from Muse, December 1999

Ragnarök—one of the rowdier ways to go.

On 21 October 1844, thousands of Americans left their homes and went outside to wait for the end of the world. For 12 years their leader, William Miller, had been preaching that the Big Day was near, and now it had arrived. God was coming to punish the wicked and take the faithful to paradise, and Miller's followers wanted to be first in line. They gathered in the pastures and climbed hills, singing, praying, rejoicing.

The next morning the Millerites came down from the hills, brokenhearted. The world was still here, and so were they. History books call it "the Great Disappointment."

The world has changed a lot since 1844, but the End of the World is as popular as ever. On the Internet, "the end of the world as we know it" is such a hot topic that people just type its first letters: TEOTWAWKI. Most of them are talking about the Y2K problem, or Millennium Bug, which will make badly programmed computers go haywire when the nines in 1999 turn into zeroes in 2000. But TEOTW comes in other flavors, too. It can mean the end of the whole universe, or just of planet earth; the end of all life on earth, or just of human life; or it can just mean the end of a familiar way of life. Some people think it might even come before the next issue of Muse. In fact, over the centuries people have produced an EOTW to suit every taste. Here are a few of the most popular ideas they've dreamed up:

It Might Not Happen

The early ancient Greeks thought that the world would last forever. It had to, because their gods weren't powerful enough to stop it. Gods, the Greeks believed, had hardened like Jell-0 out of a mixed-up jumble of stuff called chaos. Zeus, Athena, Poseidon and the rest of the gang hadn't made the universe and couldn't destroy it. Time would go on and on, an endless arrow.

It Might Happen Over and Over Again

Around 300 B.C., however, a Greek philosopher named Zeno decided that the universe could be destroyed by something more powerful than the gods: fire. Some day, he taught, the universe will burn up and be replaced by a new one. Then things will start happening all over again, exactly as they did before, until that universe burns up and gets replaced, too. (The universes all had to be the same, Zeno thought, because otherwise some would be better than others, which wouldn't be fair.)

If Zeno was right, then a long time from now in a galaxy far, far away, somebody just like you will be reading this very sentence in a magazine called Muse. And who says you're the first?

Thousands of years before Zeno, other people believed that the universe goes through stages like the seasons in a year: it is born, it grows, it decays, it dies and starts over, but isn't necessarily the same as before. In holy books of the Hindu religion, the great time cycles are called kalpas, and each one is 4,320,000,000 years long. A thousand years ago in Central America, the Maya thought that their gods had created and destroyed three earlier worlds before making the one we live in. According to some modern end-of-the-world fans, the Maya calendar predicts that the Fourth Creation (ours) is due to be destroyed between December 21 and 23, 2012.

Archaeologists at Harvard University agree that 2012 is a special year in the Maya calendar, but they say what's scheduled to happen is probably something good, not the end of the world. Stay tuned to find out.

It Might Be Fun

Of course, many people believe that the end of the world itself will be a good thing. Possibly the first person to say so was Zarathustra, a religious leader who lived in what is now Iran or southern Russia, probably between 3000 and 3500 years ago. Zarathustra taught his followers that our world had been created once and would end once.

In the future, he said, people will grow wicked and violent. Earthquakes and other disasters will strike the earth. After a long struggle, the forces of good and evil will meet in an enormous battle, after which everyone who has ever lived will have to wade through a vast river of hot molten metal. Evil people will burn up and disappear, but the good people will cross the river unharmed and live forever on a beautiful new earth. Similar visions of the future can be found in the Christian Bible (in which the last battle is known as Armageddon) and in the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an or Koran. All of them end the same way: the wicked perish, while the good get their reward.

Zarathustra, looking forward to the end.

The Vikings and their relatives in northern Europe believed that at the end of the world, the souls of heroic warriors would team up with the gods to fight a final, desperate battle against hordes of evil giants and monsters. In this battle, though, everybody dies—gods, monsters, heroes, the whole cast. The Vikings called it Ragnarök, the Doom of the Gods. In some versions of the story, one man and one woman will survive to start over, but that won't do the rest of us much good. The real reward is a chance to fight, and only warriors get to enjoy it.

It Could Take a While

The end of the world has become a lot drearier since scientists started studying it. I'm not talking about nuclear war, environmental disaster, or the idea that a comet or an asteroid might crash into the earth. Those are all just possibilities (though awful ones), and we can do things to avoid them if we're smart. What lies in the distant future, though, happens very s-l-o-w-l-y, and it probably won't be much fun at all. And there's nothing we can do to stop it.

It all begins five billion years from now, when astronomers say the sun is due to swell up and turn into a kind of star known as a red giant. Over about another billion-and-a-half years, the sun will grow so big that the earth will wind up orbiting inside it. The whole planet may sizzle into a puff of cosmic gas. At the very least, the oceans will boil away, and the atmosphere will whoosh off into space. Later the sun will shrink into a measly little star known as a white dwarf. It will get colder and dimmer. leaving the earth at best an airless, waterless, lifeless lump.

By then, human beings may have moved on to other stars. New stars are still forming in space as hydrogen gas swirls together in parts of the galaxy called spiral arms. Someday, though, that gas will get used up, the last stars will fade out, and things will get cold and dark indeed.

Just a few years ago, some scientists thought that before the stars went out, gravity might pull them all back together into a sort of Big Bang in reverse, called the Big Crunch. It even seemed possible that everything might bounce outward again to make a new universe, something like what Zeno or the Maya had in mind.

Now, though, it looks as if gravity is too weak to make that happen. Unless scientists come up with another idea (as they love to do), what lies in store for us is more like a Big Yawn. Some of the burnt-out stars will get sucked into black holes, but most will just drift around in space until their atoms dissolve. There will be no rocks, no dust, no gases—just particles whizzing around in the nothingness. No one knows exactly how long all that will take, but it is safe to say that by the year googol (a one with a hundred zeroes after it), the universe will be as dull as anything can be. Then it will stay that way forever.

Not much to look forward to, is it? Still, there's always the chance that some livelier end of the world will come along first. Some people even think it might happen this month. I hope not. it would be a shame to miss the most exciting New Year's Eve in a thousand years, even for Ragnarök.

See you next issue.

copyright © 1999 Robert J. Coontz, Jr.