Apocalypse

I find it interesting that every sensibility of man, even from his most primitive reflections, has pointed to the sudden and terrible end of the universe.

Before men knew what the lights in the night sky were, before they could comprehend the sun or our place in its orbit, mankind seemed to universally know that at some point these things would pass away.

Despite the absolute reality of natures consistency, seasons never failing to come and go on schedule, dawn endlessly rising in the morning and fading into dusk in the evening, animals and trees bearing new life in the spring and withering in the winter; despite all this near nauseous repetition and pattern, primitive man knew that it would end.

It is incredible to me that ancient literature records even more ancient oral traditions in which people commonly believe that the universe (whatever their understanding of it at the time) would in one fell swoop close curtain and be dim forever more. Science had at one point believed the universe was static, endlessly looping from rising states to falling states, but then learned of the 2nd theory of thermodynamics, which states with solemn infinity that all energy in the universe is slowly being extinguished.

Upon realizing this our future seems very sober. No matter how many galaxies we one day explore and conquer, no matter how wide the universe actually is, or whether our species numbers in the trillions as it colonizes and evolves into new and exciting complexities; one day all of sentient life will hold its breath as the cold dark wave of oblivion comes to rest upon it. Death; still, frozen, vapid and unintelligent death will be the final word no matter how far our science or our biology takes us. For mechanics and medicine are governed by a deeper magic: physics.

One day Paley's watch will tick its last tock, and this is as unavoidable and irreversible as the sun setting in the west. Try as I might, I cannot now or ever pluck the star from the pink and purple sky and place it back in the east. Darkness, desolation...death, will be the last word for all known reality, and somehow, remarkably, humanity has known this all along. Discovering that the universe is winding down wasn't shocking, it was the validation of a knowledge we have stragely had all along.

Ironically though, for just as long as mankind has intrinsically known that time itself will come to an end, it has also believed in a transcendent being who has the power to resurrect. A Governor of life and death, an unquenchable source of light and power. Perhaps when the universe has dimmed to only a faint glow, when the light is all but extinguished, finally we will be able to clearly see what was there all along, diminished by the pollution of so much other energy closer to our observation. Perhaps we will see the far off but brilliant light of a new dawn, a new universe, the ever present hope of a future, and life everlasting. Perhaps we will then know, as we have always suspected, that while death will be the final word in our reality, there is another word that comes after that, a word that must be spoken by the being that created us whom we have always suspected was there. He will speak again as He did in the beginning, and we will all come into new life; "Let there be light".