Knowledge is like a sphere, the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.
- Blaise Pascal

———

Astronomers struggled to fathom why stars way beyond our stellar region snuffed out like flames in a matter of minutes. One of them was a white star, fusing together helium to magnesium, and the next thing you knew the core couldn't react anymore. It's what's supposed to happen thousands of years later, slowly.

And it seemed this Darkness Epidemic has touched our sun too. Our sun is nothing more than a black dot. In other words, a never-ending night.

I was used to long nights during Alaskan winters, but nothing like this.

The television crackled.

Seed bank... running low... species dying out...

I switched the TV off. With something designed to bring solace, it didn't do a very good job.

I decided to venture outside. Snow rested on the ground, and the intermittent flicker of streetlights made it glow.

I pulled on my boots and ran onto the highway. Nome, Alaska, where there hasn't been a single foot trodden since the sun went dark. Three months. That's all it took to induce city blight. I couldn't complain— solitude was what I wanted. Some people wanted to get married and pass down their genes and continue the human race or whatever, but I wanted to stay.

Cosmologists predicted the most probable end of the universe will come from the Big Freeze, where stars would become black like the sun and black holes would evaporate away into oblivion. I'd like to think the black star was nothing more than just a premature ending.

I stopped by a tree that had bent over as if about to do a backflip. This was the place. "Come out," I said.

"Is that you Jocelyn?" A male voice replied. Crunching snow came closer as a gaunt figure blinked into view.

"Yeah, yeah, do you have the stuff?" I asked.

The man fingered a dime-sized packet of aluminum from his pocket and handed it over. "Indulge."

"Thanks. I'll come back tomorrow," I muttered.

I ran back home, pulling the foil off the pill. There's no doubt that this was a strong dose. My heart leapt. I couldn't wait.

I swallowed it dry and laid on the couch.

A sliver of light peeked in from the window, and when I turned, saw the bright yellow sun, luminous and everything.

I could feel the heat wisping past my fingertips like ghosts, jolted suddenly by the chirp of a bird. I looked outside.

Northern Cardinal. They went extinct two and a half years ago. The male's scarlet plumage bristled as it gave a lively call.

My heart beat faster. This was how it was going to be until I've reached my ending. The world didn't have to be real if it brought on the same emotions you felt in reality. I guess this was how humanity would really end, a final echo into the abyss of bliss.

This was my version of Big Freeze. Live until death. Not bothering about continuing a species, just accepting it was dead and moving on. And there wasn't reincarnation, oh no, it was the end and that was it. This was it— the succeeding singularity of the universe. The definitive end. An ending where the established laws of physics immediately broke down, and an answer wasn't ever guaranteed.

The singularity was why we couldn't understand what happened before the Big Bang; if there was an omnipresent human being, or if nothing but darkness lived in the empty canvas of space. If we couldn't understand birth, how would we understand death? How would we know if birth and death were the same and not just mutually exclusive principles?

We called ourselves the most intelligent species on Earth, yet we couldn't be more ignorant. Einstein once said after his theory of relativity that when you first discover a new field, you became ignorant in it. A paradox: more knowledge in a certain subject opened holes of ignorance. But it opened up doors. We managed to build hotels in space. Voyager 1 zipped by a binary system capable of sustaining life. We were able to create wormholes that took us to the outer reaches of the universe where even light was a tortoise in getting to the destinations.

We were trailblazers, discoverers, yet it couldn't mean anything useful. Did it bring us sustenance? No. Did it weave our clothes, keep us warm at night, help us reproduce? Of course not. I'd said from time to time when the sun was still alive that humanity was the most intelligent ignorant race on the planet.

We don't even know if the things we were observing were even real (the speed of light from faraway objects is nothing compared to the immensity of space) and the theories and hypotheses we create hold no meaning other than merits and labels to our own species. But I like that. It creates mystery, purpose, meaning the universe seems to lack.

Live for meaning, soaking the burdens, reliving days of bliss over and over and over again. When humanity finally disappears, I hope there will be a new race of intelligent species, looking at the universe and formulating theories of their own.

In a few billion years electromagnetic radiation will become so weak from other local superclusters, and we wouldn't have a shred of further evidence of the Milky Way's neighbors. Humanity will be gone by then.

A new intelligent species may rise on another planet in the Milky Way, and they'd think of themselves as the center of everything. The Milky Way would be their universe. What an astonishing revelation, that new species in the future would never see the same things the Hubble space telescope had captured fifty years ago, and the spectacle of amateur astronomers alike. Solar eclipses would also be a thing of the past, as the moon would deviate so far from the Earth the shadow can't block out the sun. We are temporary. Everything is temporary. But it filled me with more intrigue, hope to live for the moment.

And if an intelligent race of the future can't see other galaxies, then how would we know if we are not missing something? It took so long for scientists to figure out the universe is 70% dark energy. What else did we miss? What other temporary spectacles were out there and suddenly snuffed out before our existence?

But most of all— why ask questions we know we won't get answers to? This world was hopeless and forlorn, almost dead. But that was such a pessimist's outlook. Theories, facts, observations... they expressed the beauty of the universe. They represented us. Our desperate need for the truth. Our obsessive need to quantify the world we live on. Our hunger for purpose.

I watched the cardinal as it fluttered away forever.

But that was all until my vision faded black.

A/N:

This story was a blast to write. I really hope you enjoyed it as much as me and took something good away from it. I love all things cosmology and philosophy and to combine the seemingly contradictory disciplines. Hope you enjoyed and don't forget your existential crisis!

References:

Vsauce:
What will we miss?
What would happen if the sun disappeared?
Where do deleted files go?
More coming soon...