Everything Ends Here
Or, Learning About the End of the World After My Assault
Neil DeGrasse Tyson begins his book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by quoting himself: “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” While the act of quoting oneself in their own work has become increasingly funny to me as time has progressed, that was not what I was contemplating the first time I read those words. Instead, I was struck by their burning honesty: Hey, you know you don’t need to know jack shit for the world to keep turning around you, right? And you know that it will.
This was one of the first books I read after being sexually assaulted.
In a lot of ways I think it makes sense that in the wake of tragedy, I chose to study space. There was, to me, something very soothing within the mystery of the great unknown. Invisibility was the only thing I’d been trying to gain for a while, and if I wanted to hide, the universe was vast enough to hold me. I’d been spending weeks at a time in whatever relatively close city I could make it to and it had been good for me, sure. I had found things to do that took my mind off of the situation, but only temporarily. I’d get back and what happened had still happened, my body still felt alien, and my already very scarce money only spread so far. Eventually, I had no means to stay in any city but the one in which my parents lived, in their house. I had to get a “real job” and fill my time doing anything I could in an attempt to forget my nightmarish fate the month prior.
In the same way that I felt as though I was walking around in someone else’s skin, everything else began to take on that unfamiliarity as well. Reading has always been an important part of my life, so I attempted to burrow for a while in the tiny, now-closed public library in my town. I figured this would be an easy enough place to weather everything out–reading had always felt like second nature to me. However, as I pulled book after book, letting my eyes glaze over letters that I couldn’t remember how to sound out, I realized even books would prove to be a struggle. Fiction seemed frivolous and essays and memoirs were too burdensome. I didn’t want to read about devastating life-changing events, but I didn’t want to not read them. I could not bear to contemplate God on any lever either. Other people, real, fake, deity, animals, and anything in between was too much.
I opted, then, for physics. Real life things that were theoretically devastating and theoretically relatable, but on a purely hypothetical level. Naturally, through this, I fell headfirst into time travel, and upon crawling out, discovered the vast subject of astrophysics before me.
In my mind, time travel (or, more broadly, a lot of quantum physics) and astrophysics have a relationship like that of fraternal twins. You can’t exactly learn about one without at least mentioning the other. They are linked through their most mysterious and intriguing foundational pieces: black holes. Time inside of a black hole is one of science’s biggest mysteries because…it simply doesn’t exist. Once an object is swallowed by a black hole, it exists outside time. And sure, people can say time is just a construct and that it doesn’t exist anyway, but here, it never even existed as the former. There is no linear aging or processes, which has led to one of the bigger goals in today’s astrophysics: to prototype a small scale black hole, from which we would be able to study the particles that make it up and subsequently solve the time travel equation. This would, in conjunction with the multiple worlds theory being in some form correct, give us the ability to jump forward.
I always say I stopped working on the time travel equations because I wouldn’t get anywhere–all there was to figure out was what any scientist before me already had. There is a missing link. It is still missing. Without that black hole prototype, it stays missing, there is no solution. And this is true, this is a reason I stopped, and maybe the most solid one. At the time, though, the hypothetical reality was far more glaring: if it happens, if the missing link is found, the answer still wouldn’t be what I believed I needed–my own missing link. This whole time, I’d been wanting to go back. I wanted to say better goodbyes, I wanted to stop myself from dying my hair a few specific colors. I wanted to wake up the day of my assault and stay in bed, not go out, not drink, follow my friends back to their rooms even if I hadn’t been invited. At risk of mixing scientific fact with my own sap, I wanted to change my fate into one far more fortunate.
I was dissatisfied. I was also unfoundedly skeptical, considering my minimal prior education in the sciences. I thought that the physicists must have missed something. It makes no sense to only be able to move forward, right? And so maybe black holes are still everything. This fascination moved me comfortably into the astrophysics shelf of the library, next to physics, and as I began researching black holes rather obsessively, I was introduced to a branch of astrophysics entitled cosmology–most specifically, the cosmological end of the world, where time became wholly irrelevant.
I thought “well, my world’s kind of ended already and I’ve got the time. Let’s see what we’re working with.”
There are two things you should know about the cosmological end of the world. The first is that it is technically just a theory. The second is that it will disappoint you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was in awe when I read about it for the first time, and I suppose very much of me still is, but when you’re working with a rough timeline with some of the earliest events beginning multiple trillions of years from now…well, it’s all a very literal slow burn. It did not take long to realize that the universe wouldn’t swallow me up, not in this lifetime. It wouldn’t even start swallowing itself.
The end of the anthropocene era–the era in which we live today–will most likely be brought on by climate-related instances. In approximately seven hundred years, these will culminate with Earth’s magnetic field completely reversing itself, leading to the resurgence of currently obsolete astronomical experiences (for example, the Hale-Bopp Comet will once again be visible from Earth.) The sea level will rise, destroying much of civilization. What it doesn’t destroy, it will change drastically for the next several thousand years. Every action has an equal opposite reaction: the rainforests will be depleted, but the Sahara Desert becomes lush.
Around this time (eighteen thousand years from now) the stars will begin to die. This is going to take a while. Stars live for hundreds to even thousands of years, but as the universe expands more and more every day, we’re reaching an inevitable point of capacity: the expansion will make the birth of new stars impossible, and that which we already have is not enough to stay lighting the world. The constellations begin to shift away from themselves, fully out of alignment. Time is ticking.
Around us, the atmosphere begins to change, and earth experiences mass destruction because of it. The supervolcanoes begin to erupt, we’re hit by comets and supernovas, the ice caps melt fully. In this, though, life still somehow blooms. New islands pop up as a sort of false spring. And then the asteroid hits. We can’t know which one, can’t even begin to categorize it, but asteroids are increasing in number due to the changes in the space surrounding them. Just as it was with the dinosaurs, when this one hits, everything collapses. The subsequent shifting of Earth’s plates causes a revived Pangaea and any lucky, evolved, remaining human and animal life is gone.
The sun also begins to die. In doing so, it also begins to grow, expanding into one last hurrah. It evaporates the oceans and kills any lucky plants left over. All life is gone. The sun has become a superpower and it completely murders what is left of the Earth. The planet itself is no longer, and, eventually, the sun falls to the same fate. It shrinks into a dwarf and dies, slowly growing colder. Space freezes over.
This is approximately forty billion years from now. It is just the beginning of the end.
I tend to look at my assault as a way to measure the passage of time in my life. There is a before and an after and there is that day, and I try very hard to not think about it though I find myself constantly failing. That day is a sort of ground zero, a more personal switch from BC to AD. Everything I’ve done since it happened has been done under the guise of its occurrence and I’ve felt completely alien in my own skin, like I’ve woken up on a planet completely identical to one I once lived on, but completely foreign at the same time. I feel like I speak a different language, my mannerisms are gawky and undercooked. I look in the mirror and see blue veins popping out of my skin, little bones sticking out all wrong.
There is an intriguing theory spanning astrophysics as well as quantum physics as a whole called the many worlds interpretation (MWI). Simply put, the many worlds interpretation is the theory that there is a great quantity of other worlds out there. While some are twisted, liminal versions of ours beyond comprehension, others are virtually identical to ours and moving parallel to ours in spacetime. This centers around the function of the universal wave (which is also just a theory) and states that it cannot collapse. Instead, the wave can in this sense be looked at as if it were a tree, with an uncountable amount of branches off of it as new universes being derived, functioning the same as ours, after any one different outcome. The MWI is something I don’t know how to react to–maybe this is why I spent as significant an amount of time on it as I did. After all, it seems to imply comforting things for any human who has gone through a traumatic event, in the sense that in another world things played out differently, but it gave me hell in one area: time travel.
In my mind, time travel and the MWI have a tumultuous relationship. On one hand, so many of the physicists who believe in the mere possibility of time travel do so under the guise that the many worlds interpretation is a reality. After all, in accessing these other universes, we have feasible places to travel to. On the other hand, however, this is the reason scientists seem set on the fact that we can only move in one direction. This does make sense–if you picture each branch being built off of the initial wave, it’s moving forward. No matter where you go (at least in the timeline in which you exist) there is nowhere to go but up.
Roughly a billion trillion (yes, that is a real number) years from now, eventually every star must follow in the same footsteps as the sun, slowly starting to run out of gas and burn out. Any light that can be seen is further dissipated. Space enters a state of perpetual night, constant darkness. As this occurs, without the heat emanating from the stars, the temperatures drop further. The final stars to go will be red and white dwarves, like what the sun has turned into, strong for thousands of years. Eventually, though, all remnants of heat from them are gone and they reach death by turning into black dwarves, their final form from which they decay completely. The universe as we know it is completely gone in a cold, lonely death. Space has become a graveyard for what once was. As they become completely useless, gravity hurls the dead stars and planets colliding through the universe, and there is a chance that through freak accidents, they create short-living new stars. As neutrons collide, the same may happen in similar fashion of a supernova. Scientists nickname this the degenerate era.
We’ve reached the reign of the black holes; here they find their place as a superpower in this decomposing galaxy, swallowing any stray matter from the decayed planets and black dwarf stars. Through this, the black holes grow and come alive in a blaze, even those once thought to be dormant flare up and take their place in the galaxy. They become strong enough that, if Earth was still around, they could power the entire planet several times over.
Even in its death, the universe will not stop expanding. In fact, it begins to pick up in speed due to the lack of objects moving around it. Matter expands, the black holes expand, spacetime as an entity expands, killing anything it finds in its tracks. Smaller galaxies hit extinction very quickly at this point. Anything undiscovered will now stay that way, as it is now gone. Anything not swallowed by a black hole reaches this fate–some scientists believe that protons will at this point begin to age and disintegrate and because of this, perhaps some lucky masses could die of age. Either way, I’m not sure it matters. The bottom line is that everything is dead. Nothing gets left behind–not even a speck. The black holes here have reached the peak of their power.
I found, and continue to find, a certain comfort in my own unimportance. Being able to look at the universe in near-retrospect places a lot of insignificance on human life, after all. I mean, we all know we personally are nothing but blips, but looking at all of humanity in the same way is jarring and beautiful and puts a lot into perspective. My sexual assault replays itself constantly in my head, never of my own volition, and sometimes, in an attempt to calm down, I’ll try to picture the true end of the world instead. I watch the events line up and fall into sequence with each other, watch each planet and star violated until they are nothing, until they too are swallowed.
There’s a hollowness that comes with relating to something as grandiose as our universe. There’s an almost sorrow I feel knowing what is to come of it all, and that when it happens nobody will be there to help–not that anyone ever could anyway. What happens to the universe happens to it alone, all of its many parts. I know what it feels like to have something awful happen to you in a group setting. I know what it feels like to be swallowed up, to feel as though you’re floating without any sense of time just because of what could be deemed “natural order.” And maybe in one of our cases it is, maybe this is the only way out for the universe, and maybe it needs it, or will need it someday. Maybe all of this is only the inevitable outcome, and all we can do is spend our lives waiting. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.
Even so, I feel completely empty and I have since the day it happened. It hurts knowing the one thing I feel as though I can connect my experience to literally has no way of connecting back to me–the universe is my everything, and I’m next to nothing inside of it. Yet, it’s calming. There is nothing anyone could say, nothing will be said between the universe and I, so we tend on towards whatever is next. In the end, we do all we can, whether we have any idea of what may come to us or not. And now, as we speak, what is there still? We’ve lost every planet, every star, every remnant of life. The universe is cold and black, and this is how it spends most of its life–not just its remaining life, but the whole thing. In what we deem as its death, the universe is just exiting its infancy trillions of trillions of trillions of years away. Maybe at some point, there are conditions appropriate for creating life–maybe that even happens, but it wouldn’t last long. It probably wouldn’t even last as long as we did. There is a percentage with eighty-four negative zeroes detailing how much time in the universe life as we know it can be sustained. It is merely a fraction. So no, we know nothing. The universe cools down.
A new center is created around a supermassive black hole. Around this, smaller black holes attempt to create galaxies, in which they are the centers. They battle and eat each other and fall into larger and larger black holes, merging and continuing the cycle. The universe is still a hungry place, even in its destruction, with some of the black holes growing larger than any planet we’ve ever known, and the universe still expanding to be able to carry them. It is violent, but beautiful; the universe is undergoing a constant marriage between pairs of black holes, and as they merge, they stretch the universe out and let out a song that echoes through the blackness.
Quadrillions of years away, though, even though most beautiful marriages die out. Like everything else, black holes have an expiration date. As the first begin to die off, the others lose sustenance and follow rapidly, leaving behind mass explosions in their wake–the first significant light in the universe in billions of trillion trillion trillion trillion trillions of years.
We expand, darker, and colder, pushed by a substance scientists can still tell us very little about. All we know of dark energy is that it acts like a driving force, a prime mover, and it forces the universe on like a constant. Some scientists even believe it’s the manifestation of God–I thought about that briefly and everything became too real. Either way, so long as dark matter continues to act in the same way it has for all time, the universe can only expand: a space of obsoletion. Complete nothingness.
All there is, is no longer. Just like that. The universe grows for nothing, carries nothing, and may never do so again, though it takes up new space each minute. As I began to wrap my head around all of this and the ‘what happens if’s’ that came with it, the summer came to a close. The air grew crisp and biting and I was slapped with the realization that my life was still the same–I’d be going to school with the man who did this to me for the next couple of years and I’d be living in my body forever, my experiences expanding inside of me until sometimes, what happened to me is the only thing I recognize.
On the off chance that dark matter somehow grows weak, the universe would eventually collapse under itself–gravity would no longer be able to take its sheer size. Even if not, there is something pushing, one thing forcing growth where there is a sense of stuckness. What can this lead to but tragedy–so much, but nothing to give. If there is anything sentient in the universe, I have to wonder if it is often faced with its own impending implosion. I wonder if every year something tenses around a certain time, a reminder of the track we’ve been on and the billions of trillions of years left we have to plunder through.
So why will any of this happen at all? In a literal sense, we’re at least partially doing it to ourselves, but I’m not about to start preaching about how humans ruin things–I’ve done it enough. The fact is that no matter what we do or do not do, no matter what we’ve done, our universe tends towards maximum entropy. Ultimately, that alone will be our downfall.
There is a horrible statistic out there that basically states, regarding sexual crimes, if it happens to you once, there is a significantly higher chance that it will happen again. I hate this. I hate knowing it, I hate listening to it play like a broken record spinning around the back of my brain. I think about it every day. There have been times when I convince myself that it would be easier, knowing this statistic, to have some sort of control over that situation, so I place myself in it and do stupid things like spend nights in metro stations or hike alone. Am I living in fear? Maybe. But it’s hand in hand with an awareness that is impossible to shake.
Why did it happen to me? I don’t know. I mean, I know exactly how it happened, and I suppose in that way I could answer you very literally. I don’t know why, though. I don’t think anyone ever can. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to me, right? I am but a blip, the tiniest fraction of a number in an endless equation of stars. I might want sense, but in this universe, it is not given. It is not owed. The irony of it all is, to a degree, I can make sense of the universe. I can recite this shit about the end of the world like the back of my hand and it makes as much sense to me as it can to anyone. What I can’t make sense of is my own small life within this vast universe, why things that day went the way they did. Scientifically, there is no explanation for why my world fell out of alignment. That might be what I hate the most.
One of the last big theories regarding our universe that I dove into was the idea of quantum suicide. This is a thought experiment only–without proof of the multiple worlds theory, which it goes hand in hand with, there cannot even be an attempt to prove it (though it makes for a good nihilistic joke from time to time.) In the most simple sense, quantum suicide is based around luck. Someone pulls the trigger on themselves and the universe then splits into the possible outcomes of the situation. Each time a trigger is pulled, both metaphorically and physically in each of these new universes, they split once more. It isn’t so much a question of infinite possibilities, but the result even after only a few minutes can lead to infinite results, infinite universes branching off of infinite universes, with infinite yous experiencing an infinite number of different possible realities. The name of this theory comes from the fact that, assuming this has any sort of brevity, if you try to kill yourself, you’ll end up in a sort of universal limbo–both alive in some universes and dead in others. Your attempt would never fully be successful and you’d achieve a sort of cross-universal immortality through that (though eventually you would have to die in all universes.) In case this wasn’t obvious though, this theory doesn’t only apply to situations involving suicide. What it really means, or what it means for me at least, is there is a universe where I never went outside that day, there is a universe where my friends didn’t leave me with those men, a universe where I got sick from the drinks and just left, a universe where that was not the most horrible day of my life. There is a universe where I have never been taken advantage of. So, if that girl, that non-alien version of the person that I was, the version of me that I grieve daily is out there anywhere in some alternate universe, I miss her. I think about her every day. I hope she is still by-and-large doing alright.
But I know that I am wishful. Right now, there is no universe I can enter where this thing hasn’t happened to me: there may be versions of me who haven’t experienced it, but as I understand, wherever I move, so it goes too.
∞
Highly Necessary Footnote (TM)
Just like my last one (and probably 90% of shit you’ll see here) this is still a rough draft. That to say that I would greatly appreciate any form of criticism including but not limited to: constructive, tough love, hate comments that I can write into a song in true 2016 youtuber fashion. If you want to go super in depth I can add you to the beta doc (if you aren’t already there lmao like half of you have already seen this oops) and buy you coffee next time we’re in the same city. This account may or may not be turning you all into test readers. Thanks for letting me pull this shit again, though.
This was one of the most personal things I’ve written in a while—and like, yeah, I know that’s dumb because everything is personal to a degree but it's probably at least a little obvious that this one was more than that. On a real note, I’ve been trying to write about my assault for almost a year now, practically since it happened. I don’t think this is the end all be all for me talking about it, but it’s the first thing I’ve finished on the topic and it’s something I’m a little bit proud of thus far. If this piece is an omen for how the summer will go writing-wise—actually that’ll sound fucky no matter how I say it. How’s this: I have hope.
I guess my thing is posting on Sunday nights now. I love you all
xx-ri