysics, quantum mechanics and even multiverses.

He starts us off with the beginning of the universe and gradually takes us all the way…until the end of time.

And all in less than 350 pages. Not bad.

I’m near the end and it’s been a bittersweet chapter.

The main points is that eventually stars will run out of fuel to keep their fusion cores going.

Stars that are around 10 times the size of our sun live fast and furious. They’re around for a few million years before they explode into supernovae.

From that explosion, the materials are there for new stars and planets to form- a stellar nursery. 

Then the cycle continues.

Stars the size of our sun will last for a few billion years. Our sun is middle aged now with another 5 billion years to go.

It’s too small to go supernova. It will eventually become a dim white dwarf giving off relatively no heat.

And stars smaller than our sun are called red dwarfs.

They burn long and cool compared to our sun.

They’ve got a trillion years or so before they burn out.

But like I said, at one point all the stars will have used up their fuel and be a floating embers.

The rest will have been swallowed by black holes.

Greene writes that in about 100 trillion years we’ll have seen our last star.

Oh, did I mention that space itself is expanding?

Yep. I left out that part.

It means that, well before those stars die out, future humans won’t be able to see them anyway.

They’ll be too far.

All that will remain to prove their existence is what we record.

As of today, the farthest celestial bodies we can see with telescopes are already 13.8 billion light years away.

Space is expanding faster than the speed of light. Soon the light escaping these bodies will lose the race to get to our eyeballs.

The universe will be a lonely place. 

Silent.

Obviously you and I won’t be around for this.

Everything that will have ever been known will no longer exist.

Every piece of art ever painted.

Every piece of music.

Every invention.

Gone.

Of course it’s sad to know that it will all end at one point.

But it’s also beautiful.

Like I said, bittersweet.

The cosmic reminder that nothing lasts forever. Not even galaxies.

What we experience in the here and now can never be experienced by anyone else.

Helps put things into perspective, don’t it?

It’s a bummer that all life will cease to exist in the distant future.

While at the same time it gives a calming sense of finality to it all.

The end of the chapter.

I wonder what the next chapter will be…