We can’t know a lot about what lies ahead of us: the coming few billion years are somewhat murky. But, oddly, we can with an astonishing degree of certainty know what will be coming to us at the very end. The conclusion to history is — already today — definitively clear. And, in a sense, very sad. But also, in a minor way, redemptively and profoundly comedic. The sun formed 4.5 billion years, some 40 million years before the earth. While it appears stable, it is in truth working its way through a limited supply of hydrogen and helium at its core. The more it does so, the more its heat will increase: 3.5 billion years from now, the sun will be 40% brighter than it is today, which will be enough to cause devastation on earth: all the oceans will boil away, the atmosphere will evaporate into space, the ice caps will melt and the surface of the planet will be a molten toxic wasteland resembling Venus. Nothing — not the tiniest earthworm or parasite — will survive. If this is not challenging enough (and the thought doesn’t get as much attention as it should), 5.4 billion years from now, the sun will begin its end game. It will enter its infamous red giant phase wherein, with the hydrogen in its core exhausted, it will expand exponentially, encompass the orbit of Mercury and Venus and then collide with the earth, engulfing it and reducing it to nothingness. For about a billion more years, the murderous sun will burn as a red giant, then the hydrogen in its outer core will completely run out, and it will shrink into a fusion-less white dwarf giving off a pale glow of ionized gas before eventually, after 10 billion years, further collapsing into a stellar remnant known as a black dwarf — and then our part of the universe will be still, dark and eerie, and as if nothing had ever been. We know — in theory — that we have a lot of time still ahead of us. The human story has only been going 200,000 years. Its only been 4,000 years since King Sargon of Akkad established the world's first empire in Mesopotamia. We have — by most measures — an extraordinary amount of time left: 3.5 billion years ago, the very first living things, microbes called stromatolites, were only just coming into being, and the whole of history lay ahead of us. There is no hurry. Nevertheless, the definiteness of the end is galling. Nothing that humanity does or cares about on the planet will endure. Everything will go. The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, the top floor bedrooms in Paris’s Meurice Hotel, the ice cream at the Gelateria Duse da Giovanni in Rome, the Atlantis bookshop in Santorini, the little red train that connects Chur with Silvaplana, the white sands of Kuramathi beach in the Maldives, the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, Louis Malle’s L’Argent de Poche, the afternoon tea at the Sir Stamford in Sydney, every Madonna Bellini every painted, the ceiling of King’s College, Cambridge and the final movement of Bach’s Mass in B Minor — all will be lost as the earth prepares to boil for a few hundred million years at an intolerable 2,130 °C. It is inestimably depressing. And also, in a curious way, close to funny. If this is truly what is destined to happen, then everything that agitates us is absurd beyond measure. Every problem we have ever faced — our careers, relationships, reputations, regrets and failures — all are as naught in the face of the planet’s eventual and inevitable complete evisceration. We should use every measure we can to drain the present moment of its mock, crushing sense of significance. We have been granted an extraordinarily rich past to look back upon, a very long future to anticipate and, eventually, a very certain end point to resign ourselves to. We don’t need to worry very much at all; as it turns out we need only to love, to appreciate, to be kind and to learn — so long as we always keep in mind our beautifully miniscule position in the prolonged but blessedly finite history of time.
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