This is How the Universe Ends
A new viral video takes on the big questions about the (very) distant future
This much is certain: The sun, like all stars, will one day die. Its demise will begin five billion years from now, when it starts running out of fuel. It will slowly bloat into a red giant, becoming over two hundred times larger than it is today and thousands of times more luminous. As it expands, it will consume nearby planets—including, most probably, our own. After devouring the planets it helped sustain, it too will die.
This cosmic fate—distant, inconceivable, and inevitable, all at once—occurs only three minutes into Melodysheep’s half-hour-long video, Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time. The viewer hears the voice of British physicist Brian Cox coolly narrate the end of life as we know it while the incendiary expanding fireball of the sun swallows up Earth. A counter on the bottom of the screen adds to the tension, moving exponentially through time by doubling every five seconds. The description next to the counter (“EARTH DESTROYED BY THE DYING SUN”) is chillingly matter-of-fact.
