“If”, “When” and “How” we’ll cease to exist

The “if”: “We will cease really to exist?” The “when”: “When we’ll cease to exist?” The “how”: “How do we to cease to exist: burned, frozen, in a cosmic cataclysm, self-destroyed, how? “

Let’s start with the first, the “if”, and let’s eliminate it immediately from our mind. The if it’s rhetorical. There are no doubts, the science of astrophysics is not fantasy. It is useless then to waste our brain thinking whether we can or cannot live forever, whether we can or cannot travel forever in the universe, whether we can or cannot move endlessly from one planet to the next and other dreams and fanciful absurdities, because, in reality, these possibilities do not exist. They are just nonsense and irrational thoughts and utterances of those who still find it hard to accept the world as it is. We, notwithstanding are being exposed to an infinity of cosmic and fatal dangers of which we do not even know the nature, in spite of this, we live also in a cosmic pit, the pit created by the solar system with its mass and, from this pit, we’ll never come out.

The pit in which we live is not dark as our imagination would push us to think, at all. The pit was created by the Sun and the Sun illuminates it. The Sun, therefore the pit (each star has its own pit relative to its mass), is our life giver, our nest, our home and our oasis in the universe, but it is also our prison and finally, our grave. Here we appeared and here we will disappear. It is written so, physics do not make mistakes.

Today we know practically everything about our physical universe: we know its birth, its development, its history, its beginning and its end. We have seen every corner ot it with the X-ray, thanks to Einstein, but also thanks to those who preceded him, starting with Anaximander and Aristarchus, and those who came after him, Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking, just to name some of them. So, we know that our universe is flat, that it is made of corpuscular particles, that it is teeming with quants, that it is undulating like the waves of the sea, that it inflates and deflates and that it looks like a giant jellyfish. And not only. We know also that it is made of matter, visible and invisible, or only one, the one we can see, which is holistic, which is curved and straight, which is infinite and finite, and we know also, alas, that it is deadly.

Now let’s come to the “when.” “When” we will perish exactly we do not know. Tonight while we sleep, next month, next year, in one 100, a 1000, a million years? We do not know, but we know, mathematically we know that we will disappear for ever from the Earth, and we know also that of us and of our doings and our existence won’t remain anything: we’ll be like birds flying in the sky without leaving trace.

For me, the “when” is now. I mean, it’s like now. I know it will happen, so, what will change if it happens now or in a million years? Nothing. Not for me, anyway. Time is psychological and, sometimes, a minute can seem like an eternity and an eternity like a minute.

It could happen that one of these mornings, when we get up and turn on the radio, the latest news inform us that in this same instant, a big meteorite three times the city of Paris, escaped the eyes of the telescopes because of sunlight, it’s heading straight towards the Earth at 100,000 km/h. A wonderful news, before having breakfast, ne c’est pas?

So, let’s now come to the “how” we will cease to exist. “How” we’ll be destroyed then? And again, we do not know. Swallowed up by a black hole? By the outbreak of a caldera, the Yellowstone, for example? From a new planetary glaciation? From the gamma rays of a supernova? From a giant meteorite? From the greenhouse effect? From a mega solar flare? In short, there are million of possibilities in which we could be destroyed.

Personally, I thing that in the nearest future we will be destroyed, not by some natural phenomenon, but by the hands of the so-called homo sapiens sapiens, that is, by the hand of the 193th hairless monkey or naked ape, as Desmond Morris calls it.

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