The End of the World.

There's been a lot of chatter this past week about the end of the world, the end of life as we know it, Armageddon, judgement day, whatever term or phrase you want to use for it. It all started from a prediction made by Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster from Oakland CA (right up in my neck of the woods), that the world would end on May 21st at 6pm. Harold had made a similar prediction back in the 90's when he claimed the world would end in September 1994. Of course he was wrong on both occasions
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He based his claims on so called 'careful study' of the bible, that he somehow calculated when judgement day  would occur up to the the exact day and hour . Did he fail to read the several passages in the bible which make it clear that nobody can know when the end will come? (Matthew 24:36 "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."  Mark 13:32 "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."  Acts 1:7 He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.")

Camping is not alone in his search to try to figure out when the end of the world will come; these sorts investigations and claims have been made throughout history by many people and in many religions. For example, all of the the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have deep seeded religious views that promote and amplify prophecies that the end of the world is either imminent or coming soon within a few centuries. For Christians in particular, the belief that Jesus will return to usher in the end of the world is a dominating factor in these sorts of prophecies. Christians have thought that the end of the world has been imminent essentially since the religion was founded nearly 2000 years ago. Even in the bible it shows the apostles and disciples of Jesus making claims that the end was near at hand. But it seems that all cultures and religions have some notion of the end of the world, the Mayan calender for example is used to argue that the end of the world will come in 2012 which is, of course, another claim which will be dis proven very soon.

The truth is that the world will not be ending this millennia or even the next. We as human beings can never know what will happen to the human race or what the future will hold for us, but one thing is certain though, humans will go extinct, just as surely as any other animal will go extinct. We may have descendants of humanity living on for many millions of years into the future, but humanity as we know it does have an end. What sort of end it will be is for anyone to guess. My prediction is that; unless we annihilate ourselves and life on earth with a nuclear war, humanity will go on living for several hundreds of thousands of years, after which there will be certain branches of humanity that go extinct and new forms of humanity that will be living on for perhaps several millions of years. It will likely be an ambiguous 'end' to our race of humanity that will branch off into some other race of humanity into the future, just as it has been for all other lifeforms on earth since life began.

Looking beyond the end of humanity and our ultimate extinction we can make much more precise and accurate statements as to how the earth as a whole will end in a few billion years. With the knowledge we have on the life cycle of stars and what we know about the age of the sun, scientists can give a fairly specific timeline and sequence of events that will bring about the end of the earth. The Sun is middle aged, being roughly 4.5 billion years old.



So in about 4 billion years the sun will have increased in temperature and will start to expand more rapidly to where all the oceans will be evaporated. Eventually the sun will likely engulf the earth and obliterate it around 5 billion years from now.

As far as the universe itself, it is expected to continue expanding in size to were eventually all matter will be so spread out that there will be no light or heat remaining, this is called the 'Heat Death of the Universe'.

With all of this in mind we can be assured that the world will not be ending for many many many millions of years. Weather or not we as humans will survive longer than a few hundred thousand years is unknown but it really only makes sense to think of our short term survival and prosperity as opposed to being fixated on how things will eventually end. With this larger perspective we should try to make a world that will continue to give space, life, and opportunities to the many, many, many, generations that will follow in our wake.