The movie still carries a punch, and it has also spawned imitators. In The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Soviet and US nuclear tests accidentally knock the Earth closer to the Sun, with devastating results. In Meteor (1979), a giant meteor is detected on a world-ending collision course with Earth, before catastrophe is eventually averted. In 1998, two movies – Armageddon and Deep Impact – were released in which brave men fly up on space shuttles to avert an impending world-ending meteor strike with nuclear bombs. Lars von Trier’s arthouse movie Melancholia (2011) is lower-key: a rogue planet is on a collision course with the world, but this one is a disaster that cannot be averted. The movie follows the lives of two sisters, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, until the blue planet collides with the world and everything is brought to a final end. That this planet ‘Melancholia’ is an obvious metaphor for suicidal depression (from which Kirsten Dunst’s character suffers) does not rob the movie of its force, or the dark beauty of its final shots.
There is a grim but satisfying physicality in imagining the world being smacked, as if by an enormous cosmic hammer. Although we find it hard to picture the ongoing slowly increasing toxicity of our natural environment, we can picture a fist punching through a plank of wood laid out over two breeze blocks. It is immediate and speaks to our direct experience: war in the twentieth century was dominated by aerial bombing, and as the catastrophic damage and death it caused became a feature of wartime experience, the temptation to extrapolate this and imagine a cosmic bomb dropped onto Earth from space led to these particular apocalyptic movies.
Nor is this mere paranoia – it is prudent to watch the skies for asteroids, because a large enough celestial object colliding with our world would end it, in a literal sense. And there are good reasons to fear such a catastrophe. After all, it has happened before. In fact, the Earth has been the site of five major asteroid-prompted extinctions, as well as a dozen lesser ones. The first such catastrophe happened some 450 million years ago, during the late Ordovician Period. Around 250 million years ago, during the Permian-Triassic Period, a global disaster destroyed 90 per cent of all marine life, and 65 million years ago an asteroid the size of Edinburgh hurtled down onto the Yucatán Peninsula, landing with a force equivalent to 100 million hydrogen bombs. The professor of biology and earth sciences Peter Ward describes ‘life’s worst day on Earth’ as follows:
The world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous plankton, and a tsunami picked up all of the dinosaurs on the vast, Cretaceous coastal plains, drowned them, and then hurled their carcasses against whatever high elevations finally subsided the monster waves.*
This, as Ward notes, was ‘death writ large’, and the fact that it has happened multiple times before makes it likely to happen again. According to the B612 Foundation (a California-based non-profit that studies near-Earth objects for potential impact and lobbies for the development of better defences against them), the probability that an asteroid as large as the one that destroyed the Tunguska River area in Russia in 1908 will strike us during the twenty-first century is 30 per cent. The earth is much more widely and densely populated than in previous eras, so the risk of large casualties is correspondingly higher. The possibility of a planet-ending asteroid strike is not trivial.† And should one appear in the sights of a telescope one day, what will we do about it? Can science and technology save us? Or must we resign ourselves to our final fate?
We have had to come to terms with the reality of our place in the universe – not at its centre, the most important place to be, but a miniscule speck hanging precariously in an unimaginably vast, unforgiving, uncaring void. We need our technology to reassure us that we can protect ourselves against it. We need it to enable our explorations of space, to reassert our importance, to prove our superior intelligence – especially should an alien neighbour show up. And yet, fully aware of the weaknesses of our own nature, we also still fear technology, what it might do to us, and what we might do with it to ourselves.
* Not that I’m suggesting there are such things as appropriate Nazi salutes.
* Published in 2008 in China. He was the first Chinese winner of the Hugo Award for the English translation.
* Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest (Head of Zeus, 2015), p. 484.
* Peter Ward, ‘Nautilus and Me’, Nautilus, 29 April 2013: http://nautil.us/issue/0/the-story-of-nautilus/ingenious-nautilus-and-me
† The organisation’s website makes for absorbing, if often terrifying, reading: https://b612foundation.org/
HEAT DEATHS AND ETERNAL RETURNS: THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
In 1895 H. G. Wells wrote of a ‘time traveller’ (the novel does not disclose his name) who has created a machine that can transport him backwards or forwards in time. He opts for the latter, zooms to the year 802,701 and discovers that humanity has evolved, or rather ‘devolved’, into two separate species: the beautiful but stupid Eloi, who live idly and hedonistically above ground, and the technologically advanced but hideously ugly Morlocks, who live below ground and come out at night to feast on the Eloi.
That’s the most famous part of The Time Machine, but after this episode the traveller travels even further into the future and sees further ‘devolution’, with mankind becoming rabbit-like creatures and then crab-like monsters, scuttling around under a dying sun. The final portion of the story takes us from the year 802,701 to the year 802,701,600,509,408,307,206,105,004,* the final epoch of the world, where all life has been distilled into a strange, half-seen, uncanny globular creature:
The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense [. . .] In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me [. . .] I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
This dark conclusion is indicative of something profound. In this story Wells creates a machine that promises an ultimate freedom, an escape from the ‘now’, with the whole of our past and future available to explore. It is the fantasy of escaping mortality, for what is death but the formal structure of the inevitability of our various individual timelines? Wells’s brilliance was to grasp that the escape route from death is not actually an escape but rather leads back to death; the death of the individual becomes the death of the species. There’s a reason why Wells’s terminal beach has proved so iconic for science fiction writers – J. G. Ballard even wrote a short story called ‘The Terminal Beach’.
I would argue that The Time Machine is one of the most influential works of science fiction ever written, but it is also a masterpiece of a particular genre of endof-the-world fiction – the dying earth. It came at a time when advances were being made towards understanding the nature of the universe, allowing scientists to finally develop more accurate theories regarding the workings and ultimate fate of our Sun – the very thing that brings light and life to our planet.
The Sun is a fire, so there will logically come a time when it burns itself out. That’s not a comforting thought: without a sun, the world will grow cold and dark and we will all die. People have been speculating about such end times for centuries. In the seventeenth century, the English naturalist and scientist John Ray argued that the su
nspots, or ‘maculae’, we can see on the face of the Sun were symptoms that it was starting to die. His Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692) includes this prophesy:
After some vast Periods of Time, the Sun may be so inextricably enveloped by the Maculae, that he may quite lose his Light; and then you may easily guess what would become of the Inhabitants of the Earth.*
In the nineteenth century, scientists were particularly worried about the Sun going out. New discoveries about the actual age of the Earth combined with all the observations they had made told them the Sun should have burnt through its fuel long ago. In 1871, the British scientist William Mattieu Williams noted that even though the Sun’s ‘stupendous ocean of explosive gases’ constituted ‘an enormous stock of fuel’, it should have been used up over the millions of years the Earth had existed. Long before the present, he calculated, there should have been ‘a gradual diminution of the amount of solar radiation, and a slow and perpetually retarding progress towards solar extinction’.
The solution to this conundrum was not discovered until 1904, when the physicist Ernest Rutherford speculated that radioactive decay at the core of the Sun might provide it with its energy. Albert Einstein’s work provided the frame by which Rutherford’s insight could be theorised, and in 1920 Sir Arthur Eddington argued that the extreme pressures and temperatures at the Sun’s heart cause a nuclear fusion reaction, squeezing hydrogen atoms together with such force that they merge into helium nuclei, releasing considerable quantities of energy as a result. This is still our best understanding of why the Sun burns; nobody has travelled to the Sun to check, but we’re pretty sure.
But although this explains why the Sun has burnt for as long as it has, it only kicks the can down the road. For though the Sun’s fuel will last for billions of years, our star will eventually burn through all its fuel. And when that happens, the constitution of the Sun will alter and any life forms in the vicinity will die.
When the metaphorical fuel-tank indicator needle starts wobbling near zero, four things will happen, which we might regard as four apocalyptic horsemen. First, the Sun will swell hugely, becoming a red giant (let’s call this the red horse stage), which will gobble up the inner planets, assuming they are still in those orbits in five billion years’ time.* The red phase will last for 100 million years or so, until the Sun shrinks to a much smaller, dimmer version of its former self (the pale horse), which will last as long as 500 million years before eventually the outer layers of the Sun will blast away, leaving only the brilliant white core (the white horse). At this point, all of the fuel has run out, it burns only because its constitutive elements are very hot; over time, perhaps trillions of years, this heat will be radiated away and the Sun will reach its final state: a lightless black dwarf (the black horse).
It doesn’t stop there. If our Sun will die, then so too will all the stars in the universe. And while new stars are being born even as I write, it will not always be that way. Eventually all the stars will have used up their fuel, and will stop shining. Then, for unimaginable gulfs of time, the universe will be black, cold, inert, over and forever continuing to be over.
Almost all scientists agree that the universe began with the Big Bang, when a dimensionless point ‘exploded’, pouring out matter in all directions. This universal expansion is an ongoing, measurable phenomenon. As the matter continues to expand outwards, becoming less dense, new stars will no longer form. Eventually, over quadrillions of years, each and every existing star in the universe will use up its fuel. The unimaginably vast spaces of the expanding cosmos will be diluted to a temperature only slightly above absolute zero.
The technical term for this process is ‘entropy’, a word with a vulgar as well as a scientific meaning. The latter dates from 1865, but the former, which is much older, is that things run down. From ancient times, humans have understood this basic truth about the nature of things – that order slowly becomes disorder, as youth inevitably decays into age. Build your house, fit its windows and paint its walls, by all means; you know very well that unless you keep inputting your labour, it will fall away into crumbling, peeling, weed-clogged disorder. That’s the crude sense of what entropy means: disorder increases unless we put in the work to maintain order.
So this is the end that most scientists tell us is coming: a cold universe expanding lightlessly, lifelessly and forever, however hot, bright and lively things are right now. Not a very heartening prospect.
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 l
ife 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?
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 9
