The Tartan

By Eshaan Joshi

Questioning what comes after death is part of our nature. We don’t want to believe that we’ll become dust in the wind, consigned to memories and plaques and memorials, so we’ve made stories to explain what comes next. 

But have you ever thought about how strange it is that we exist at all? We’re a jumble of organic molecules — organic being a name we gave to the pieces of us we need to survive — thrown onto a ball of junk that’s floating through an empty, merciless void filled with billions of infinitesimally small particles ripping through the fabric of spacetime, an enigma flattened and reshaped into an existential horror.

How is it possible that we exist?

It’s more fundamental than just matter managing to hit other matter at just the right velocity to make things work out. It’s more fundamental than the fact we’re far enough from our sun to not get turned into vapor and mist. It’s the fact that our universe even has the physics necessary to operate in such a way that we can exist. Molecules can survive and bond and gravity can exist, and all these coincidences on top of each other somehow contribute to us, a bunch of misshapen apes that sing, dance, cry, fail 15-112 midterms, and think about the fact we exist.

That’s a topic in and of itself, one I wanted to touch very briefly, because there’s something just as interesting as the fact that we exist — the fact that we won’t at some point.

This brilliant, beautiful universe, filled with mysteries that we still don’t know how to solve will somehow, at sometime, end. It will become something else, a form we don’t really know yet, unrecognizable.

What’ll be the death-rattle of our universe?

While we don’t know, we have a lot of different theories, most of which involve oodles of strange scientific jargon wrapped up in silly-sounding names. We’ve got the Big Freeze, the Big Rip, and the Big Crunch. These theories represent different ideas of how our universe is expanding and how that expansion will affect the very backbone of creation — cosmic gasses and stars.

In the Big Freeze, the universe doesn’t go out in a glorious explosion. It’s a slow and quiet death, a decay more than anything. The stars grow farther apart. Entropy reaches its maximum. The gas and dust accumulated for millions of years is flung across everything. There’s nothing local enough to actually cause star formation, or the creation of new galaxies or nebulae, because nothing is close to anything big enough to make it happen.

It’s a slow, torturous death that has no grand conclusion, just an emptiness that could never become something ever again. It’s the least optimistic, or at least, the least interesting of the three options, and from what I’ve seen, probably the most likely.

In stark contrast, the Big Rip is the explosive end we all secretly want. The universe is expanding, slowly but surely, and it may expand so fast and with so much aplomb that it tears itself to pieces, destroying everything and turning the entire universe into a singularity where physics stops making sense and we throw our hands up and say “well, whatever will be will be.” It’s a fiery death that leads to the very bonds keeping protons and neutrons together collapsing and turning into mush, the universe returning to fundamental particles. It’s a much more interesting end, one that comes packaged with a little bit of optimistic mystery. Who knows what the singularity looks like? We can barely understand the ones that do exist, in the center of a black hole, and that mystery is effortlessly interesting to think about.

Then there’s the Big Crunch, the cycle of birth and death, the theory that tells us that even if it’s all over, the universe will turn itself into something brand new, a grand collapse resulting in another Big Bang, simultaneously explaining our end and beginning. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, universe to universe, in a cycle of birth and death ending in the grand collapse and grand creation.

The Big Crunch is the least likely theory. It’s doubtful the universe collapses in on itself — that would require things that do not currently align with how our universe behaves, and we’d need to see a sea change in our knowledge of the universe before we’d lean towards the Big Crunch. But it is the most hopeful — the most likely to yield in new life, looking up at new stars, wondering about their ultimate fate.