Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe International Edition

The Lure of Eternity

Beginnings, Endings, and Beyond

In the fullness of time all that lives will die. For more than three billion years, as species simple and complex found their place in earth’s hierarchy, the scythe of death has cast a persistent shadow over the flowering of life. Diversity spread as life crawled from the oceans, strode on land, and took flight in the skies. But wait long enough and the ledger of birth and death, with entries more numerous than stars in the galaxy, will balance with dispassionate precision. The unfolding of any given life is beyond prediction. The final fate of any given life is a foregone conclusion.

And yet this looming end, as inevitable as the setting sun, is something only we humans seem to notice. Long before our arrival, the thunderous clap of storm clouds, the raging might of volcanoes, the tremulous shudders of a quaking earth surely sent scurrying everything with the power to scurry. But such flights are an instinctual reaction to a present danger. Most life lives in the moment, with fear born of immediate perception. It is only you and I and the rest of our lot that can reflect on the distant past, imagine the future, and grasp the darkness that awaits.

It’s terrifying. Not the kind of terror that makes us flinch or run for cover. Rather, it’s a foreboding that quietly lives within us, one we learn to tamp down, to accept, to make light of. But underneath the obscuring layers is the ever-­present, unsettling fact of what lies in store, knowledge that William James described as the “worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight.”1 To work and play, to yearn and strive, to long and love, all of it stitching us ever more tightly into the tapestry of the lives we share, and for it all then to be gone—­well, to paraphrase Steven Wright, it’s enough to scare you half to death. Twice.

Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the inevitable and direct our energies to other things. Yet the recognition that our time is finite is always with us, helping to shape the choices we make, the challenges we accept, the paths we follow. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker maintained, we are under a constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”2 According to Becker, we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us. Some soothe the existential yearning through commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—­constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”3 Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal.

Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment.

Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters.

Such is the story of this book.

Stories of Nearly Everything

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—­narratives—­is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—­and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning.

These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-­errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

Perhaps one day we will be able to transit seamlessly between these stories, connecting all products of the human mind, real and fictive, scientific and imaginative. Perhaps we will one day invoke a unified theory of particulate ingredients to explain the overwhelming vision of a Rodin and...