The End of the World

For centuries the Church and the Bible have been ridiculed for claiming that the world will end.

The idea that the world has always existed has ensnared even Catholics who have yet to realize that if the world did not have a beginning and does not have an end, then the existence of God lacks meaning. The truth is that the world, as we know it, can end by many ways.

Pathogens, biological weapons, a virus
Men have used poison with the intention to kill since the beginning of civilization, not only against individual enemies, but also occasionally against armies. Since Emperor Barbarossa poisoned water wells with human bodies in Tortona, Italy, in 1155, until World War I and II, through its use in China by the Japanese, and more recently in Iraq, biological weapons have become "the poor man’s atomic bomb," as Block, an American scientist, wrote.  

With our increasing knowledge of the biology of disease-causing agents -- viruses such as AIDS, Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, pathogens such as typhus and smallpox, and toxins such as anthrax and numerous types of bacteria -- it is legitimate to fear the possibility of a large-scale biological war. Biological weapons offer terrorist groups and "rogue states" an affordable way to counter the overwhelming military superiority of the United States and other nuclear powers.

The current crisis of COVID-19 has included accusations of biological warfare. The existence of a high-security virology laboratory in Wuhan has fuelled some theories and accusations that China had deliberately unleashed an attack. The hypothesis that the virulence of a virus like the one of 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide and the current one that is already in excess of 5 million, was necessarily man-made is further proof of anthropocentric arrogance and irrational faith in science.

For millions of years nature has been producing viruses and pathogens, such as the Black Death virus that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, without any help of man’s science. Man's meagre ability to create viruses is no more than 10 years old, and so far, laboratories have yet to create any as destructive as what mother nature has done in the past.

On the other hand, there is a war raging between pathogens created by nature and the antibiotics created by men to fight them. So far, antibiotics have worked, but there are already pathogens resistant to the strongest antibiotics so that we don't know what is in store for us, as my mother used to say.

Impact of a meteorite
The moon with its large craters is a testimony of the constant bombardment by these rocks or metals of great proportions, pieces of stars and planets, that populate the universe and move without regular orbits, like some comets.

We ourselves are witnesses to the fall of these celestial bodies on Earth when at night we see them as shooting stars. The Earth's atmosphere protects us from these bodies. When they collide with our atmosphere, most of them incinerate and pulverize, falling over our planet as tiny particles.

But this does not always happen and there are footage of these meteorites larger than a soccer ball falling on Earth. And there are still larger ones at the NASA museum in Washington.

All of Earth's nuclear charges might not be enough to break up a meteorite like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs if by an unfortunate chance, it is on a collision course with Earth. On the other hand, the impact of comets or meteorites, depending on their size, disturbs the initial inertia of a planet and can slow it down or even project it out of orbit, which would be fatal to life on our planet. The danger is real, it has already happened once that we know of and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and it could happen again, causing the end of life on planet Earth.

Nuclear conflict
At the end of the Cold War, the planet's nuclear arsenal was enough to destroy it not once, but 10 times. After treaties were signed, especially between the United States and Russia, it is likely that today there are far fewer atomic weapons.

However, these two countries are not the only ones that have them. The world wars started with few countries but gradually more and more got involved. The nature of violence is to increase exponentially. North Korea, for example, could start a nuclear war that would gradually involve atomic powers and this will certainly be unstoppable. There is also the danger that nuclear bombs can fall into the hands of terrorists.

Ecological suicide
We cannot condemn our children, and their children, to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair.  Not when we have the means -- the technological innovation and the scientific imagination -- to begin the work of repairing it right now. As one of America’s governors has said, “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.” So today, I’m here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second largest emitter, to say that we have begun to do something about it.  Barack Obama’s Speech at U.N. Climate Change Summit September 23, 2014

The soil – is depleted of elements essential to our health, because of mono-cropping; it is also contaminated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers that have altered its chemical composition and are poisoning the groundwater from which we get our drinking water.

The oceans – are full of plastic microfibers discharged from our washing machines, since plastic has replaced natural fibres such as wool, cotton, linen and silk, along with heavy metals such as mercury are absorbed by the fish that we consume.

The air – is polluted by over emission of carbon dioxide gas that causes the greenhouse effect. This is responsible for the global warming that is melting the glaciers and polar ice caps; it is also causing sea levels to rise, changing wind patterns, changing the rhythm of seasons, and causing hurricanes, floods and droughts of unprecedented intensity.

The social environment – is also plagued by the fact that today the 1% of humanity has more wealth (54%) than the remaining 99% (46%). The gap between the rich and the poor never stops widening. Some die of hunger, and others die of abundance; if there was sharing, neither one nor the other would die.

Biodiversity – is another area of paramount importance. In addition to the fact that biodiversity protects humans from the effects of agricultural disasters, such as the Irish potato famine, the loss of one species results in significant changes in natural habitats that can seriously harm us in the short, medium or long run.

Death of the sun
Contrary to logic, the sun apparently is not producing less and less energy as it dies bit by bit. The more hydrogen is converted into helium, the more the sun's core shrinks, causing the outer layers to move closer to the centre under a stronger gravitational force. This causes more pressure on the core, accelerating hydrogen fusion and increasing energy production, leading to a 1% increase in luminosity every 100 million years. In the last 4.5 billion years, corresponding to the age of the sun, this energy has already grown by about 30%.

In one billion years, the sun will be 10% brighter than it is now. This increase in luminosity will lead to an increase in the heat and energy that Earth and its atmosphere will have to absorb, causing, in turn, an increase in the intensification of the greenhouse effect. This will gradually turn our planet into what Venus is presently: the hottest planet in the solar system with a temperature of around 500 degrees Celsius.

Within 3.5 billion years, the sun will be 40% brighter than it is today. Under this condition, seawater will boil and steam will be lost into space, turning our planet into a hot, dry planet like Venus. It will not have higher temperatures than Venus for the simple reason that Earth is farther from the sun.

When the sun's hydrogen is about to run out, the inert helium ash, the result of its combustion, will eventually collapse. This will cause the sun's core to become denser and hotter, increasing in size and entering the red giant phase.

In this phase, the orbits of Mercury and Venus will be absorbed by the growing sun, two thirds of our sky will be occupied by the sun which will gradually end up absorbing our planet. When this phase is reached, the sun will still have 120 million years of active life left. Finally, the accumulated helium will ignite violently, and in the next few hundred million years, it will burn the helium that resulted from the combustion of hydrogen.

The size of the sun will continue to increase until it turns into a white dwarf. In this state, it can still survive for trillions of years until it finally turns into a black hole.

The end of the universe
In 1927, the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lamaître (pictured in the image illustrating this text), upon observing that the universe is expanding, intuited that it began when a very small and extremely dense point of matter exploded (the Big Bang). Atheists responded by claiming that after reaching its maximum expansion, Earth would initiate the reverse movement of contraction, ending in a great crunch and giving rise to the initial extremely dense point, which would then explode again and so on.

The observations and studies done so far have corroborated the Big Bang theory, but not the Big Crunch theory. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the transformation of matter into energy is not possible without the irreversible breakdown of the first; there are no perfect machines that feed themselves, that is, that produce all the energy necessary for their own functioning.

The efficiency of a gasoline engine is about 25% and about 40% for a diesel engine; that is, we get more kilometers with one liter of diesel than one liter of gasoline; the efficiency of the steam machine is 12% and that of the human body is 1%. The universe is extremely inefficient and wastes its energy; in fact, it will expand until it dies, when it has used up all its nuclear energy.

The Bible is then correct in saying, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" (Revelation 22:13). Science therefore will never prove that our faith is wrong; on the contrary, the more man knows, the closer faith gets to reason and reason to faith.

Conclusion: Science, at last, discovers what faith has always known, that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. However, long before the universe, or the sun, runs out of energy, life on our planet can end in many other ways, some of those man-made.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC