OK, kids, here’s the hard truth: the world WILL come to an end. Be it by asteroid impact, a nearby gamma ray burst, the expansion of the sun, proton decay or dark energy, someday all life on Earth will be extinguished. Humanity will very likely disappear from the Earth long before life in general does. No person is immortal. No species is immortal. We are, indeed, every last one of us unto the last of our descendents, DOOMED.
However…
While I know that I will one day die, it’s not exactly something I seek out. Hell, somewhere on my list of “reasons to avoid death” is that I will leave behind some cats that might be left in a bad way if I’m unable to care for them.
But then there’s THIS asshole:
“I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth”
OK, so your life sucks. Boo-friggin’-hoo. But for your dream of Rapture to come to pass, billions of others would have to have died horribly in pain and terror, then to spend the rest of eternity in unceasing torment.
Hmmm. How do I say “noʎ ʞɔnɟ” in a family-blog-friendly way?
There is a difference between someone who believes that The End Is Nigh, and someone who wants it to happen just as soon as possible. The former can be a kinda sad person. But the latter type gives me a major uncomfortableness. I have a hard time *not* seeing such a person as a psychopath only after his/her own gratification… screw everybody else, I wanna get me some of that Paradise I’ve heard so much about.
The end of the world means not just the death of all humans, but the end of our civilizations and our dreams. Even if some large number do get beamed up to Heaven, the Heaven that’s typically described along with the “Rapture” is a place where humans have no worth and no real future. Brightly lit and gold plated though it may be, it is a dark future where the few humans not screaming eternally in pain and terror are reduced to smiling robots, little more than knicknacks on a shelf. Bah.
Religions around the world accepted that the world would end. The Hindu religion has the world constantly being destroyed and reborn, as the universe is just the dream of a god. In the Norse faith, Ragnarok would come and destroy the universe. In the remaining texts (written a few centuries after Christianity officially supplanted the worship of Odin and Thor in the Norse world) after the universe is destroyed, a few of the gods and a pair of humans somehow survive, and start over in a new golden age. To me that always read like it was tacked on as an afterthought, an attempt to prettify and Christianize the belief system, by either turning Ragnarok into not the end, but actually the beginning, with the two humans as stand-ins for Adam and Eve (thus turning the pagan faith into a “preview” of Christianity), or by giving Ragnarok the same sort of shiny happy end that the Book of Revelation seems to have for some people. That ending just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the lore, however.
The chief of the Norse gods, Odin, knows full well that the end is going to come. But unlike the Rapturists, he is not thrilled by the prospect. Everything he does, he does to delay the end for as long as possible. It’s inevitably futile; the stupid, strong unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, entropy will have its way, things fall apart. The gods, as well as men and the world of men, are doomed.
But doomed though we are, we can make good use of our time. We can grow ourselves and our culture; learn all that is learnable, take ourselves, our progeny and life itself out into the universe and green the stars. A few billions years of work could see the universe brought to life by our efforts. With time and effort, humanity can make itself all that it is possible for it to become.
But not if we all die. And certainly not if we actually seek death.
So… yeah. All those of you who actually *want* the world to come to an end just as soon as possible? Y’all can bite me.
