I’m Talking About the End of the World
I’m about 50 years old. It doesn’t seem that old, but only 20 times my age ago (2009 – 20*50 = 1009AD) it was the middle ages! The Pope was handing out indulgences to get Knights to stop killing Christians in Europe and go kill Muslims in the Middle East. A little over 40 times ago there was no Christians or Muslims. 60 times ago, was the Trojan war, if you believe the Illiad. The Egyptians were busy making their pyramids. Before that? The time of Atlantis, western history is pretty sketchy at this point as it was invented only about 50 times my lifetime ago.
3000 of my lifetimes ago there were no humans on this planet at all, Neanderthal sure, but no Homosapien. Species don’t last forever. They die out and are replaced by others. Neanderthal didn’t last too long compared to us. If we evolve into something else in another 100,000 years (1000 life times) then that puts an upper limit on the total number of Homosapien that will ever live. If the Earth can support 10 billion people and people live about 100 years and in another 100,000 years humans evolve into something else then there will only ever be 10 trillion more of us, ever.
Only 20,000,000 of my life times ago, there was little more than bacteria on this planet. That’s a billion years, sounds like a long time but if a person lives approximately 100 years then that’s only 10,000,000 life times. The same amount of time in the future, and the planet may be unlivable as the Sun will probably be about 10% brighter. Not to mention that in that time there will likely be 10 extinction size meteor collisions. Needless to say in 50,000,000 life times the Sun will cook the planet and puff out a Nebula which will definitely wreck the environment.
What is really unfathomable is that the spatial dimensions of the universe are so much greater than the time dimension. The universe is 150 million lifetimes old yet it contains so much stuff, 125,000,000,000 Galaxies, 45,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Even if we all fan out, every human that has ever, or will ever live, we would each have to visit about 4,500,000,000 stars to see them all. There just isn’t enough time, so we will have to travel very quickly, but at that speed we’d just fly right by them, like a bad European bus tour, and never get a good feel for the nightlife.
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