AFTER THE STARS HAVE GONE—THE FINAL, SILENT DARK
THE LAST CHANCE SALOON (CASINO) Entropy is always the winner in the end, when there’s no more money left to lend; meanwhile we stabilize, in nature’s way, rearranging resources temporarily.
Prelude
Going beyond our very old obsession, so vast, of how it all began, back in the distant past, but, retaining our search for meaning, from that, we now turn to how will it all end, this and that, whether becoming collapsed, expended, or flat. Is there is some deep meaning in all that?
Yes, for it is there in that future distance, we’ll find, or not, the end of our persistence—whether or not we are at all forever resistant; whether all that was, and what was did and done will be of any long-lasting benefit to anyone, of what destiny awaits, if there ever was one. Endings are important to us, for what we’re about, because we believe that how things turn out implies what the beginnings ultimately meant, of what, or not, is our place in the firmament.
As an ambitious species of nurture and nature, we are now and always pointed toward the future, for, of the three forms of the chimpanzee: the common chimp, the bonobo, and us, we are the only chimp who went beyond the trees… and, more importantly, even out of Africa, freed, by that exodus, which laid down, indeed, from that experience, the urge and the need to move on, exploring, ever planting another seed.
The horizons on Earth sufficed us, as in “time”, for many millennia, but now the horizons’ climes are broadened, through cosmology and physics, and so they can well inform us of our prospects. The future matters to us, for very basic reasons: we wish to offset our mortality, our pleasin’s, to know if humanity’s works, for every season, will be remembered, or lost; for nothing, even.
The Final, Silent Dark Marches On…
Time hurls a million waves of is displacement at us, yet we are still here—at least our replacements: Time, ever gray with age, hurls its changes, then, ‘gainst existence’s rock, time and time again, the entropic seas denuding the sands, yet, energy is transformed via science’s wands. Reminiscence weathered, but could ne’er wither, for, in those mists of time; yesteryear yet appeared.
Would the prospect of a “Big crunch” bring on phobia, such as an ever more confining claustrophobia? Seems a better thought, somehow, though no picnic, but more pleasing, if the universe(s) were also cyclic, although then all would still be really crushed and forever lost, gone headlong into the rush.
We expect cycles, for all the days and seasons embedded this in our ancestors, into our reasons, since, at least, the periodic supplies some rhythm, a pattern—the rolling hills of lives onward driven. As for the cyclic, endless repetitions, they, too, would seem to revolt more of us than just a few; as, too, perhaps, would some infinite abyss of time, which, too, grants us neither reason nor rhyme.
Does the drama go on forever, or does it end? What do the visions of the future portend? Doesn’t it all have some purpose meant—a goodly end of all of it to us might it present? Is our higher mammal time, certainly, but of such short parentheses within eternity? It’s only a finite time, then, which, too, tends to horrify many, and more, as the universe ends, such as told by Robert Frost, a name of chill: in heat or in cold, known as fire or ice, still.
Should we not believe in God since nothing lasts? Well, if nothing lasts, then of what our purpose past? Is a purpose really required, so constructive, or would that be really quite restrictive? No realm could really be special or sent, its becoming being of some specific intent, for, all arrived here of causeless accident. Is there anything wrong with the freedom to be, anywhere, any how, or any time during eternity? No.
Should we rail against the law of entropy, the “heat death” of thermodynamic energy, the second of its final laws, we see, because it would destroy all of history? Well, there are so many ways for disorder to be than any one ordered state specifically.
Would even a Heaven on Earth become a misery if it, as it might, contain no more novelty? Must there be an end to our revelry? Can’t we, at least, hibernate eternally? Won’t all matter, too, last eternally? Will Shakespeare’s works live on, paternally? Is this not a Wagnerian struggle for eternity?
Science Can Settle Whether a Last Day is Ever Going to Come this Way.
Only a decade or so ago, with some consternation, we discovered the universe’s large acceleration, this expansion even increasing, onto some thin disaster, the galaxies getting further away, ever and ever faster… then, one last snapshot taken, for all to remember. The accelerating expansion of the universe’s rafters means that the universe will cool even ever faster, So, any conceivable forms of the future’s life prolongers will have to keep themselves ever more cooler, think more slowly, and hibernate ever-longer. One day the protons will fade away, leaving but dark matter, electrons, and positrons.
The waves of the ancient swells of time’s forgetting tides swept ever on… as time, now hoary with age, hurled forth its ashen change, the charge ever san, pale and colorless, that force born to summon decay, so endless, ‘gainst nature’s universe each and every day; time and time again, time fed all upon, in its bloodless, white and waxen way; but, this everlasting rose would not fade, its luster even brightening by the day, ever unsuccumbing to the sickly, peakèd state draining drawn the life away.
Entropic seas yet denude the mountains, yet, this enduring flower, never-endingly has cast deathly time aside, for now, ceaselessly somehow thriving on, to that which was the near imperishable, the flame of beauty still inextinguishable, forever celebrated as immutable, gaining its seemingly perpetual permanence from the undying love of the glorious truth.
Yet, everything was moving apart, cooling off, the big slowdown not really so very far off; ultimately, even the black holes of late and the lightless planets would dissipate. The primordial soup, once so rich and hearty was now a thin gruel that couldn’t serve the party. One day, every particle would be moving away from every other particle, so much out the way that they won’t even be able to see one another; thus, for all intents, motion will have ceased forever.
Our spurt of life, followed by an infinite stretch of dark equilibrium, was but the briefest sketch—a warm and fuzzy stage, so interestingly active, whose time, relatively, was but infinitesimive. Yet, we were there, in all our glory, for whenever else could we be?
In the future, uncounted societies of overlapping minds accumulate, with love, in island redoubts, their preserved data burning with a vital remembrance, in which, returning, past is the present and future, they all reliving the data, even animating it and ever altering. Without any new enrichments, the present and future reprise the past, in this retreat from external nature. Their candles would have been nearly invisible to us, they enduring, by diminishing, so as not to exhaust. They made few new memories, a kind of blind sight, for whatever realities had ever existed out of sight of their own mental structures were now fractured, and thus not much different from those manufactured.
The Penultimate Part of the Final Dark
AN ESCALATING ONE WAY TRIP FROM A FLUKE TO OBLIVION The majority of the energy of the universe is dark today, although everything else passes through it in every way. It’s everywhere, having a component that repels its own state, which cause the expansion of the universe to much accelerate.
DARK ENERGY MATTERS: THE ESCALATION We’re on a one way trip from the quantum fluke, that maximal energy within old Planck’s nook—heading toward the oblivion of sparse expansion, all that we ever loved and knew going to extinction.
We sent message of early warnings to some, in those castles of illusion, yes, many a one, that they would face the decay, not so far away, of the heavy particles, the “proton pause”, one day.
No self-assembled granularity can endure forever, but must return to the substructure, and, so, the lives must all transition, it seems, from heavier to much lighter regimes… although this, too, would not be permanent, all destined to be swallowed by the firmament.
We have often asked why some space exists, why it permits the countless to briefly persist on mother Earth, nourished under father sky—all of those finite sparks that light and die. There were those who endlessly debated, whether to live in their virtuals unabated, or press forwards and outwards, of delirium, to seek new localities in the mysterium; but, the pauses of the heavy particles continued, and so there was nowhere to go for the retinued.
It was much simpler once, in those days of old, when we thought that universes didn’t go cold, but that they expanded and collapsed, still destroying all, yet ever giving more to last. And, well before that, once upon a storied time, we simply made it all up, with tales and rhyme, in place of any physical observations, or of all our revealing experimentations.
… The past was now a reef of dead accumulations, a graveyard of various useless informations, which, despite their splendorous beauty, could not provide a novel futurity.
… The last one of us, born of the sparkness, kept a window to the outer darkness…
S/he looked out, from a once brightly colored and sparkling inner reality, into the dark abyss… There was nothing out there, all being so lonely and bare—no more singing of life’s song; for now everything was gone.
The Final Epilog
Our fruits are of a universal seed, are yet another yield of all possibility treed, for siblings elsewhere in the entropic sea are also born of such probability.
There could not have been any special time, one that was privileged over any other chime, nor any special place, nor any specific form arising out of the necessarily causeless realm. Even those locally specific dates and places past of the events’ novel memoirs could not ever last, they being writ on water, with no meaning vast, disappearing in significance so very fast, since it’s only the universals that last. …
The protons were all gone from the show, having decayed so very long ago, into positrons—ever canceling the electrons, but emitting the fleeing light of photons; there being, of course, an equal amount of protons and electrons in the count; and, of course, along with all the protons, went all of the atomic elements, the end, all of their forms becoming myth and legend—as they were still dreamt in night dreams, those forms that we once had, so it seemed.
S/he, as many of a luckily adaptable kind, had long since lightened and lighted the mind with the dwindling electrons, and precious photons—that beginning light of ancient times, growing wan. Ours had been the only line in the uni-verse, one that had become sentient, with proto-man first, the rest of the cosmos being but a colossal waste, a foreboding, harsh, and very dangerous place.
S/he was now the only one left, having outlived all of the rest. …
The universe was near crumbling away, having run out of space, time, and all its sway. S/he was dispersing, melting, into the vacuum, lone, but, s/he held on for another thousand years, alone; and, then, s/he, too, was gone, being the last of the hominid’s song, of all that was sapient: the Magnificat, the composition of Earth’s sweet plot, the greatest symphony that was ever sown, now having faded into the unknown.
From near nothingness our forms became, and into the same must go our remains. If the unknown be such, although it is otherwise; but, still, if it’s yet called unknown, then the reply is still, for sure, that we’re free to be, anywise.
If you’ve shed a tear, reading here, for both the far, and the near and dear, it won’t make their graves green again; but, it’s possible that life could begin again…
Be of good cheer—the sullen month will die, and a young moon requite us by and by: look how the old one meagre, bent, and wan, with age and fast, is fainting from the sky! (A Fitzgerald quatrain that’s not in his rubaiyat)
The Eternal Return
Behind the veil, being that which ev’r thrives, the eternal multi-cycle has ever been alive. Some time it needed to learn everything for, and now well knows how these bubbles to pour, of existence in some meant universe, those that wrote your poem and mine, every verse.
So, as thus, thou lives on yester’s credit line, in nowhere’s midst—now in this life of thine, as of its bowl our cup of brew was mixed into this state of being that’s called “mine”. Yet worry you that this cosmos is the last, that the likes of us will become the past, space wondering whither whence we went after the last of us her life has spent?
The eternal Saki-Cycle has thus formed trillions of baubles like ours, and will form, forevermore—the comings and passings of which it ever emits to immerse in those universal bubbles blown and burst. So, fear not that a debit close your account and mine, knowing the like no more; the eternal cycle from its pot has pour’d zillions of bubbles like ours, and will pour.
When you and I behind the cloak are past, but the long while the next universe shall last, which of one’s approach and departure it grasps as might the sea’s self heed a pebble-cast.
