Apocalypse Guarranteed

The Apocalypse.  For many of us the phrase holds lasting fascination.  What calamity will befall the human race and the natural world.  Who will survive?  What will their lives be like once the current complex of industry, technology, and government are swept away?

Post apocalyptic literature necessarily presumes that at least a few people survive the great catastrophe.  Without the survivors there are no characters for the story apart from perhaps microbes or mutated rats, which would grievously constrain the story line.

Oddly enough, all our history and personal experience point to an apocalypse that no one will survive.  Life is hard, and then each of us dies.  Our lives may entail seasons of contentment, moments of joy, and glimpses of bliss.  There will most certainly be pain, loss, and for those who live long enough, an inexorable deterioration of body and likely degradation of our minds.  Even the most optimistic of us is aware of that some mix of pain and pleasure inevitably ends in death, although a few may dream of a breakthrough that allows humans to live centuries or even millenia.   Very few imagine that this life could continue on for all eternity.  Fewer still would find that prospect appealing.

In an interview, famed atheist Richard Dawkins was asked if he would like to live forever.  He was quick to say no.  Perhaps ten thousand years would be desirable, but no more than that.   I wondered how he arrived at 10,000.  One hundred years would bring so many joys and trials that they are beyond my imagining, and at 68 years of age, they are already beyond my ability to recount.  A thousand years would surely consist of a multitude of experiences that would be well beyond remembering and ordering rightly.  Ten thousand strikes me as a cop out number.  It is large enough to sate the imagination of the most ardent optimist.

As things stand, this life ends in a century plus or minus a few decades.  It ends for every human being.  The apocalypse may continue piecemeal until that one stray meteor demolishes the earth.  Or perhaps there will even be time for the sun to grow into a
red giant, consuming the earth and its neighbors.

The most determined authors of a distant future suppose technology that allows humans to populate planets near distant stars or even man made arks, self sustaining and wandering the universe. If we allow for such leaps of technological capability, we still face the constant expansion of the universe, ultimately leaving heavenly bodies so far separated that they are incapable of even observing each other.  And current cosmological prognostications suppose a gradual grinding to a halt referred to as the heat death of the universe.

Let us think more deeply about such scenarios that allow the human race to survive for many eons more, and yet is accomplished only through the living and dying of enormous numbers of generations.  What satisfaction is to be found in that.  Like most people, I know little about the generations that preceded me and I can only speculate on those to succeed me.  I have seen a single photograph of one great grandfather.  I have a very sketchy oral history of the barest outlines of his life.  I met another great grandfather, who seemed to a very young me as being so old, doddering, and demented that I was unable to connect with him in any depth. That leaves two other great grandfathers of whom I know nothing.  Presumably I have eight great-great grandfathers, but their history is a complete mystery to me.

We may be sure that we will most certainly not "live on in the hearts and minds of generations to come".  At best a caricature of us will survive two or three generations.  And then we will be at most a single name in a laboriously crafted genealogy.  Perhaps some dubious legend will be attached to the name.  Nothing more.

Death is the apocalypse that devours all humans.

Unless.  Unless there is a life greater than this one inhabited by a being greater than us all.  He is the Creator of space and time. He loves us so much that He has enabled us to choose to live for all eternity with Him.  Indeed, He will transform our body and
mind to enable us to experience that eternity without the constraints that currently plague us and make very long lives a dubious bargain.

Some find the prospects of creator, eternity, and resurrection to be, at best, myths generated to protect us for the very real horror of the apocalypse.  Others are not so charitable, and see such beliefs as a plague upon the human race, inhibiting us from being as great as we could be. I feel immense sadness for them. For them reality is a horror dotted with moments of happiness.  Their greatest hopes for the future lie in a multitudinous and yet finite number of successor generations who will know nothing of today's 7 billion souls as individuals, or perhaps even nothing of them as a cohort in the distant past.