Death, and Rebirth, Are Comforting Limits Amid the Infinite

Creation and apocalypse. These are the driving themes of religion and cosmology. How it all began, and how it will all someday end. Or not.

I was introduced to Dartmouth cosmologist Marcelo Gleiser through his book on beginnings, “The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang.” Now the popular Brazilian writer has worked the entwined threads of science and religion into a vision of “the end” that is strangely comforting and inspiring--that gives us cause to celebrate not only the gift of life but also the finality of death.

“Without limits, there is no desire,” writes Gleiser in “The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time.” “And without desire there is no creation. Like stars, which generate pressure to survive the crush of gravity, we create to survive the crush of time.”

And as good books do, Gleiser’s tells you things you thought you already knew in a way that introduces them to you for the first time.

Take the obvious fact, for example, that the sky is falling--even as we speak.

Buzzing about the solar system like electrons around the nucleus of an atom are something like 10,000 asteroids larger than 10 kilometers in diameter--roughly the size of my commute between Santa Monica and UCLA; there are about a million larger than 1 kilometer, and 28 million bigger than a football field.

These interplanetary interlopers come to call with distressing regularity, careening out of control like a distracted adolescent driver, nudged out of their usual orbit by some chance gravitational encounter. When they drop in uninvited, we know what to expect.

In 1908, a puny rock a mere 30 meters in diameter crossed our path and exploded over central Siberia with an energy equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs (approximately the size of an average weapon in today’s nuclear arsenal). Thousands of square kilometers of forest were flattened. “As far away as California,” Gleiser tells us, “the soot from the blast darkened the skies for several weeks.”

As for comets, they are too numerous to count, and at an average of a few kilometers in diameter, large enough to trigger a global catastrophe. Remember what happened when comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter in July 1994, setting off several days of spectacular planetary fireworks.

Of course, space is plenty big and pretty empty. Maybe it won’t happen here. Not in our backyards. At least, not any time soon.

And yet, an impact of the Siberia scale can be expected once every hundred years, which makes us nearly due.

As for a Really Big One, we can expect one of those every 10 million years. It’s already been 65 million since an asteroid 10 kilometers wide crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending up a plume of vaporized rock and water halfway to the moon.

“Most parts of the United States and Mexico were completely destroyed in a matter of hours,” Gleiser tells us. “The heavens brought hell to Earth.”

Dust, equivalent to that spewed from 1 million volcanoes, rose into the air, blocking the sun, turning the Earth dark and cold for months. It wasn’t long before one of the most successful species ever to walk the Earth--the dinosaurs--was history.

“What killed the dinosaurs can kill us too,” Gleiser writes. “Yes, scientists have become the new prophets of doom.”

The good news is that with the dinosaurs out of the way, mammals flourished, leading eventually to us. Extinction is not all doom and gloom. It’s always an opportunity for someone.

But if we wish to survive (and we don’t self-destruct first), we could do worse than listen to these prophets with telescopes. Gleiser is not unaware of the irony. “What was first confined to ancient religious texts, prophecies of fiery rocks falling from the skies and bringing widespread destruction, has become a legitimate branch of astronomy.”

In an earlier age, the fireworks of Shoemaker-Levy would certainly have been taken as a sign: “Repent or else!” Today, the lesson is: “Prepare or else!”

“We have the chance to do something,” Gleiser writes, “and we should.”

Even when the odds are small, things happen. People win lotteries. “It would be quite foolish to rest the future of civilization (at least of countless lives) on the feeble assurance of small odds,” Gleiser writes. “It is a matter not of whether a serious collision will happen, but of when.”

Eventually, of course, even hell will freeze over; that much we know. The stars will all go out. Perhaps they will be reborn again in another space and time. In the meantime, as Gleiser reminds us, “the skies are full of magic.”

Redemption lies in looking up.

K.C. Cole can be reached at [email protected]