The Meaning of Life and the Heat Death of the Universe
The heat death of the universe is inevitable.
The stars will blink out of existence in spectacular fashion, each putting on a final fireworks show for an indifferent universe, and the heavens will settle into a self-satisfied soup of thermodynamic equilibrium: a perfect entropy, a uniform chaos.
In five billion years, the Sun will die. It will burn through its reserves of hydrogen, swelling uncontrollably as gravity fights in futility to hold the dying star together, scorching humanity’s achievements, fizzling Earth into blackened streams of soot.
How much blood have we shed to fight over our meaningless tiny speck of dust floating somewhere in space, orbiting an unremarkable inconsequential star in a mediocre ordinary unexceptional galaxy? When the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back at our planet and took one final picture, it brought into focus the irrelevance of our planet: a single white pixel against the void of space, so small that in order to find it you would need someone to point it out for you. That’s it, right there, in the center, just a bit to the right of that grainy photo.
That’s it. That’s Earth.
Nearly everything we have loved can fit into that single pixel. Everything we have ever hated. Everything we have ever built, or destroyed.
How many kings have stood on that fleck of paint in the sky, proclaiming their superiority over the natural world, oblivious to their own obscurity? How many prophets have believed that divine powers would give heed to one of ten trillion trillion diatoms floating in the cosmic seas?
From this viewpoint six billion miles from Earth we learn a fundamental truth of our existence: nothing we do matters in the end.
That is a depressing thought. It’s hard to confront your mortality. You are transient, impermanent, ephemeral. You are but a footnote in the four-billion-year story of this insignificant planet. One day, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, or maybe ten thousand years from now, someone will remember you for the last time, and you will be forgotten, forever lost to the ebbs and flows of the ages. Every award you won, every dollar you earned. Every invention you made, every book you wrote, every child you raised.
One day, we will all be forgotten: every Hitler and every Gandhi, every Shakespeare and every struggling poet, every greedy capitalist billionaire and every downtrodden cardboard-sign beggar, every scientist and every man who blinds himself from the laws of the physical world, every saint and every sinner, every hero and every villain.
You are born, you grow, you work, you die, and you are forgotten. In all likelihood, in that blink of the universe’s eye, you will have done nothing. In all likelihood, you will have lived an average life, contributing little to humanity. In all likelihood, not many people will remember you. Statistically speaking, you’re not special.
Nothing you do matters.
Yet that is also comforting. The heat death of the universe is a cosmic eraser. If everything you do will be forgotten, then every one of your failures will be forgotten too. Every time you tripped over the stairs and all your friends laughed at you. Every time someone tormented you. Every time you tormented someone.
It doesn’t matter what you do with your time in this world. If life has no intrinsic meaning, you get to give it whatever meaning you want. So spend your life doing something that makes you happy. Try to cure cancer, if that strikes your fancy. Plant a cactus. Read some books. Tackle tough political problems that plague society. Solve math problems. Listen to lo-fi music on Spotify. Write essays, even if no one will read them. Play video games with your friends. Buy a crêpe. Doodle on whiteboards. Try to make out the stars in the night sky while sitting next to a log cabin on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts. Crochet a hat. Get some sleep. Fly kites on windy days. Hug a dog. Eat the Cape Cod Sweet & Spicy Jalapeno chips that have been patiently sitting on your desk for the past two weeks. Become a professional Rubik’s cubist.
The futility of life is freeing.
Nothing we do matters. But maybe that’s a good thing.