Death Comes Equally To Us All

“Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.” — Ecclesiastes 1:5-11

The author of Ecclesiastes believed that everything is cyclical.  Plagues, wars, famine.  All things come and go, all things have their time, like the passing of the days or the turning of the seasons.  In the end nothing of substance is changed about the world.  “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”  And there was a time when I found this notion bleak and depressing.  But now, in this moment of history, I’m not so sure.  I often find myself wondering if this idea of a world without novelty isn’t, perhaps, naively optimistic.

What the author of Ecclesiastes didn’t know, couldn’t have known, is that the cycles of the wind and the sea and the seasons would one day find themselves at the mercy of human industry.

What the author of Ecclesiastes didn’t know is that our world can die, and our species along with it.

What the author of Ecclesiastes didn’t know is that nothing, nothing whatsoever, endures forever.

The elliptical orbit of our earth around the sun was predicted by Newton to be absolutely stable.  But it is not.  Newton didn’t understand that every second of every minute the rotational momentum of the earth is being stripped away into the cosmos, carried off by infinitesimal ripples in the fabric of spacetime.  The earth’s orbit will, in time, decay away.  And our planet will fall into the sun.

And the sun, in time, will burn out and die and collapse under its own mass.

And the accelerating expansion of the universe will shred away the distant galaxies, shroud them from view.  So that astronomers in the far distant future — of which there will be none — will know nothing of the greater universe, and will conceive of themselves as utterly alone in a sea of enveloping darkness.

And even the dim afterglow of the big bang — the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background — that has endured for some 400,000 years, will fade into insignificance.  And as this first light dies away, so too will die any hope that some far-future cosmologists might understand the origins of the cosmos they inhabit.

And even the universe itself is transient, will die.  All data suggests that the ultimate fate of our cosmos is the so-called heat death, a state “of universal rest and death” as first articulated by Lord Kelvin in 1852.

Poet and clergyman John Donne wrote that death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.

He didn’t know, couldn’t possibly have known, exactly how right he was.