I read an interesting piece in the NY Times this morning about the end of all things from a scientific/naturalistic perspective. Because I have spent my whole life in the context of faith, and because faith infuses life and history with meaning and direction, it never occurred to me how dismal and hopeless the naturalistic view of time and history really is.
Here are the first few paragraphs...
Dennis Ocerbye wrote:
The End is coming, in maybe 100 billion years. Is it too soon to start freaking out?
“There will be a last sentient being, there will be a last thought,” declared Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College, near the end of “A Trip to Infinity,” a new Neflix documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.
When I heard that statement during a showing of the film recently, it broke my heart. It was the saddest, loneliest idea I had ever contemplated. I thought I was aware and knowledgeable about our shared cosmic predicament — namely, that if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life and intelligence are doomed. I thought I had made some kind of intellectual peace with that.
But this was an angle that I hadn’t thought of before. At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely, silent years...
Dan Z wrote: ↑Thu May 04, 2023 11:04 am
I read an interesting piece in the NY Times this morning about the end of all things from a scientific/naturalistic perspective. Because I have spent my whole life in the context of faith, and because faith infuses life and history with meaning and direction, it never occurred to me how dismal and hopeless the naturalistic view of time and history really is.
Here are the first few paragraphs...
Dennis Ocerbye wrote:
The End is coming, in maybe 100 billion years. Is it too soon to start freaking out?
“There will be a last sentient being, there will be a last thought,” declared Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College, near the end of “A Trip to Infinity,” a new Neflix documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.
When I heard that statement during a showing of the film recently, it broke my heart. It was the saddest, loneliest idea I had ever contemplated. I thought I was aware and knowledgeable about our shared cosmic predicament — namely, that if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life and intelligence are doomed. I thought I had made some kind of intellectual peace with that.
But this was an angle that I hadn’t thought of before. At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely, silent years...
That is a strange idea, that there will be a last sentient being. I mean, I would have thought that evolution would just be expected to either keep the evolution going upward, or else a new sentient being would be expected to evolve.
