As if the rampant pandemic weren’t  enough, there’s information afoot that “only one thing is certain: The universe will end.”  (It doesn’t mention heaven).

The astrophysicist Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) writes,  as reported in The New York Review of Books July 1, 2021, “Only one thing is certain: the universe will end.  It simply cannot remain unchanged forever. The universe has been expanding since its birth about 13.8 billion years ago. As its composition has changed from being dominated by radiation for the first 30,000 years of its existence to being dominated by matter and then by dark energy (for the past 4 billion years),  the expansion rate has also changed. Further transitions will determine the universe’s ultimate fate.  This is a challenging question that several large teams  of cosmologists are probing with observational surveys and experiments.”

Another review in the same article is of Frank Wilczek’s Fundamentals, containing two main sections, “What There Is,”  and “Beginnings and Ends.”  The review, All Things Great and Small, by Priamvada Natarajan, also discusses Katia Moskvitch’s new book, Neutron Stars: The Quest to understand the Zombies of the Universe.

We are reminded not to worry, life on Earth [or Earth itself?] won’t be around by that time.  Still, couldn’t our inhabitants quit squabbling and instead  love, support and enjoy while the eternal now  lingers here?

The accumulation of money, power, manipulation and ego just doesn’t hack it.