What do we mean when we talk about the end of the world? The first thing I think of when someone cries “Apocalypse!” at the top of their lungs is some Fallout-esque landscape, blasted and barren, devoid of all life except for the remnants of a shattered civilization. I imagine that many of us draw on aspects of pop culture to illustrate what the world will look like once it’s all over. But when we look at our stories, our movies and books and games that languish in the post-apocalyptic genre, what we’re really thinking of is the end of society as we know it and not necessarily the world itself.
How the world ends is all based on how you define it. The sudden loss of global society is one interpretation, but there are others. I might be inclined to get philosophical and believe that the world ends when I die. After all, isn’t our concept of the world around us just an internal construction? A homebrew illusion concocted from how our brains interpret the data perceived by our limited senses? Maybe it’s a bit of the hardcore existentialist in me, but you could say that every living thing is an apocalypse waiting to happen, as each and every one of our own little worlds flicker and fade away.
Or instead of all of that depressing schlock, we could be talking about the physical destruction of the Earth itself. I could point out that several billion years from now the sun will expand into a red giant star and probably engulf the earth in flames until our planet is reduced to cosmic ash. Case closed! Shebang! World: destroyed. To go even further, we could talk about the eventual heat death of the universe, where it’ll expand and expand until it snaps back in on itself and nullifies existence as we know it. And, at any point in the intervening time between now and then, a massive asteroid could come along and strike the earth, destroying it ahead of schedule or knocking it out of orbit and into some other unforeseeable danger.
The possibilities are endless.
No matter what way you choose to look at it, the end of the world is a concept that is both fascinating and terrifying (perhaps one more than the other). All the people you love can (and will) die, the culture and society that you live in will crumble and fade into obscurity, and the earth itself will eventually succumb to the march of time. Still, I think it’s okay not to be afraid of an apocalypse. After all, countless horrible things will probably happen before anything truly cataclysmic comes along. Maybe focus on those instead.
Happy studying!
