It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758)

by Roberts, Adam

  Well, it’s possible that the Big Bang will at some point go into reverse. All the matter flung out in that initial detonation has mass, which entails gravity. Some scientists believe that the gravity of the trillions of star-dense galaxies will slow down the expansion, stop it and then slowly pull everything back towards itself again. This would result in a ‘Big Crunch’, with all the matter in the universe falling towards a central point increasingly rapidly. And maybe the energy of the entire mass of the universe collapsing in on itself would put so much pressure on its now miniscule portion of space-time that gravity would be momentarily distorted, and everything would blast outward again in a second Big Bang, a ‘Big Bounce’.

  The theory was more widely believed in the past than it is now. It still has some adherents in the scientific community, but according to the most up-to-date science, neither the ‘Big Crunch’ nor the ‘Big Bounce’ theories are true. We won’t collapse back, and we won’t bounce – we will instead wind down slowly. Entropy, rather than rebirth, wins the day.

  Are we sure? The answer depends on how heavy the universe is, since gravity is the force that will draw the cosmos’s matter back into a new singularity. If the mass of the whole universe is dense enough, there will be enough gravity to slow our expansion and eventually reverse it. But the most current science suggests that the mass of the universe is below that threshold, and that it will not have enough gravitational attraction to fall back in on itself.*

  Nevertheless, it is the idea of escape and rebirth that science fiction tends to cleave to. ‘Eucatastrophe’ is a term invented by J. R. R. Tolkien to describe the sorts of stories he himself wrote, in The Lord of the Rings for instance. The ‘eu’ in ‘eucatastrophe’ means good, and Tolkien was talking about those sorts of stories in which things seem bad until they swerve towards good at the last moment. Consider those tales where events get worse and worse until we reach a point where the whole situation appears hopeless. In tragedy, that is where the story ends and we leave the theatre or close the book sadder but wiser. But the last hundred years or so have proved allergic to tragedy, and we are nowadays much more interested in eucatastrophe – in the final twist in which evil is defeated in the nick of time, when the giant asteroid plummeting towards Earth is averted at the very last moment. Eucatastrophe is when the storyteller makes a happy ending out of a doomy situation, just as a conjurer pulls a rabbit from a top hat. We saw this with the religious and mythological apocalypses of the previous chapters. The world ends in fire or via enormous human suffering and death, and then – miraculously – a new world appears, clean and bright.

  The truth is that although science fiction likes to pride itself on the ‘science’ part of its name, it is more informed by religious thinking than it cares to admit. The ends of the world in science fiction, after all, are generally religious apocalypses in a pseudo-scientific overcoat and hat, taking us through suffering in order to emerge somewhere new. This is a book about the representations of the end of the world, but in actual fact it is hardly ever represented.

  Entropy is a real-life phenomenon, but naturally enough we tend to want to cling to our stories of more optimistic ‘endings’ even in the face of scientific evidence. It’s striking how few writers have followed Wells and Byron down the pessimistic route of the eternal freeze, even as the scientific discoveries piled up.

  A few years before Byron’s ‘Darkness’, the scientist-poet Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin) published an epic poem called The Botanic Garden that also turned a clear eye on the likely end of things. Its apprehension of the end of the cosmos is no jollier than Byron’s:

  Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,

  Frail as your silken sisters of the field!

  Star after star from heaven’s high arch shall rush,

  Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,

  Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,

  And death and night and chaos mingle all!*

  However, Darwin was no Byron. He worked for the betterment of humanity and was a firm believer in God; he tempers the gloominess of this vision with some more hopeful lines:

  Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,

  Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,

  Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,

  And soars and shines, another and the same.

  William Hope Hodgson’s novel The Night Land (1912) is set after the death of the sun, but the story concerns the survival of humankind after that catastrophe – survivors have holed up inside a gigantic pyramid called ‘the last redoubt’, powered by residual heat from inside the earth. More usually, science fiction authors set their stories shortly before the death of the sun, enabling a melancholic and elegiac style of storytelling. The American author Jack Vance’s short novel The Dying Earth (1950) initiated the vogue for this sort of storytelling, which is now known as ‘dying earth fiction’, but Vance’s wit and ornate inventiveness are a long way from the desolation of Wells’s terminal beach. Perhaps the work of ‘dying earth’ science fiction with the highest reputation is Gene Wolfe’s four-volume ‘The Book of the New Sun’ (1980–83): a major work of literature in which an apprentice torturer called Severian travels through a world that is at once medieval and high-tech, and over which a dying sun is giving out its last light. Wolfe is as inventive as Vance but not so irreverent, and he tackles the end of the world with gravity and integrity. But he was also a Catholic, and rather than follow through the remorselessly entropic logic of his novels, he wrote a sequel, The Urth of the New Sun (1987), in which Severian rejuvenates the dying sun and renews his world.

  James Blish’s classic quartet of Golden Age science fiction novels, known collectively as ‘Cities in Flight’ (1955–62), ends when inhabitants of spacefaring human cities discover that the collapse of the cosmos has been accelerated and a Big Crunch is imminent. Knowing that the crunch will annihilate all life in the cosmos and that a new universe will burst forth, Blish’s characters contrive to find a way to pass something immaterial – love – to shape the logic of the new universe.

  It’s not just science fiction writers exploring the idea. The scientist Frank Tipler isn’t satisfied with the idea of such evanescent ‘influence’ on the next iteration of the universe; he wants to keep all human life alive forever in this iteration. His book The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (1994) argues that such immortality is not only possible but inevitable. He calls the Big Crunch the ‘Omega Point’ and seeks to show that it will be a transcendent climax of cosmic information-processing. Intelligence, he argues, will use asymmetries in the shrinking to generate effectively unlimited energy, which will in turn power far-future iterations of computers that will run perfect digital copies of all the people who have ever lived in immaculate digital worlds. Time, he says, will be made to run asymptotically – that is, after the manner of a hyperbolic curve that steepens and steepens without ever quite becoming vertical – such that it feels infinite to these copies, who will be indistinguishable from resurrected human consciousnesses.

  Though he is a respected cosmologist, Tipler was widely mocked for the earnest literalism with which he works through his heavenly vision in this book. He addresses such minutiae as ‘Will my dog be resurrected along with me?’ (His answer: the collective intelligence of the Omega Point will want us to be happy – if our happiness depends upon us having our dog with us, then we’ll have them with us.) But it is, in many ways, as pure an iteration of religious apocalypse as anything by St John – a eucatastrophic vision of inevitable disaster averted at the last moment.

  But there’s a fundamental point to consider with this theory: why should this be the second Big Bang? Why should the universe we’re living in at the moment be the very first? Maybe our current reality is the millionth version, and the next Big Bang will be the million-and-first. Or maybe this process of Big Bang, Big Crunch and Big Bounce has been going on forev
er. If you continue down this line of thought it turns out there is only one thing more depressing than the prospect of the cosmos winding down to a state of eternal cold, dark, lifeless nullity: the prospect of it not doing that.

  Consider this: every possible combination of the universe’s atoms would reoccur an infinite number of times. If the universe is a finite number of atoms being juggled across an infinite timescale, your exact life will be lived not once but an infinite number of times.

  From that night you lay awake, tormented by toothache, to the birth of your children, you will live every joy, every torment, every boredom, every effort over and over, in exactly the form you have already lived it, forever. If that seems hard to believe, perhaps you don’t quite grasp the magnitude of infinity.

  Nietzsche was fascinated by this very idea, which he called ‘the Eternal Return’ (sometimes translated into English as ‘the Eternal Recurrence’). He first mentions it in The Gay Science (1882) and explores it at greater length in his masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). Some scholars will try and tell you that Nietzsche raises the issue of the Eternal Return only as a thought experiment, but don’t be fooled – he literally believed in the Eternal Recurrence, and if the ‘Big Bounce’ theory is correct, he was quite right to. This is how he puts it:

  The weightiest burden: What, if by day or night, a devil were to sneak in upon you, during your moment of loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will be compelled to live again, and again, and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every moment of suffering and every joy and every thought and lament and everything, whether small or great, you will return to as you live, all in the same succession and order – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and this moment and your meeting here with me, myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again – and you with it, you mote of dust!’

  Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke to you this way? Or have you experienced that overpowering moment when you could answer him: ‘You are a god, and I have never heard anything more wonderfully divine!’ If this thought lodges itself inside your brain it will change you as you are – perhaps it will destroy you utterly. The question you must always ask yourself, with each and every thing you do or encounter, is this: ‘do I want this, again, and then again, and an infinite number of times again?’ Such a question would lie upon your actions as the weightiest burden imaginable. But then, perhaps, it gives you the opportunity to become the best version of yourself, to yourself, and in life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?*

  Nietzsche’s point is that only the strongest soul would be able to embrace this fate – to experience with intense joy every single moment of existence, whether painful or happy, exciting or dull, even though they are doomed to repeat exactly that moment over and over again, forever. The ability to embrace this fate is the key quality of Nietzsche’s celebrated ‘superman’ – the Übermensch, he thought, was destined to replace Homo sapiens. And the way to become an Übermensch is to look into your soul and know, with absolute certainty, that you truly embrace the Eternal Return.

  I suspect that for many people the idea of a ‘Big Bounce’ appeals because it evades the horrors of the heat death story, opening a secret door through which we can escape mortality. To me its implications are, in the strict sense of the word, appalling. The thought that I would have to live my life over and over in every detail, like being trapped in an infinite loop of Groundhog Day, a masterpiece of supreme existential terror,* provokes in me a profound existential revulsion. Grim though the prospect of the universal heat death is, the alternative is far worse. If those are our two options, then I know which one I’d prefer.

  * Actually Wells doesn’t specify the year in which his final chapters are set, but this seems to me as good a guess as any.

  * John Ray, Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1715), p. 315.

  * Spoiler: they won’t be. The overwhelming likelihood is that none of the planets currently orbiting the Sun will be in their present orbits by that point. The thing to keep in mind is that our Sun is sweeping in a great arc around the outer hem of our galaxy; five billion years of its future will include many close encounters with other stars and gravitationally significant objects liable to interfere with the orbital mechanics of the solar system, even to the point of slingshotting planets out of solar orbit altogether. Then again, it’s also likely the Sun will pick up new satellites in that time, so there’s a reasonable chance that it will have something to nibble on as it swells.

  * Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints, translated by Ilinka Zarifopol-Johnston (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 23.

  * ‘Falsification’ is the philosopher Karl Popper’s de facto definition of science. A biological scientist might advance the rule ‘all swans are white’; if we spot a black swan, then we have falsified that universal. The important thing to note is that falsification is not the same thing as an absolute refutation. When faced with data that falsifies a theory, a scientist usually modifies it (‘most swans are white’).

  * Indeed, modern scientists note that the cosmic expansion actually appears to be speeding up. They don’t know why, and explain the increase in expansion with reference to something they call ‘dark energy’.

  * Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791), 4.2.378–83.

  * Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), p. 341.

  * Perhaps you think it is a charming and funny romantic comedy? You are wrong. I cannot deny that Bill Murray’s deadpan performance generates many laughs from a well-written script, but if you think about it properly it is the most horrifying movie ever made. How long must he have been trapped there to learn jazz piano, ice sculpture and French? This was no two-week glitch, but one that went on for years, decades – or longer: director Harold Ramis, a Buddhist, said at the time of the film’s release that Buddhism teaches that it takes 10,000 years for a soul to evolve to its next level, and that he assumed that was how long Phil is trapped in his loop. I couldn’t last that long, reliving that day, over and over; I’d go mad. At what point do you think your sanity would snap? At what point might you give up on ethics and morality when you realised your actions have no consequences? You might think that you could assert joy in every second of your relived existence in such circumstances, but that groundhog isn’t going to snare me in its Nietzschean nightmare.

  THE WORLD ON FIRE: CLIMATE ARMAGEDDON

  In Roland Emmerich’s environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004), the charismatic climate scientist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) realises that a massive and catastrophic climate shift is about to strike the world. The authorities refuse to heed his warnings, but he’s proven right when a colossal storm system batters the whole of the northern hemisphere, sucking frozen air into more temperate zones and instantly freezing the whole world: a huge hailstorm smashes Tokyo to rubble, tornadoes rip Los Angeles to pieces and the British Royal Family die when the sudden drop in temperature causes the helicopters transporting them to Balmoral to freeze in mid-air and crash. Jack treks across the newly frozen wasteland to find his son, stuck in an ice-locked New York. The going, we might say, is Ragnaröcky.

  It’s an entertaining movie, but daft: the temperature, one character declares, is ‘dropping 10 degrees a minute!’ which would, if true, get us to absolute zero in less than half an hour. One scene that has particularly stayed with me sees Jack’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) literally pursued by the drop in temperature – he and his friends run as the floor freezes behind them as if it is chasing after them, reaching the safety of a room and shutting the door just in time. But it’s mean-spirited to sneer – the film is not a documentary, and the vivid special effects are good at conveying the immediacy of its topic.

  Climate change is a real and present danger. If you don’t believe that then I don’t know what to tell y
ou. The scientific consensus on this fact is irrefutable, short of there being a massive international conspiracy by scientists to fool the world. But the idea that a legion of geeks is slowly accumulating forged data and publishing it in obscure academic journals in order to reduce the profits of gigantic petrochemical corporations seems a little far-fetched.

  We can be honest: the climate is warming and we are mostly responsible. Some people might point to the natural fluctuations of our climate over time, but the rapid global changes we are seeing at the moment are unprecedented and not comparable with anything that has happened before. Its effects will bring extreme weather events, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures, rendering parts of the world uninhabitable. This statement is probably enough on its own to explain why it is becoming the dominant imaginary for the apocalypse, both in fiction and reality. And in the way it is represented, non-fiction accounts vie with fictional ones in terms of impact and terror.