Soon, against its will, it will submit to the fact it cannot continue the narrative. The physicists have advised us to prepare ourselves emotionally for the end of our world: trees will have fewer leaves, both men and women will go bald, animals will be drawn with less detail. As the decline continues, you will someday turn a familiar corner to find buildings missing. At some point you may look through the missing walls of your bedroom to find your lover only half drawn. This is the proffered prediction but, fortunately for us, the physicists have slightly miscalculated. Missing from there equations is the fact that the quark loves us too much to allow this to happen. It cares about its creation and knows it would break our hearts to see through the veneer....
![[-]](https://gayspeak.com/images/duende_v3_local/collapse.png)
•
So it has a slightly different plan. It will end the world in sleep. All the quark’s creatures will curl up where they are. Morning commuters in suits will sink softly into slumber behind there steering wheels. Highway, locomotives, and subways will slow to a muted halt. Office workers will make themselves drowsily comfortable on the floors and hallways of there tall buildings. The square of the world’s capitals will drift into silence. Farmers in there wheat fields will doze off as midnight insects touch down softly like snowflakes. Horses will arrest their gallop and relax into a standing slumber. Black jaguars in trees will lower their chins to their paws on the branches. This is how the world will close, not with a bang but a yawn: sleepy and contented, our own falling eyelids serving as the curtains for the play’s end....
•
This way, the quark’s beloved creations will be unable to witness what happens next. What happens next is the world’s recession, the unraveling of the planet. As the quark slows, its individual pencil strokes become increasingly sparse until the world resembles a crosshatched woodcut. The sleeping bodies become transparent netting through which the other side can be seen. As the pencil marks grow fewer, the asphalt highways become a sparse lacing of black strokes, with nothing below but the other side of the planet, one earth-diameter away. The world’s canvas devolves into a thin sketch of out-lines. The remaining strokes, one by one, disappear from the latticework, drawing the cosmos toward a more complete blankness. In the end, spent, the quark slows to a halt at the center of infinite emptiness....
•
Here it takes its time, catching its breath. It will wait several thousand millennia until it regains the stamina and optimism to try again. So there is no afterlife, but instead a long intermission: all of us exist inside the memory of the particle, like a fertilized egg waiting to unpack.
•
OK....:eek: slightly concerned about you and g'old Bowyn Aerrow with this whole "talking to myself" tendencies
Anyway, subject like this interest me and depress me at the same time. I do love a good science rant, but then I start to think that the sun will turn to a red giant and swalLow the earth...yay...fantastic...no more humans, no more philosophizing about the universe..:frown:
•
