When Time Becomes Meaningless

This is a republish of my original post from Medium that I wanted easier access to on my blog.

Over the millions of years that humans have existed; time is the only effect that ever remained as a constant in the fabric of our reality. Although it’s only been a few thousand years since we have started to read time — humans have always felt the flow of time. We have always figured linearity to the ambulations in our surroundings.

But, in a few order of trillion years, the remnant black holes in our universe will evaporate and the universe will plunge into complete darkness. The very last generation of photons will disappear as the universe cools them to absolute zero. Entropy will reach unity. Time becomes meaningless.

What does this mean for us? Does knowing this engulf you in a feeling of nihilism? If everything including the universe is destined to die at some point — what is the purpose of living life the way we do? At this scale of thinking, our material desires are of no meaning. I personally feel to opt for a complete optimistic approach towards this, mainly because I’m a human; man has always tried to create a sense of purposefulness in their lives, whether that be to serve their countries or provide for their families or whatever, it allows them to remain sane in a ‘Brownian’ environment.

Life contains the same ingredients that are vastly abundant in the cosmos. We are composed of the very elements that were ejected by the cores of stars aeons ago, we are special not because we are a rarity but because we are part of the universe trying to understand itself through itself. The character Dr Burnham on Star Trek once said, “People think time is fragile. Precious. Beautiful. Sand in an hourglass, all that. But it’s not. Time is savage. It always wins. So this… is meaningless.”. Although I would like to agree with such sentiments; the statement itself is flawed in understanding the preciousness of momentary life. The stellar conditions required in the universe for the formation of life to be even possible has an occurrence probability of one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billion billion billion billionths of a per cent. Not only does this boost my narcissistic emotions but also brings about a feeling of special creation.

If we humans ever had such nihilistic ideas imprinted in us from an early generation onwards we wouldn’t have had developed into such an advanced civilization. Instead of stepping on the moon, we would rather be plucking fruits out of trees. We would have made an incredible community of apes. But the world would have been all the lesser for it. Time might be meaningless in the end. But, ‘this’ matters. ‘Now’ matters.

Original Medium article link