The End

The End is the universe’s apparent terminal state, when the wreckage of the galaxies gathers into barren ash amid energy that can no longer accomplish anything. In the cosmology presented by the book, however, this is an ending only from the perspective of limited knowledge: events continue beyond it, and time’s cycle eventually brings the Beginning again. The End is therefore both a cosmic catastrophe and a boundary that human understanding cannot treat as ultimate.

The universe’s apparent terminus

Within the known spatio-temporal order, the Beginning starts with an immensely tenuous gas, the parent of material and spiritual existence within time’s known span. Its many constituents crowd into swarms, which become nebulae and then galaxies. Stars form and die within those galaxies; only a very few support mind for a brief interval. In due course, the galaxies’ wreckage drifts together into a single, barren, seemingly changeless ash, surrounded by energy that can no longer be used. This universal exhaustion is what the account calls the End.

The name marks the limit of what can be observed, not a proven cessation of all events. The universe appears to close because the familiar contents of its history have run down into a static remnant. Yet the account immediately qualifies that finality: the End is final only in relation to ignorance of what lies beyond it. What seems to be the last state of existence is a threshold in a larger order.

The cycle beyond the End

The End belongs to a cycle of events that has no external time in which to repeat. After it, unknowable events continue for a period much longer than the interval that separates the Beginning from the End. At length, the identical event that was the Beginning occurs again. In this sense the past Beginning is also the future Beginning.

The account insists on a distinction between cyclic succession and repetition. Events form a cycle, but there is no independent, unchanging time against which one cycle could be compared with another. Time is an abstraction from the succession of events; since all events together constitute that succession, nothing stands outside it as a measure of recurrence. The Beginning can thus return as the identical event without being merely a copy made in a second, separate time. The End is one spoke-to-spoke span on a wheel whose larger arc extends beyond it and around to that Beginning.

Cosmic duration and the brief season of life

The interval from the Beginning to the End is about a hundred million million terrestrial years. The period after the End and before the next Beginning is at least nine times longer. Life occupies only a much shorter interval within the first span, and living worlds are rare: life cannot occur before stars exist or after they have cooled, and even during the stars’ lifetimes only a few support it.

The account places this scarcity on a galactic scale. In the galaxy, about twenty thousand worlds have conceived life, but only a few score have attained or surpassed the mentality of the First Men. Humanity has outstripped the others, and at the point from which the cosmic history is told, humanity alone survives. Against the immense duration of the cosmic cycle, the span in which mind can appear is a brief season; the End closes that season without closing the succession of events itself.

Cosmic ending and historical collapse

The book’s history also contains the fall of civilizations, but those collapses are not the universal End. The First World State, for example, failed when its coal supplies suddenly ran out. The deepest borings in Antarctica revealed no further deposits, and a society whose energy-intensive ritual of flight consumed more power than productive industry could not bring itself to make the necessary reductions. Its collapse led into the First Dark Age, but it remained a local historical disaster within the larger cosmic order.

Likewise, the history of the Third Men records civilizations rising and collapsing at intervals, sometimes after long periods of cultural or industrial achievement. These endings recur within human history; the cosmic End is different in scale and status. It is the apparent exhaustion of the galaxies themselves, yet even that exhaustion is not the last event: beyond it lies a vastly longer interval, and beyond that, the return of the Beginning.