Original subtitles

Freeman: Eternity.

It's an idea as old as religion.

Perhaps as old as humankind.

But what can modern science tell us about the end of time?

Will the Universe end in a cosmic apocalypse?

Could time keep on ticking forever...

Or will eternity end?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

Through the Wormhole 03x09 Will Eternity End ? Original Air Date on August 1, 2012

== sync, corrected by elderman ==

The Apocalypse.

It's the day when Muslims, Christians, and Jews

believe the world will come crashing down around us.

Physicists now have their own version of Apocalypse.

In fact, they have several of them.

The sun will engulf the earth.

Our star will fall into a black hole.

Our entire galaxy will collide with another.

But what if everything came to an end?

Destroyed in an Apocalypse so complete

that time itself would disappear.

I was just a young boy when time ran out for my grandmother.

The sun continued to rise and set each day.

The seasons cycled on.

I wondered if time for my grandmother really had ended,

time when the Universe carried on.

In fact, it seemed impossible that time itself could ever end.

The ancient Greeks and Egyptians

thought of eternity as a place outside of time.

They saw time as a giant circle,

mirroring the passing of the sun overhead

and the rotation of the seasons.

But today, we have rolled out the circle of time into a line

stretching from the distant past to the far future.

Now we are forced to contemplate whether this timeline has an end

or whether it can stretch on forever.

But perhaps the riddle of eternity

is something we've created in our heads.

Anthropologist Vera da Silva Sinha

and linguistic psychologist Chris Sinha

spend their time thinking about how people think about time.

Chris: We have very large-scale, complex societies.

We could not make our society take over

if we didn't have a calendar and a clock.

So we think of time concepts and ways of measuring time

as being what we call a "cognitive technology."

It's a technology of the mind.

Freeman: But Chris and Vera have discovered

this organized view of time is not universal.

It's an insight they gained

from studying the language and culture

of an indigenous Amazonian tribe called the Amondawa.

The Amondawa people live in Rondonia --

the state of Brazil.

They were contacted by the Brazilian government

in 1984.

The Amondawa tribe does not live by a calendar,

and they don't use clocks.

In fact, there isn't even a word for time in their language.

If you ask an Amondawa speaker

to give a translation of the word "time,"

the nearest thing that they can think of --

they will say "Sun."

Or they say "raining season,"

or they say "summertime," but there is no...

There's nothing which is abstracted from that, right?

To try and understand the Amondawa's notion of time,

Chris and Vera had them arrange a series of paper plates.

So, we found out there is two seasons, yeah?

Rain season and dry season.

So, and they would use the plates

to symbolize how these seasons are divided.

An Amondawa man organizes the plates

not according to days or months but by the natural events

that occur throughout their two seasons.

For each one of these small subdivisions of a season,

he'll tell a little story

about what kind of planting and harvesting goes on,

also what fruits are ripening

and what's going on in the forest and in the rivers.

Is their level of the river going up or going down?

This kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a way of mapping out time

that would make sense to any farmer.

But in our industrialized cultures,

a much more rigid system has taken over.

We might arrange plates in a line of seven --

one plate for each day of the week.

Or we would divide a day into hours arranged in a circle.

But the Amondawa don't arrange events in any particular shape.

Vera: He's not really worried about the shape of the events.

He worry about the contents of each event.

They don't think of time as being analogous

to a spacial dimension.

They don't think of time being a sort of line

in which there is a future that you look forward to

and a past that you look back to.

In English, you can say, "Oh, I look back to my childhood."

However, in Amondawa, you don't look back to your childhood.

So, in your childhood, you were there,

so you don't look back anymore.

So [Chuckles]

The Amondawa don't look back on a line

that traces their life from past to present.

But in Western cultures,

we can't help but impose this time geometry on our lives.

A person's life is like a line

that stretches from birth to death,

and so we imagine the Universe, too,

must have a timeline --

from its birth in the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago

to some far future date when it will die.

There was no time before the beginning,

and time will eventually disappear

when the Universe meets its apocalyptic end.

Theoretical physicist Fotini Markopoulou,

like the Amondawa, rejects this idea.

Well, if you are to say that time will end,

you also have to say that time began.

It's like death and birth.

You really can't have deaths and no births.

So now you have to tell me

where time came from if there was no time.

Freeman: Fotini is trying to understand

the fundamental nature of time,

which in the microscopic world of subatomic particles

becomes a tricky concept.

The theory of Quantum Mechanics says

that particles don't interact

as if they are solid, defined objects,

but as amorphous clouds.

A particle can be both there

and not there at the same time.

And it's impossible to say when two particles meet

or whether they did at all.

If you try to apply the laws of Quantum Mechanics

to large objects like people or planets,

you can imagine some very puzzling possibilities.

I'm sitting here, and I'm talking to you.

Now, if by some accident, in our Universe,

there was a huge black hole

that would suck me inside the black hole,

according to Quantum Theory,

that black hole behind me should be there and not there.

And, as a result, you are in a position of our conversation

having happened or not happened.

Freeman: Many Quantum physicists argue

this uncertainty over whether the events really happened

shows that time cannot be a fundamental thing

in the Universe.

It's something we've made up.

Albert Einstein disagreed with Quantum Mechanics.

He believed time is real,

that it is woven with space into the fabric of the Universe.

And, according to his disciples,

space and time were born together in the Big Bang.

But Fotini thinks both these views of time are wrong.

She thinks that time is real and eternal.

But for that to be true,

we have to reimagine what space is.

Okay, so let's say that this is space --

the world we live in --

and the little red strings are other stuff in our world.

And the net represents the distances between us

in terms of connectivity.

So that means that, for instance,

if we say that this is me

and this is my friend Oralia and that's my fried Helmut,

it takes me --

one, two, three, four, five, six steps to get to Oralia.

And then I need -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,

11, 12, 13, 14, 15 steps to reach Helmut.

Freeman: But right after the Big Bang,

the net of space was not spread out like this.

Perhaps, me here...

was actually just one step away from Helmut

back in the early Universe,

and these two guys were connected,

until everybody is really on top of everybody else.

Freeman: In the very hot and dense Big Bang,

everything is shrunk down to a single point.

The idea of space is meaningless.

But time, Fotini is certain, always exists.

If we throw out space, we get to keep time.

Time was always there before. It will always be there after.

Freeman: If Fotini is right,

time can indeed tick on forever.

But one scientist is deeply troubled by an eternal Universe.

Because if time never stops ticking,

our very existence could make no sense at all.

Eternity.

It used to be a word that only made sense in religion

or to people in love.

Now some scientists also believe time really may last forever.

But if eternity does exist,

[ echoing ] some very strange things...

[ Normal voice ] could happen.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll

from the California Institute of Technology,

often takes a drive into the mountains above Los Angeles

to get a better look at the night sky.

And when he does,

he can't help but wonder what that night sky will look like

trillions of years from now.

Carroll: Right now, we live in a bright, comfortable Universe

with stars shining 100 billion galaxies in the Universe

with 100 billion stars in every galaxy.

But those stars can't shine forever.

They burn up fuel. They have a finite lifetime.

So, about 10 to the 15 years from now,

those stars will all have burnt out.

There'll be no more stars shining in the sky.

Freeman: A million billion years from now,

the only celestial object remaining will be black holes.

Carroll: You might think, okay, now we're done.

Black holes and empty space.

But those black holes evaporate.

They give off radiation,

and the black hole itself shrinks away.

So it will take a long time, but once that happens,

there's nothing left but a thin gruel of particles.

And then we're faced with the question,

well, what happens in that infinitely long future period

after everything has emptied out?

What is life like in empty space?

Freeman: It turns out that empty space is not truly empty.

In 1998,

astronomers discovered a strange cosmic force

called "dark energy,"

an expansive pressure existing everywhere in space.

Even an empty universe, in the far future,

would be filled with this energy.

And the laws of Quantum Mechanics say,

wherever there is energy,

particles can spontaneously appear out of nothingness.

Because that dark energy is lurking in empty space,

there's a temperature.

The future of the Universe is not at absolute zero.

There's a tiny thermal fluctuation,

even in empty space.

If we imagine this oven represents the whole universe,

we can look inside and see things appear.

So if we wait a long time, about 10 to the 10 years --

10 billion years --

we'll see a single, lonely photon

propagating through the Universe.

Freeman: But give the Universe more time,

and more particles appear.

Eventually, after 10 to the power 10 to the power 30 years,

something as complex and unlikely

as a perfectly wired human brain

could simply pop into existence.

And if you wait even longer than that,

10 to the 10 to the 120 years,

we'll see an entire new Big Bang,

an entire universe fluctuating into existence

out of the surrounding chaos.

Freeman: For Sean,

these random fluctuations present a big problem.

If the Universe lasts forever,

an infinite amount of time

means an infinite amount of possibilities,

which means everything you could possibly imagine

will indeed appear --

including another version of you,

who thinks he got here first.

Many, many copies of me will fluctuate into existence,

many of them with exactly the same memories that I have.

There will be another version of me that thinks the same as I do

and has the same set of memories that I have.

But for most of those versions of me,

they won't actually be embedded in a sensible universe

with a big bang and other galaxies.

Freeman: Each one of these Seans

assumes that he is the first version of himself.

They each think they grew up in Pennsylvania,

studied at Harvard, and wrote books on physics.

But they are really just random fluctuations

that have popped into existence,

future imposters that actually live in empty space.

The scenario that the Universe just lasts forever

and there's all these fluctuations

into everything we can possibly imagine

means that we have no right to accept and believe our memories.

If people and galaxies and universes

can randomly fluctuate into existence,

the conclusion is that this can't be

the right picture of the Universe.

Freeman: If dark energy keeps on expanding our cosmos,

countless versions of all of us will eventually come to be,

stretching from here to eternity.

There's only one thing

that could prevent such a preposterous universe...

A truly cosmic apocalypse.

[ Pop! ]

What does the word "Universe" mean?

It used to mean "everything."

But now some scientists imagine there is more to creation

than all the stars and galaxies we could ever hope to see.

We might be just one tiny patch of something much larger,

a multiverse,

a place that lasts forever,

and where a little Universe like ours

comes and goes in the blink of an eye.

Raphael Bousso is one of a new generation of cosmologists

who grew up with the idea that our Universe may not be

the be all and end all of existence.

For him, other universes pop into existence all the time

and exist inside a colossal multiverse.

Bousso: The multiverse is made out of many different regions.

These individual regions can be so large that,

if you live in them,

you're really like a fish in an extremely large tank of water.

You might think that there is nothing else whatsoever.

Freeman: Imagine the Universe we live in is like a balloon.

In the beginning,

it was just a miniscule piece of compact space.

At the Big Bang,

a powerful force called inflation took over,

expanding it in a split second.

14 billion years later,

we all live deep inside its inflated walls,

blind to what's outside.

But Raphael believes inflation is still at work

outside of our balloon.

It constantly takes tiny pieces of space and expands them.

So, this room is what we can think of

as the multiverse looking like,

where every one of these balloons is a single universe,

and all these universes are here because of inflation.

Freeman: Raphael's understanding of inflation

stems from the view of reality called "String theory,"

which holds that there are not three dimensions of space...

but nine.

In our Universe,

six of the dimensions are curled up billions of times smaller

than the smallest particle.

There might be some places

where all nine spatial dimensions have become large.

There might be other places

where fewer than three have become large.

So inflation stretches some, but not necessarily all,

of the dimensions of space.

Freeman: Just like an inflated balloon,

inflated dimensions of space

are intrinsically unstable and will eventually...

re-collapse.

As I'm walking around this room,

you can see that these balloons are popping...

ever so slowly, one after the other.

There are a lot of balloons,

but if you train your eye on one balloon,

that balloon eventually is going to pop.

And just like that,

our piece of space eventually is going to decay.

Freeman: By studying how inflation

mutates the curled-up dimensions of space,

Raphael has been able to calculate

that the rate of creation of inflated universes

is much higher than their rate of decay.

So, even though universes are going...all the time,

many more are always being created.

So the multiverse keeps on growing and will last forever.

This pattern is called "eternal inflating multiverse."

If you were watching this room from the outside,

time would be eternal.

This would continue forever.

Freeman: This multiverse may be eternal,

but it's an eternity no one can ever hope to experience

because no one can ever escape the universe

they were created in.

You don't get the benefit of seeing this eternity

of more and more inflation and more and more balloons.

The speed-of-light limit

prevents you from seeing all these other balloons.

You sit around in this one balloon,

and sooner or later it's going to go "pop."

[ Pop! ]

Freeman: If you live in a universe, like everything must,

then Raphael believes your time is definitely going to end.

[ Pop! ]

And all of the problems of an eternal universe

that worry Sean Carroll

are problems our Universe will never live to see.

We can calculate how rapidly space will decay.

As long as that decay of our Universe happens faster

than these unbelievably unlikely events are going to happen,

then we know that we don't have to worry about

copies of ourselves coming into being.

When our Universe decays, time really does end there.

[ Pop! ]

Is our universe destined to die in a cosmic cataclysm?

Perhaps not.

Because time may not be what we think it is,

and all of eternity might already exist.

Physicists tell us that time is the fourth dimension.

But it's not like the other three that we move around in.

In space,

I could walk from here...

to here...

and then turn around and go back again.

Time's dimension seems different.

We only move through it in one direction.

But there may be a way to grasp all of eternity

if we stop thinking about time as a dimension

and start thinking about time as a projection

from the future...

[ Echoing ] to the past.

[ Normal voice ] For Harvard physicist Andy Strominger,

the difference between the future and the past

is a deep puzzle.

Because, according to the known laws of physics,

they should be exactly the same.

There's a very basic principle of physics

which begin with Newton.

The past determines the future,

and the laws of physics can be run forward or backwards.

So, if I take this motion of this pendulum

hanging from the pencil

and you run the movie forward or backwards,

it looks exactly the same.

But there's a huge white elephant in the room of physics,

and that's the Big Bang.

So, the cartoon picture of the Big Bang

is that there was nothing.

Somebody flipped a switch,

and, all of a sudden,

all the something that we know of was present.

So, the past of our Universe

and the future of our Universe look fundamentally different.

Freeman: To resolve this paradox,

Andy began to imagine the dimension of time

a radical new way --

as a hologram.

Holograms are two-dimensional plates

from which a third dimension of space appears to emerge.

Andy wondered if he could apply this idea

not to space but to time.

Perhaps a dimension of time is just a holographic projection.

Time is a kind of illusion.

And the whole universe is written at a hologram

that is sitting there at the end of time

and projected backwards through our present era

back to the Big Bang.

Freeman: The hologram that contains everything the universe ever was

and ever will be is like this intricate ice crystal.

According to Andy,

it sits in the far future

and projects information back into the past.

Strominger: So, this sculpture represents the holographic plate,

which contains all the information

about the entire lifetime of the Universe.

As I look at this very closely, I can see more and more detail.

From far away, or more accurately,

from further back in time,

there would be less and less detail,

less and less information present in the universe itself.

Freeman: The further you get from a holographic plate,

the less information you can read on it.

So, as we travel back in time from our present day,

in a highly complex universe of planets, stars, and galaxies,

we move to a simpler past,

to a universe the way it was billions of years ago,

filled with nothing more than clouds of gas.

Strominger: And, eventually,

if you go far enough back in time,

before the Big Bang,

there is simply nothing there at all.

Freeman: Holographic time is the only theory

that logically explains how our Universe began from nothing.

Once you get too far back in time from the holographic plate,

it cannot project back any more information.

Before the Big Bang, there is no information in the universe.

In a holographically-emergent universe,

we don't have a Big Bang.

There isn't a special moment when, all at once,

everything in the universe came into being.

Rather, we have an ongoing continual bang,

which started from nothing

and kept banging and banging onto the future.

In the past, there was nothing.

In the future, there is everything.

Freeman: The mathematics behind Andy's theory

are highly complex.

Holographic time is not laid out like any normal dimension.

As you go further and further into the future,

the same increment of time moves you less and less far forward.

So it would take an infinite amount of time

to actually arrive at the holographic plate.

Strominger: In this picture,

our Universe goes on forever into the future

and gets bigger and bigger

and keeps growing and creating new elements.

So we don't know that it describes our universe.

We're very far from that.

But we do know that it is something which can be discussed

with some mathematical precision and consistency.

And so that's a starting point.

Freeman: Will our Universe survive for an eternity?

It depends on who you ask.

Some say time will go on forever.

Others are sure it must end.

But now another physicist thinks

we might be able to decide who is right,

because the future of the universe

may be traveling back in time to meet us.

Is all eternity already out there?

Could the present and the past be echoes of the future,

rippling back in time?

If that's the case,

why is it you don't know what I'm going to say next?

The fact is,

scientists think they found evidence

the future really does affect the present.

And knowledge about the fate of the Universe

may already be right in front of us.

Physicist Jeff Tollaksen from Chapman University

thinks the future is very much connected to the present.

The notions of time, eternity, the end of time --

these are some of the most profound questions

that we deal with as human beings.

But you have to listen very carefully

to what nature's trying to tell you

to discover fundamental truth.

Freeman: Jeff believes most physicists

have failed to fully understand the nature of time

because of the way they insist on doing experiments --

smashing particles together in giant accelerators.

Maybe, instead of smashing particles to bits,

we just need to give them a little push.

What if more physicists took up the gentle sport of curling?

Tollaksen: As you can see

what our athletes are doing here,

they set the stone going and they sweep a little bit

to try to direct the stone going somewhere.

In a sense,

this sweeping is kind of like a very gentle interaction.

You're not actually touching the stone.

You're kind of making the ice a little bit smoother

or melting a little bit

so it would tend to go in one direction.

Freeman: Jeff believes you can understand everything

about the way time really works in the universe

by watching curling.

And you can begin at the beginning,

with the idea of time Isaac Newton had.

Tollaksen: So, the stone starts

from some definite place in the past,

it goes to some definite place in the present,

and it goes to a definite place in the future.

So, from that perspective of classical physics,

the universe looks like it's a big machine,

like a big, very perfectly tuned clock.

Freeman: But then, about a century ago,

along came Quantum Mechanics.

It took away all that certainty from the universe

by unmasking the subatomic world.

If these curling stones were atoms,

the rules of the game would change dramatically.

Tollaksen: So, the quantum world is different.

It makes different predictions

from the classical view of things.

In Quantum Mechanics,

you could start these stones the same

and you notice that, incredibly, one stone goes to the left

and the other stone goes to the right.

Freeman: In the microscopic world of atoms,

nothing is known for sure.

Atoms are not solid, defined objects.

They are waves of probabilities that tell you where,

when you look for a particle, you are most likely to find it.

But in the 1960s, quantum guru Yakir Aharonov

dared to ask why atoms are so unpredictable,

why it's so hard to pin down

what they're doing at any given moment.

And the answer, he discovered,

was because the future and the past are both involved

in creating the present.

Yakir showed that he could reformulate Quantum Mechanics

in a way that dealt with the past

and the future on exactly equal footing.

Future information, which is impossible to know now,

in principle,

maybe that's already relevant to the present moment.

Freeman: Jeff and Yakir have searched for evidence

of this revolutionary idea for the past two decades.

They've learned to be very gentle in their measurements.

A subatomic particle will move or disappear

if it's observed directly.

It's as if they have to put a particle in a box,

not look at it, and allow it to carry on existing

as they spread out a wave of probability.

When they do that,

they can begin to see the effect of the future on the present.

So, we have the red boxes that are going forward in time.

And now you have to think about the backward evolving state.

So we're gonna represent that by blue boxes.

Same particle, right? We have one particle.

But coming from the future, we're saying the present

is created out of a combination

of the forward evolving and the backward evolving.

Freeman: As radical as it sounds,

Jeff, Yakir, and their colleagues

have now tested this idea in the lab.

They give a series of very gentle magnetic nudges

to subatomic particles.

They measure them at 2:00...

and then at 2:30.

They do this over and over again.

Some but not all of the particles

are also measured again at 3:00.

And what they found is that taking their measurement at 3:00

seemed to influence the apparently random readings

they got at 2:30.

The future seemed to affect the present,

even though it hadn't happened yet.

Tollaksen: If you're trying to understand the present moment,

the past is relevant, as we knew before,

but the future is just as relevant to the present

as the past.

Freeman: So far,

these experiments have only been carried out

on the microscopic level,

and the effects of the future on the present are very subtle.

But to Jeff, it suggests that buried somewhere

in the apparently random motion of all the particles

in the Universe there is such a thing as cosmic destiny.

Tollaksen: There's an ocean flowing here.

There's a current flowing

from past to future and from future to past.

Freeman: The Universe may already have a destiny.

But can we mere mortals ever know it?

One scientist thinks he's discovered

the mathematical limit of human knowledge.

Scientists have spent 3,000 years

trying to learn as much as they can about the world we live in.

We've done pretty well.

We understand how planets, stars, and galaxies work.

But to know the fate of the entire universe,

just imagine how much more there is to know.

So perhaps it's time to ask ourselves an important question.

Are there some things we just aren't meant to understand?

Theoretical physicist Tom Banks

believes the best way to understand eternity

is to calculate how much we can ever know.

And what we can know is what we can measure.

So, you can see the Pacific Ocean is here behind me,

and the Pacific Ocean is huge.

We couldn't possibly measure it with rulers,

so we measure it by using trigonometry,

all kinds of math.

Freeman: The Pacific Ocean may be massive,

but we've traversed its length and breadth

and mapped out all of its 64 million square miles.

However, it isn't even a speck

compared with the entire universe.

Banks: It is much too big for us to physically measure.

Our Universe -- we can't even get out there to most of it.

And we measure it by receiving light from it,

sending light out to it,

and getting all kinds of signals.

And we figure out where things are,

how far away they are.

Freeman: But the Universe does not just stretch out over space.

It also extends over time,

from its beginning in the Big Bang

to the far future.

What would it take to know everything

about such a vast place?

Tom thinks he can calculate the answer to that question

using something he calls "the theory of causal diamonds."

Banks: I'm drawing a schematic diagram,

showing a causal diamond.

This is my past. This is my future.

And this diamond represents

everything I could've done experiments on

during that whole history from the beginning to the end.

That region in space-time,

it forms a diamond shape

because light goes out in sort of a cone like this,

and then if I look back from the latest time,

it goes backwards in a cone.

You put those two cones together,

and they're sort of a diamond shape.

[ Clock ticking ]

Freeman: A causal diamond marks the limit

of how much of the Universe a measuring device

could ever hope to reach.

When that device sends out a light beam,

it heads out into the Universe,

bounces off some distant galaxies,

and finally returns to the device billions of years later.

Tom has been able to calculate

that the amount of information existing inside that diamond

is related to the area of a sphere

that just fits around it at its widest point,

a sphere he calls "the holographic screen."

Banks: So now we can ask the question,

suppose there was some machine that lived forever

from the beginning of the Universe to the end?

How big does the holographic screen of the causal diamond

of that infinitely long-lived detector ever get?

And it's very important,

because that determines how much information

there could've possibly been

in this region of space and time.

Freeman: Knowing absolutely everything there is to know

about every atom and every subatomic particle in existence

would mean collecting a truly mind-blowing amount of data.

Banks: This number is 10 to the 10 to the 123.

It's a 1 with 10 to the 123 zeros after it.

That number is so huge that it's hard to imagine it.

If I started trying to write that number down

and I wrote a zero every second,

I would run out of time

long before the whole history of the Universe,

and I would never get to the end of it.

Freeman: But could an advanced civilization

actually collect this much data

and know everything about the Universe

and thus learn its fate?

The answer, Tom believes,

is contained in this tiny cup of water.

So, in this little bit of water I just got out of the Pacific,

there are sextillion atoms.

That's trillions of trillions.

If we wanted to measure all those atoms,

we'd have to have a really big machine.

We'd need a device that was larger than the United States.

Freeman: But collecting data on the entire Universe

is not just a monumental engineering challenge.

The laws of physics actually prevent us from doing it.

If we tried to measure every atom in existence,

we would end up using so much equipment

that we'd fill space with more stuff than it could handle,

and the entire experiment would collapse into a black hole,

destroying all that information with it.

Whoa!

Tom has calculated that we can measure no more

than 10 to the 10 to the 90 bits of information

before we cause the entire Universe to collapse

into a black hole.

This may seem like a gigantic number,

but it is actually just a tiny fraction

of 10 to the 10 to the 123,

which is all that there is to know.

That number is so incredibly smaller than this number,

that there's no hope that any civilization,

no matter how sophisticated,

could possibly measure all of the information

that there is in the Universe throughout its entire history.

Freeman: All we can ever learn about the Universe

is an impossibly tiny morsel of what's out there.

And Tom argues,

trying to predict the future based on such scant knowledge

is utterly futile.

So, perhaps we should quit worrying about the end of time

and learn to live for the now.

Banks: It's natural for us to want to know everything.

And we like to make up stories about everything.

And those stories are often wrong.

So people...are people.

We're finite. We're not Gods.

We're -- we don't own the Universe.

We're a very tiny portion of the Universe.

And we've now discovered that we're a much tinier portion

than we might've thought before.

We don't have the right, in some sense,

to expect to know everything that there is to know.

Will the Universe last forever?

Is eternity already out there,

projecting the present back to us from the far future?

Or will a cosmic apocalypse destroy everything

in the blink of an eye?

We don't know, and we probably never will,

because some questions require more knowledge

than we can ever get.

And maybe that's not so bad.

After all, what fun would life be

if we already knew how it was going to end?

== sync, corrected by elderman ==

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