THE END OF TIME

Before I try to determine when everything will end, let me start with when everything began.  A 2017 Gallup poll showed that 38% of adults in the U.S. tended to follow an interpretation of The Bible that Earth and its lifeforms were created in their present forms by God between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.  The Western World also adhered to this general timeframe, as even William Shakespeare mentioned the poor world being 6,000 years old.

Other beliefs:

• The Chinese around 250 AD fixed the creation at 39,000 BC.
• The Maya around 250 AD dates the beginning to 6 September 3114 BC.  Quite appropriate, as my birthday is on September 6.  However, there was a competing age of 24 trillion years.
• The Hebrew Calendar around the time of Christ said 3761 BC, while other contributors to The Bible provided beginning dates of the Universe between 5000 to 8000 years ago.

Interestingly enough, Hindu cosmology, however, is eerily close to the best knowledge today:

• The Rig-Veda asserted 2400 years before Isaac Newton that gravitation held the Universe together.
• In the fifth century AD, the earth was calculated to be 4.3 billion years old, at a time when advanced thinking from England supported the age at 100 million years.
• the Cosmos undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.

Scientific disciplines today believe that:

...the age of the universe is around 13.8 billion years, the formation of the Earth happened around 4.5 billion years ago, and the first appearance of life on Earth was at least 3.5 billion years ago.^{[10][11][12][13][14]}

Much later came Homo sapiens, us, perhaps 350,000 years ago.

Now, what about the end of time, when everything is gone.  Religion delves into the end of us, but not the Universe, as such.  American poet T.S. Eliot (left) remarks, Not with a bang but with a whimper.

According to Dartmouth cosmologist Robert Caldwell:

• The Universe will continue to expand with all matter disintegrating into energy into a heat death, which is really the Deep Freeze, for everything will be uniformly cold, dead and empty.  It could take 10 to the 100th power number of years for black holes to dissipate into inert energy.
• Gravity will re-collapse the Universe into a reverse Big Bang, called the Big Crunch into a wall of darkness.
• Dark energy will accelerate the expansion into the Big Rip.

So which one will happen?  Scientists don't know, until they determine the nature of Dark Energy.  That third one above is called by Caldwell as Phantom Dark Energy, leading to a Cosmic Doomsday.

Some simpler thoughts:

In an ever-expanding hyperbolic universe, entropy will take over after hundreds of billions of years. All the stars will burn out. No new stars or life forms will arise. The universe will be totally cold, dark, and unchanging. In effect, time will stop because there will be no more change.

Or

Time can only stop if gravity becomes infinite. Inside singularities gravity is theoretically infinite and there is no time. In order for time to stop altogether, the universe must stop expanding and contract to one big singularity again. Then time stops and there will be no future, no nothing. This universe is closed. If that doesn't happen, time will go on forever, a world without end. The universe will eventually thin out, enthropy will steadily increase and it will be cold and dark and unpleasant. Unless there is some life somewhere that continues to export enthropy, continues to search out whatever source of energy they can find to fuel their quest for happiness and love into eternity.

I hesitated adding this last one, for there is no such thing as enthropy, but also because I never quite understood entropy when I took thermodynamics.  Heck, I'll add a final one:  THE BIG BOUNCE:

Thus, there will be no end of time.  Hooray!!!

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Once Super Typhoon Hagibis came as a Category 2, and left.  The death toll is up to 33, with 99 still missing.  However, nothing like the 1958 typhoon, when 1200 people died.  

Japan beat Scotland on Sunday 28-21 to, for the first time, reach the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals.  You need big people in rugby, so more than  half of their team came from offshore.  I guess there is no restriction to who can play, for these players were recruited to Japan.

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