Death of All Sizes
Counting up the concept of death from the microscopic to the galactic
Eternality is an impossible concept. Nothing lasts forever; time eventually claims everything. However, despite being an inevitability, Death depends on your point of view: after all, the final moments of a molecule and a star are hardly at all alike. Just like in life, there is great diversity in death. Looking at these various viewpoints of death might just shine some light on our existence.
Let’s Start at the Start: Quarks
Quarks are the tiniest particles currently known to science. Three of them put together make neutrons and protons, to give a comparison point. Despite being the very basis of matter, though, they are incredibly short-lived: pairs are created and annihilated billions of times a second, without end, a boiling sea of energy and matter pervading the Universe. The bigger quarks also tend to decay to the lower ones with haste: the Top Quark (also known as the Truth quark because physicists got sappy when naming them) decays to less massive particles within 5 x 10⁻²⁵ seconds. Here at the smallest end of the scale, we find the fastest death.
What Resides In the Nucleus: Protons & Neutrons
Protons and neutrons are the basis of baryonic matter, making up the nucleus that has the majority of the atom’s mass. While free neutrons decay within about 15 minutes to form a proton and an electron, free protons appear to be infinitely stable; after all, hydrogen ions are basically naked protons. However, some theories predict this might not be the case: the proton may decay at extremely slow rates to form various fundamental particles. The half-life for this ranges from 10³¹ to 10³⁶ years. In comparison, the Universe is 10¹⁰ years old.
Even if protons are infinitely stable, though, they aren’t eternal. Over enormous time spans, quantum tunneling will convert the atoms they make up into black holes that themselves evaporate into nothingness by Hawking radiation. Death reaps even that which can live forever.
The Building Block of Life: DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid, the double-helix compound that codes for life: where would we be without it? 23 chromosomes’ worth of information is enough to make a human. Despite its incredible importance, though, it is surprisingly fragile: errors in copying and damage from the surroundings occur surprisingly regularly. While some of these are mitigated by specific repair proteins, the process is still imperfect enough that it is the reason why natural selection is a thing. Without the randomness generated by each error, evolution would be impossible.
Generally, DNA is destroyed at the cell’s death. Some lucky cells like pacemakers live as long as their human does, while other, more unfortunate ones like neutrophils last only a few hours before being led to the chopping block. From the super-short lives of quarks to the unfathomably long ones of protons, we are finally at a comprehensible timespan.
The Bell of Unseen Time: The Immortal Jellyfish
Turritopsis dohrnii, commonly known as the immortal jellyfish, is one of the few organisms that is immune to aging: it can turn back from an adult to a baby at any time it chooses, effectively bypassing death. It usually does this in response to external threats, like a sudden change in salinity or having the bell damaged. The actual conversion process happens quickly; thus, no video recording of it happening in the wild has ever been taken.
Being a mere 5 millimeters long, these jellyfish are tiny and fiercely competitive. These qualities have allowed them to quietly spread all across the world’s oceans, a silent invasion unknown to most of us. The only reason they are not overflowing until now is because they are still not immune to death itself: predation, injury, and disease drive their mortality. Indeed, these jellies are relatively fragile, especially in captivity: only one person has managed to keep a set of individuals alive for an extended period. Given that even he had several colonies die in less than 2 years, I imagine the typical lifespan of an immortal jellyfish would be around 1–5 years in the wild, another comprehensible length of time.
Modern-Day Eradicator of Darkness: The Light Bulb
Light bulbs have been a smash hit with humans ever since they became mass-producible cheaply. For a while, their average lifetimes increased to around 1,750 hours as companies competed to one-up each other quality-wise. Then came the Phoebus Cartel: a secret agreement between the biggest lightbulb manufacturers to reduce their durability, thereby increasing sales. It was hugely successful; bulb sales rose by over 50 million dollars from 1925 to 1934, corresponding with a decrease in lifetime to 1,250 hours.
This has happened with several other products: washing machines, smartphones, even vehicles. In economic studies, this is known as planned obsolescence: the intentional reduction of product life to drive up sales. Companies actually conduct in-depth analysis to find out exactly how short a product can last such that the consumer still has enough faith in it to go buy another one. This is the reason we can’t have nice things.
We are the Centre of our own Universe: Humans
Human life expectancy has been on the rise ever since the Industrial Age. However, just stating the average lifespan of a person and moving on sounds cheap: after all, we are humans. The Earth may revolve around the Sun, but as far as we are concerned, the Universe revolves around us. Being the sole (known) purveyor of this great, big, weird place should give us some sort of extra consideration; thus, instead of using just the lifetime as measurement, let us consider memory.
Several notable individuals across history are called ‘immortal’ because they will be remembered for centuries to come. We strive to make an impact large enough that someone will keep us in their memory. However, most fall short. The average human will be remembered for 3 generations, maybe 4 (or if you are like me and don’t want kids, 0). Celebrities don’t fare much better, either: neither the Queen nor The Rolling Stones will be recognizable after a few dozen decades outside of a few fringe circles who got to know about them from books and documents, knowing only what was written down so many years ago. Of course, this can be said of anyone: who knows what Florence Nightingale was like as a person? Did she have any dreams she never pursued, desires she left unfulfilled, people she wished she could have helped? Nobody knows the answer. This raises the question: what does it mean to keep someone in your memory? What qualifies as remembering and what doesn’t? Can we really quantify something as fickle and fluid as memory?
The Roof of the World: Mountains
“What are men to rocks and mountains?” asks Jane Austen. What would these unchanging giants think of humans? They would see us scurrying past, building tiny buildings, growing crops, dying as fast as we came. A few would climb them, plant a flag and come back down. It would be sort of amusing, I think.
Mountains predate humans by millions of years: they’re the embodiment of the saying ‘That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.’ This ultra-slow growth from the action of flowing water and blowing wind, the movement of magma deep within the Earth, the shifting of the continental plates erode away weaknesses in the underlying rock, leaving behind a dependable base capable of supporting enormous weights for centuries. Unless blown up by humans, mountains can last for billions of years, surviving Ice Ages and solar storms that can kill almost all life on the planet. Despite all this, though, they aren’t eternal: the same processes that hardened them also lead to their demise. Over millennia, tiny bits of the mountain get carried away until there is nothing left. After years of drastically affecting basically every aspect of human life by their mere presence, these giants die just as silently as they were born.
What Makes us Human: Love
Perhaps that is not quite right: love exists for animals, too, be it parrots or cows or cats. The lower lifeforms might not be able to feel it, but at the very least, we know mammals and birds can: the connection is so easily identifiable even in other species; that caring look, the mourning of a lost friend, the happiness elicited by the mere presence of a loved one. The end of Love would thus come at a time when the only things that remain alive are insects and other organisms that lack the higher-order intellect to feel affection, being driven purely by the reptilian emotions of fear and hunger and sex.
Given the current state of the planet, I am not optimistic about our survival for much longer, but let us say that we somehow avoid massive climate catastrophes and make the switch to sustainability in the nick of time. If we do manage that, we have a few billion years before the Sun runs out of hydrogen and swells enough to swallow the Earth. Unless humans somehow develop incredible cooperative ability spanning generations in order to occupy other star systems, or instead find a way to become biologically immortal, this is the hard upper limit for the time the word ‘love’ holds meaning. Even for an emotion said to transcend physical boundaries, Death still holds eerie sway.
The Seat of Consciousness: Life
“Life is the Universe’s way of being aware of itself.” goes a saying I found online. Yet, the fact is that life is inherently fragile: it needs several things to go just right to thrive. If planet Earth is the only place where it exists, then the Universe will be observer-less again in a few billion years. But there is another overlooked candidate for life: rogue planets.
Rogue planets are those that have been cast out of their star system. They are probably more common than stars, with one study even suggesting they outnumber them by as much as 100,000 to 1. Because they have no star’s light reaching them, they are deathly cold, their heat radiating away into empty space. This may seem like an odd place to look, and to be fair, it is. Rogue planets can only support life if they have deep water oceans, a thickish atmosphere, and a geologically active core. The top few kilometers of the sea will freeze over, providing insulation and protecting against meteors and radiation. The bottom layer would be kept warm by hydrothermal vents and volcanic activity. It would be a near-perfect prison: the organisms that live there would have no idea that such things as stars and space exist at all, confined as they are underneath miles of ice. Because they are underwater, they won’t be able to discover fire, a vital component for welding metals. If this sounds dismal, it’s because it is. Be that as it may, in all probability, the last lifeforms in the Universe would be ones like this, hidden away by frozen water, unknown by and unknowing of everything this vast world has to offer.
A Flowing Fluid: Water
Water: one of the four elements, the element of flow. Incompressible, yet capable of molding itself into any shape needed, it’s the ultimate expression of fluidity. With just its simple formula, H₂O, it forms the basis of life. Organisms can live without air, but water is essential. The end of water in the Universe would truly mean the death of everything as we know. Yet, the reality is that even a concept as strong as water is incapable of escaping Death. Eventually, long after stars have stopped twinkling and the only things remaining are black holes and black dwarves, matter would slowly decompose to iron via quantum tunneling. This takes an astounding amount of time, assuming no proton decay occurs: the range being 10¹¹⁰⁰ years to 10³²⁰⁰⁰ years. With proton decay, the atoms will directly turn to gamma rays and leptons, in a shorter (but still incomprehensibly long) process that takes 10⁴⁰ years to finish. After this, we enter the Black Hole era.
Giants of Time: Black Holes
Whenever we reach the extreme end of this Universe, we always find black holes. It’s not much of a surprise, really: they are, after all, the inescapable final forms of the greatest of stars, having the power to warp time itself until it stands nearly still. But as the lyrics of the Sequel to Grandfather’s Clock go,
‘There is Hope for the Small, there’s a Chance for us all; For the Mighty Ones of Time, they Must Fall!’
Depending on whether protons decay or not, this fall can take anywhere from 10¹⁰⁰ years to 10¹⁰^⁷⁶ years, not that there is any distinction between either of those for us. After this incredible time, the black hole once holding the title of largest, most majestic thing in the Universe would finally evaporate, a closing moment nobody is around to see.
The Final Countdown: The Universe, Time and Death Itself
We reach the end of our journey. After the final black hole has come and gone, there isn’t much to see: all that is left are photons and some other subatomic particles all zooming around in empty space. The Universe is near absolute zero. Time loses meaning, a second being identical to a millennium. Death has reaped everything it can, and presently it takes itself, locking the door behind it as it leaves. This is truly the End.
…or perhaps not. Spontaneous entropy decreases can happen, but they are incredibly, incredibly unlikely. So unlikely we will never notice it on a macro scale even if we live until the last black hole dies. However, after Heat Death, we quite literally have forever, infinite time to wait for something to happen. If you wait long enough, a broken glass will absolutely repair itself. In about 10¹⁰^¹⁰^⁵⁶ years, there is a nonzero chance of a new Big Bang spontaneously being produced. The Universe will be born again, a glorious beginning for everything in existence. Space will bustle with light and stars and planets, activity that hasn’t been seen for millions of trillions of quadrillions of years. And hopefully, on some mushy warm watery planet surrounding a bright young star, the seed of Life will once again germinate, allowing the Universe to feel Love again.
