I was in second grade when I first learned that the Sun was going to die.
It was in one of those science magazines for kids, this brief postmortem from the future explaining how in a short few billion years from now the dying sun would bloat up to a red giant large enough to devour Earth.
My breath caught when I realized it wasn’t just people that would end. You can almost accept human extinction knowing that nature’s going to continue on. The end of the oceans and the forests and the skies that I loved so much, that was too much to take.
Yeah, that’s billions of years from now, but still. Entertaining the mortality of your entire planet and the smallness of your place over the grand totality of existence is heavy stuff for a seven year old.
That was my first encounter with the existential horror of time.
Time scares the heck out of me to this day.
Look at this from a piece of astronomical research done back in the elder days of 2001:
The analysis done here indicates that three-quarters of the Earth-like planets in the Universe are older than the Earth and that their average age is 1.8±0.9 billion years older than the Earth.
You shaking in terror yet?
I don’t guess you would be based on such paltry details.
The terror springs from a monstrous idea known in nerd circles as The Great Filter.
What’s the Great Filter? I’m glad you asked.
If we take the astro-data at face value, Earth-like planets began to form 9 billion, that’s billion with a B, years ago.
That’s about twice the age of our big, beautiful Sun.
Science fiction media over the last 100 years has taught us to expect aliens in fabulous space-ships equipped with fantastic special effects. But when our astronomers look out into space, we see nothing. No radio signals, no warp drives, no fusion engines, no Dyson spheres swallowing up stars, not a single thing worth calling Art Bell over.
If Earth is more or less typical as Earth-like planets go, which is the neutrality that scientists try to keep, then we’d expect to see life like Earth has life.
Life which almost surely predates our Sun’s birth.
Maybe not everywhere, maybe they aren’t that common, but with billions of years and many billions of planets to work with, the odds says somebody ought to be out there tearing around space.
But they aren’t.
Which means there’s a silent assassin knocking off intelligent life somewhere on the path from life’s dawn to space travel.
That’s the Great Filter.
What we don’t know is whether it is behind us, something that makes life itself rare, or if intelligent life is fragile, or industrial civilization inevitably runs out of energy and collapses under its own incompetence. Ahem.
We might be past the filter. But with all those ancient planets out there, far older than our cozy little world, the scarier scenario is that it’s waiting ahead of us.
In which case…
Maybe it’s just me, but a predator lurking in the cosmic darkness waiting to prey upon blissfully ignorant young species, I find that unsettling.
And that’s not even the worst of time’s horror.
The present Stelliferous Age, the universe as we see it now full of stars and planets and galaxies, will last about 100 trillion, that’s trillion with a T, years according to the cosmologists.
Then all the energy runs out, new stars stop forming, and the night sky is nothing but the burned-out corpses of rotten suns as we enter the Degenerate Era. This age of wickedness is speculated to last for upwards of 10^39 years, at which point talk of numbers which literally boggle the mind becomes pointless.
Cosmologists figure even this graveyard of heaven is not the end of all things.
If young Matt thought the death of the Sun was traumatic, this is future history is next level grim.
Even more odd:
The Great Filter makes us look late to the party. But these future ages of the universe are bone-achingly remote from us. If any forsaken soul may one day inhabit the silent reaches of the Degenerate Era, we would be to it infants in the first warm afterglow of creation. We are much closer to the Big Bang than to any mind that might live to think in such cursed times.
That timeline assumes that we know a great deal more about time and reality than we actually do, but it’s not a bad guess to fit the physical facts as far as we can see them.
Compared to the cosmic cycles of time in Hindu cosmology and the lesser-known Western occult traditions, even these soul-numbing abysses of time are downright quick. I don’t know if that helps or hurts the case.
However which way you look at it, time is real weird.
It’s enough to chill your blood if you think about it too much.
But the awful sublime terror of deep time can put things in perspective, too.
How mad can you get about whatever the TV wants you mad about this week once you’ve understood that the entire lifetime of the human species isn’t a micro-second on the cosmic clock?
I mean, yes, people will get mad about the TV anyway. People are addicted to the trivia filling their lives, and nothing is more addicting than outrage and self-righteousness.
What I’m getting at is that a good portion of the addictive live-to-get-by trivia doesn’t matter and isn’t important and we only do it out of habit or “what we do around here”.
I’m talking to the few who can open their minds to see reality beyond their preoccupation with the shadows dancing on the cave wall. We’ve been trained to call our narcissism by the name ‘consciousness’ when it is anything but.
Fill out these six forms and wait on hold for 3 hours? Get big-mad because of politics theater?
Nah, can’t do it. Entropy is devouring all creation.
The flip side is, things don’t have to last to matter.
Nothing lasts, but that doesn’t steal the significance from the genuinely good things in life. Getting older, watching the kids grow up, losing family and friends, watching the places and moments from the past fade away, all that makes me realize that it doesn’t have to be permanent to be important.
The point is not to fall into despair at the meaninglessness of being, but to understand that meaning doesn’t come from a white-knuckle grip on what can’t last.
The goods in life are less about what you hang on to and more about where you keep your attention.
Matt Perryman