"We may have different opinions on how the world was created and how it will end, but it does not matter if we still could not live together and respect each other as human beings"

Hey, welcome back to your (almost) weekly post. I was so busy in the last couple of weeks and I could not find time to write this post last week, so here we are. As I have said last time, this will be the last episode of this season, which we have been discussing a lot about the existence of God, religion, and the cultures connected with them. Since we started our journey with how the universe was formed, why don't we end it with how everything will be finished?

The end of the world is a familiar concept in our society. Every religion has a version on how the world will end, including some religions that say there is no ending in our universe. However, why the concept of apocalypse is so needed in our life?


Why Do We Think of Apocalypse

Apocalpyse is strongly related to death, something that I have discussed in many episodes ago to be one of the catalysts that create religion. Our fear of ending our life here on earth makes us create a lot of concepts to bear with it. Apocalypse means the end of everything. Our life, our world we are living in, our universe. No one knows if it is going to happen or when.

There are a lot of disagreements, even inside of a certain religion, on what actually it means. Let's take the concept of apocalypse in Christianity, for example. A lot of people interpret the second coming of Jesus as the apocalypse, which He will actually come and end the world once and for all. However, there are also a lot of people interpret it as a "personal" apocalypse, which means there is no literal second coming of Jesus, instead it describes someone's death and he/she need to leave the world. A lot of Bible experts tend to believe the first interpretation, which a lot of it was written in the book of revelation. (My favourite book in the Bible, to be honest, it sounds like an upgraded Harry Potter novel with all these mythic creatures lol)

However, in the last decades, there is a lot of studies that reveal the background of the writing in this book. It was said that John wrote this book when angels or something else came to his dream and show him what the apocalypse looks like, and a lot of believers still believe it. The last studies reveal that this book was written during Christianity's Gospel from the Middle East to western Europe, which at that time the concept of Christianity was strictly opposed by the Romans. There are a lot of slaughters towards the Christians, and for them, it was like the "apocalypse of Christianity" at that time, including how the number '666' came alive and how it related to Nero, the Roman emperor at that time. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you watch "The Story of God", a beautifully written documentary hosted by Morgan Freeman on Netflix.

So, there are already 3 groups of people reacting to the book of revelation: First, the group that believes everything written here is literally what is going to happen in the future. Second, the group that believe it is just a metaphor to describe someone's death, and last is the group that believes it was Christianity's fear during that time, that inspires them to write this book.

Three of them have the same core: death. Death of something; could be every human's life, someone's life, or a collapsing society. However, it still has not answered the question: why do we need the concept of an apocalypse?

Why Do We Need Them

Last night a friend of mine asked, "what will you going to do if you know that you will be dead in the next hour or so?" This is actually for me the core of apocalypse. We need something to remind us, that every life has an ending. "What is the difference than a regular death, then?" For me, there is no difference. The concept of apocalypse is no other than the concept of death. It is a not-so-friendly reminder that we are not eternal (yet?). 

This concept also makes us easier to teach kids (as any other religion concepts) to do good and leave good things while our life last. It also shows that the lingering fear of the end of the world already existed since the beginning of humanity, since almost every single society from the past always have a version of it. The fear of ending shows the maturity of the evolution of our human brain; it shows that we are foreseeing to the future that no one is going to know what will happen.

If apocalypse is just merely a concept of death, is there actually the "real" apocalypse, when literally the universe ended? We have not closed the possibility of the real We need to take a look at science.

Science's View on Apocalypse

Believe it or not, there is actually a branch of physics that learn about apocalypse, which is thermodynamics. Just kidding, but thermodynamics actually has its own version of apocalypse, which is called entropy. What is it? Let me try to explain it in a casual way.

Let's say you want to eat noodles. You would only eat noodle when they are clumped together, right? No one eats noodle when they are separated in a way that you need to eat it every single strand, moreover, they are located everywhere. One strand on the kitchen, another strand in your dining room, and so on. This configuration of noodle is called a high-entropy configuration. It does not make sense to eat the noodle, since you need a lot of effort to consume them. In the other hand, if your noodles are clumped into one bowl, you could eat it directly. This is called the low-entropy configuration.

Entropy measures how "useful" your energy is. You may have heard the law of conservation of energy, which is also called the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can not be created or destroyed, but they could only be converted. Have you ever thought, why don't we just convert heat that created by the engine to power the engine back again? It does not violate the conservation of energy. This is called a perpetual machine. Why do we never see them? Entropy is the answer. When you feed your engine with fuel, the energy is "clumped" together; they are useful. However, the output of the engine as heat is separated everywhere, the entropy is too high that it makes no sense to use them.

The second law of thermodynamics literally describes this. The entropy of a system will never go down with time. Hence, this is the definition of time according to thermodynamics. The increasing entropy shows in which direction the arrow of time is. What does it have to do with apocalypse? If the entropy of our universe keeps increasing, there will be a time when it has reached the maximum entropy, and God knows what will happen next. This version is called "heat death". 

What Matters More

Entropy is not the only way scientist predict the end of the universe, there are thousands of them. Some use quantum physics, some use gravitation and dark matter, but every single of them is merely just a prediction, and there is a huge chance that we will already be gone when it happens.

This is what actually matters more. Apocalypse might happen sooner or later, but our life is currently more at risk, both physically and socially. In the current era of pandemic, we have already seen how fragile we are, and yet a lot of people are still in denial of this virus. Add that with a lot of social issues in our society such as racism, our own apocalypse can't be more complete. 

End of This Chapter

This will be the closing of this season, and who knows when I will be back discussing issues about religions and cultures. If there is something I could say to end this season, it is summarised in this episode: we may have different opinions on how the world was created and how it will end, but it does not matter if we still could not live together and respect each other as human beings. 

I want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed directly and indirectly to this season, I deeply appreciate every single sentence we talked about. Also thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey, and I could not wait to share more things in the next season. I will take first a short break before I start the new season, which we will be discussing a lot of interesting topics. (Yes I do need this break lol).

That's it for this season, and see you next time!