It’s probably a little too early to worry about this but the sun is going to burn out one day and turn into a red giant and devour Earth and all the inner planets and that will be that. Toast. Dust to dust.
All that humanity has been and all that humanity has accomplished will be lost and forgotten. Who won the 1936 World Series for example (the Yankees over the Giants 4 games to 2) and all the rest of the sports scores, the headline news from all the front pages from all over the world, all the world wars, all the tragedies, all the dramas and the heroic achievements - poof, gone. It will take 5 billion years but still, it does put a different spin on things.
And of course it depends on whether or not we’re still around by then. Probably not. The dinosaurs only lasted 160 million years and I’m sure they thought they were invincible.
Or maybe we’ll find another planet to live on, out there somewhere circling around another star. That’s possible. We’ll have enough time to learn star travel, sneak through a wormhole, hook up the hyperdrive and travel at warp speed like Star Trek, teleport ourselves around the galaxy and appear in identical but different bodies on some other planet. Five billion years is a long time. But regardless of what happens, the sun will burn out one day, ready or not. Heck the whole universe will disappear. It has to. Everything that gets created gets destroyed, right?
So here’s the point of my tirade, humans exist in a space/time matrix but we don’t belong to a space/time matrix. We belong to a spaceless/timeless matrix or at least we long to. And what is that longing? I don’t think the other organic life forms on this planet share that longing because they can’t imagine a spaceless/timeless matrix. We can, because we are eternal. How else could we imagine it?
I’m a writer, I know about dreaming stuff up. It all has a source, it comes from somewhere before it gets filtered through an individual mind, gets modified and altered by other influences from other minds. If we can imagine God then there must be something like ‘God’ is another way to put it.
Gerard Manley Hopkins imagined God as some kind of overpowering, terrifying being, or beingness. Rilke imagined God as a thrilling essence known only through his angels, but that was shocking enough. In any case the infinite was contained, in some sense, within the finite human mind or the human heart. Poets tend to transcend even the mental world and enter the realm of pure feeling. Kind of like riding your bicycle until you’re not riding your bicycle anymore but moving through space and time like a spirit in a material world.
So something will survive, not our mind maybe but our spirit. Is that right? Sounds right. Maybe our sun, as it expands outward in its brilliant denouement, will be the prelude to another level of existence. Maybe we will become light beings and not need a planet to live on. We won’t care about sports scores anymore and poetry will be our nature not our entertainment.
I don’t know, but when I saw the article that’s linked at the top of this post, I wanted to write about it. ‘What happens when a star dies?’ it says. It’s an amazing question and a powerful idea especially when it’s our star. We think of the stars as eternal, blinking away up there in space as they have ever since humans have been here on planet earth. They’re not eternal though, not in that form. They burn up, their fuel dissipates and they metastasise into a red giant or explode in a supernova event if they’re large enough, and spew their contents out into interstellar space.
This is where all the heavy elements come from: iron and nickel and copper and zinc and etc. Stars are made of hydrogen and helium, the two simplest elements and the ingredients of the primal universe, but the heavy elements that make up our earth were created in an exploding star. Those elements, which were then basically space dust, came together under the influence of gravity and became a planet.
The lighter elements that make up the tissues of our body and all living things: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, and such, formed in the nuclear furnace of a star before it supernoved or turned into a red giant. Check this out. From NASA, Imagine the Universe.
Stars transition from being light givers and warmth givers to being the birthplace of new elements and then share them with the universe. So it’s not all bad. Our sun will seed the universe with the ingredients that some day may be part of a new planet and a new civilization with life forms and everything.
I don’t know how long the universe is going to last but until it does the stars will be creating the stuff that planets and their biospheres (if they have one) are made of. Mother Nature, as we call it, although we usually limit her to planet Earth.
All these elements. from helium to plutonium, were fused and molded in the terrible crucible of a dying star as it transformed from a light giver to a generator of matter - how could human beings disappear? If even the stars transform and mutate into planets and continents and biospheres why not us?
This brings up an interesting point (obviously I am not done with this rant). If God is infinite and the creator of the universe (and the destroyer) then how can a puny human (in a body or not in a body) know him? The saints and sages all pretty much concur on this - by looking within. The source of all things can be known by looking within? I guess so. If you can ask the question then you must have the answer. The tree bears the seed and the seed holds the tree. What’s there to worry about? All our petty issues will one day be scattered like leaves in the autumn breeze. Scattered and lost. Decomposed and transformed into something new. I take heart in that having made so many mistakes in my lifetime and not having grown weary of making mistakes.
Maybe you can relate, maybe not. Big fluffy clouds float across the sky this morning as I sit under the trees writing this, big fat, fluffy clouds. They seem so generous and full of promise. I wonder where they go? I wonder where they came from?
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what happens when the sun dies?