The End

By the time the sun sets, I will be dead. The world will be dead. I always knew I was going to die, but I didn't really think about it until now, until the reality was actually staring me in the face. I wondered what it would be like to be dead. Was there really a heaven? Or was death just the end of life? Does God really exist? Most people nowadays don't believe in God. In the light of modern science, it was considered immature, even though there were still quite a few who hung on. If they did believe, they didn't advertise it. But if God does exist, I can't really blame God. Our destruction is our own fault.

I walked over to the crib, and looked at my beautiful great‑granddaughter, sleeping peacefully. A sleep from which she will never awaken. I looked into her peaceful face, wondering why all faces weren't peaceful. She will never know life, and maybe it's just as well.

I went over to my recliner and sat down, looking out through the open patio doors, at the many trees creating shade in the brilliant sun, waiting for the end. Squirrels were busily chewing on acorns, robins singing in the many thickly leaved branches, butterflies visiting spring flowers, and ivy hiding a multitude of little life in the ground below. A nice day for the world to end.

I was mesmerized by it all. To think that such beauty was going to disappear. I thought about the horrible things in my life, the loneliness I endured as a youth, living out in the desert in poverty, without brother or sister, and though I had both parents, there was no love, no one for companionship. I was a mistake in my parent's life, a regretful mistake, and they constantly reminded me of it, as if it were my own fault.

But I was determined to endure, nonetheless, to become a real success, and indeed, I have been overwhelmingly successful, at least by most people's measure. After my emancipation from my parents, I went to the local university for physics, met my beautiful wife, honeymooned in Tahiti. I lingered a little on the thoughts of Tahiti, for it was such a beautiful time and place, when the world seemed to be almost over its violence; when poverty, disease, and pollution were being wiped out forever, and I had everything to look forward to, so many opportunities to chose from. I remember the joy I felt when Pauline was born, then John, and Tricia. A beautiful home, a loving family, a sharp contrast to my beginnings.

Winning the Nobel prize in physics at the age of 28. That was wonderful. People looked at me different. I had fame. Yes, I nodded, as I placed my fingers on my chin, casting my gaze downward. I had fame. The attention was intoxicating, delirious. I thought I was so unique. People looked at me especially, I thought. But really, everyone thinks they're unique.

I did some things I regretted. I wasn't completely faithful to my wife, but after my guilt climaxed, I confessed to her, and asked for her forgiveness, and she forgave me. I have been faithful to her ever since, even though she died twenty years ago. I guess that was the most depressing time in my life, except for now. The depression came back now and then, when my mind was not entrained by the environment, when I had time to be by myself, to reflect on the past, indeed, to live in the past, for the present had become so abominable.

Sometimes, when the hurting becomes overwhelming, I would settle down in a dark place, close my eyes, and try to think about infinity, although that's not really possible. That's what makes it so intriguing, I guess. I would see myself floating in intergalactic space in a most peaceful mood, actually looking at billions of galaxies, with their billions of stars, in crisp detail, wondering where it all came from, knowing where it was all going. At least I thought I did. When I actually visualized the vastness in my mind, it made my own problems seem so small.

It's amazing what it takes to have life, all the properties that life requires in order to exist. If gravity didn't exist, then neither could life, for there would be no large mass of heterogenous material for life to evolve on, nor would there be any stars, and therefore, no energy. Gravity is many orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic force, and the electromagnetic force is, in turn, weaker than the strong nuclear force binding the nucleus of the atom. If gravity were stronger than electromagnetism or the strong nuclear force, then everything would coalesce into one gigantic black hole, and again, life would be impossible. If electromagnetism didn't exist, or if there were no positive and negative charges, then there would be no chemistry, and no life. If the strong nuclear force were not stronger than the electromagnetic repulsion between protons, than there would be no nucleus other than hydrogen and its isotopes, and again, there would be no life. And without the strong nuclear force, there would be no fusion, and again, no energy for life. If the sun hadn't burned steadily for billions of years, then there would be no time for life to evolve. I could go on and on. There are so many requirements for me just to be sitting here, thinking.

Even with these things, life was a rare phenomenon. We didn't find any life anywhere else in the solar system, not even fossils. We really had hoped to find some fossils on Mars, at least, for many Martian features, such as the historic presence of water, had promised life of another era, but there were no fossils to be found.

We didn't detect any radio waves from other civilizations, even after we built a gigantic radio telescope in space more than a century ago, searching the entire spectrum from the very long radio waves to the infrared, and in every direction, simultaneously. Since many of the stars are older than the sun, it would seem that if there were life anywhere else, then there would have been intelligent beings, and some of them would have been producing radio waves of some sort long before we did. But life is so exacting in its requirements, that it seems unlikely it would develop anywhere else, and our failure to find any signs elsewhere seemed to confirm that. Now, it will cease to be here, also.

Tachyons, with their ability to travel at infinite speed, were no more revealing of life than the radio spectrum. Our ability to detect tachyons with great sensitivity, and to communicate with them gave us the ability to traverse the universe in a vanishing time, and if we developed the technology, there must have been beings elsewhere who would do the same, somewhere in those billions of galaxies, each with their billions of stars. But in spite of sending messages constantly in every direction, there was no response.

There seemed to be no other life anywhere else in the entire universe! Only on earth, it seemed. But not for long.

I loved history, and I've studied it extensively, yet I never studied a war that had a good cause. The only cause of any war, it seemed to me, was for power. Civil wars, third‑world wars, world wars, all wars created by someone groping for power. And as weapons became more advanced, more people groped, and did so with more destruction.

There were always some people who weren't satisfied with just living well. We had solved the pollution problem forever. We had solved the energy problem forever. Every person had almost everything they wanted. We had cured almost all of the diseases, greatly extending our lives. We all lived in a veritable paradise. Why, then, were people not satisfied? They wanted to control other people, I guess. They wanted to be more important than anyone else. Maybe it was just boredom. Maybe it was the desire to be God.

I could hear my grandson and his wife bickering in the kitchen. They knew they were going to be dead soon, but they bickered anyway. I didn't know what it was about. It didn't matter. It never mattered. I don't think I ever heard an argument about something really important. Even my own arguments with my family and friends, were about things that didn't really matter in the long run. It seems most people argue and fight more vehemently with people they're supposed to love than they do with strangers.

The sun was shining brightly outside. The steady sun. The sun was destined to burn another 5 billion years. As I looked back at all of the progress that people have made in the past few centuries, I realized that if people could only live together, and pursue life instead of death, they could become like gods. For a few centuries is so short compared to the billions of years that we could've had left in this solar system. We could have colonized the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. Everyone could've been a god.

Why did society tolerate so many people working in nonproductive activities, such as legal and bureaucratic activities? Such wasteful institutions, wasting the lives of so many people. Nobody could control large organizations, I guess. There was too much profit in them for somebody. So they continued to live. Like a giant dinosaur on welfare. Not really benefiting anybody. Just eating a lot. They continued, but this will be their last day. The dinosaur will become truly extinct. All life will become extinct.

Why couldn't people learn the technique of discovery and invention, to make it a profession, and even a part-time endeavor, long before they did? To make it a steady habit by everyone? While they tended the farm by day in the growing season, they could have taken a small amount of time to think and experiment every night, and more so in the winter, about possible solutions to their many problems, just as agriculture was a solution, or actually many solutions, but they were solutions arrived at by chance. So it took something as basic as agriculture thousands of years to develop beyond a rudimentary form that it had in the beginning of civilization.

The common person was too shrouded in religion, I guess. They thought gods controlled the world. Why couldn't they see that what they controlled was by their own efforts? And what they couldn't control was not controlled by sacrifices and rituals to the gods, that nature was capricious. Why couldn't they see that? And why couldn't they see that it didn't take geniuses to make discoveries or to invent? That it just took effort. For somebody to think: I have a problem here. How do I solve it? Everybody had that one percent genius. They just didn't perspire as much as Thomas Edison. How different the world could've been, if people were so.

But it was too easy just to be a follower, and to indulge oneself in life's fleeting pleasures, to drift like a leaf in a stream, rather than take command of one's own life, and make something of it, to see what they were told to see, rather than looking to see what was really there. The politicians told them that this is the way it was, and the people believed that that was the way it was. The politicians told them that this needed to be done, and the people believed that it needed to be done. Too many times the politicians said that what needed to be done was go to war with somebody else. Why couldn't the people just say no? What war was ever actually needed?

But most of all, why couldn't we just learn to live together? The waste of war is so enormous. And for what? A little temporary power. It was always temporary. They just couldn't understand that, the dictators and so‑called heads of government. I guess their egos expanded as they rose in society, until eventually they thought they were above the law. Didn't Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon think that way? I think they did. Delusions of grandeur. Maybe they thought they were god. Hitler thought he survived all of the assassination attempts on him because he was in God's favor. It was a sure sign, Hitler thought.

If they weren't the heads of government, they would have been put away in an insane asylum. They would be labeled as paranoid schizophrenics with delusions of grandeur. How much better the world would have been, had they been put away.

And it never ceased to amaze me how so few individuals would be the cause of all this destruction, how even in feudal times, it was the people in power who would immerse entire populations in their petty squabbles. Such egomaniacs! Why didn't the peasants get together, and overthrow the bastards? They couldn't organize themselves, I guess. They had no initiative, and what initiative that did spring up briefly from time to time had no plan for growth, and so it died. But I would think that through all of those centuries, somebody would've gotten all the right stuff together, and would have overthrown the bastards. But when you're born into a situation, you come to accept it, I guess. If you do finally get it all together, you're too old to do anything about it. People's lives were a lot briefer, then.

But today, with advanced weaponry, it takes only a few people to destroy the whole world, and it's a few people who will. Each thought they could win, but they were wrong. And if they did win, so what? What would they have done then? Tell everyone else how to live. Most of us already know how to live.

Why couldn't we accept each other the way we were? Why did we create so many of our own problems? Even as I look back at my own life, I could clearly see that most of my problems were problems I created, or that others created for me.

The evolution of intelligence could have continued with great rapidity as we learned to engineer ourselves, to remove the chance element in evolution. Who knows what we could have accomplished. Who could possibly imagine? Maybe we could've populated the universe with intelligent beings of great diversity. We could've been the creator of most life in the universe. We could've. But we didn't. No, we couldn't even survive.

I could hear my grandson and his wife bickering again. Something about cleaning up. The pressure, I guess. It's the pressure. But. They always bickered. Usually about the same things. I would think that it would be easier to agree, than it would be to constantly bicker. Ego, I guess. Ego. The same answer to the many questions of our problems.

It's ashamed, I suppose. If there truly is no life anywhere else in the universe, then soon, there will be no life anywhere.

Eventually the universe itself will die. A heat death. A death of maximum entropy. Hydrogen will become helium, helium will become carbon, and eventually carbon will become iron and some of the other elements, but mostly iron. Iron will become the most common element in the universe. Iron can neither fuse nor fission to yield energy. When the hydrogen and helium are burned, there will be nothing left to power the stars, and without stars, there can be no photosynthesis, and therefore no coal, oil, or gas, or any other complex chemicals; no wind or water power; no radioactive elements produced by supernova explosions, and no primordial heat conserved by the mantle and crust of the earth, and therefore, no geothermal energy. All energy is ultimately derivable from the fusion of the lighters elements, especially hydrogen and helium, in the stars, and as they are consumed, there is less and less left, until finally, like oil, there will be no more, and without energy, there could be no life. The universe will be cold and lifeless. For life cannot exist in a universe of maximum entropy. Nor could it ever evolve. Of course, the universe won't die for billions of years, yet. But the universe has already been alive for billions of years, and it seems that life has only occurred once. With so many places for it to happen, and with so much time, if it didn't happen anywhere else, it probably won't happen again. For as the entropy of the universe constantly increases, the chance for life constantly decreases.

Now, I could be wrong. Nobody can really prove that life doesn't exist anywhere else. There could be reasons other than nonexistence as to why we didn't find any signs of life elsewhere.

But suppose...suppose I am right. Suppose we really are the only ones in the universe. Then this was life's only chance, and we blew it, for there will be nothing left of this solar system that is alive. Not the smallest microbe. No, not even the cockroach.

All of a sudden, my grandson and his wife stopped bickering. I heard the squirrels and the birds settle down to an eerie silence, as if they, too, knew what was going to happen. A strong gust of wind blew, and the sky had brightened considerably. I went out onto the balcony, my hair fluttering in the wind, and gazed up at the sky. The intense light was blinding me, but what did it matter. Yes, I thought. Here it comes.

The End

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