God's Mood Swings

Time: 2350 BCE. God gets mad that he didn't do so well on making humans the first time around, so he decides to destroy everyone and everything he has made (I thought you said everything you made was “good”? whatever), because even God has mood-swings sometimes. He tells 600-year old Noah to build an ark that will house “seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird.” Converting the Hebrew measures of length to units we understand, we get that the ark was roughly 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. Modern science has only identified some 2 million species of what could be upwards of 10 million species total on Earth – all this on a boat the length of one and a half football fields. Apparently before the invention of the modern camera God liked to do all kinds of crazy, logically impossible shit, but now that people like photographic evidence for things, he doesn't seem to be around much anymore.

Anyway, God locked Noah’s family of eight in the boat with this circus show and sent a downpour of rain for forty days and forty nights. The water apparently rose so high the boat was elevated several meters above every mountaintop in the world (so we’re above Mt. Everest without any help breathing?). Every person on earth was killed, as well as every animal, which I cannot understand, because they didn't do a damn thing. The rainwater existed on earth for 150 days; essentially, Noah and his family packed enough food for hundreds of thousands of animals to survive for five months on a 450 foot boat. They also presumably cleaned up after all these animals. I don’t understand how God could make a simple affair of killing every man, woman, and child so nonsensical and complicated. Why not just zap Noah and his family and the animals to some mystical realm where they could survive and just make all the evil children and horses and elephants on earth vanish? What happened to the leftover bodies? Did God just zap them away? If so, why couldn't he have just done that in the first place?

Anyway, after all this was said and done and God made the water on earth evaporate somewhere else, Noah stepped out into the barren wasteland of earth and sacrificed some animals to God. God thought it smelled good, so he was like, “that was a kind of dick thing to do. I won’t do that again. Look, I made a rainbow!” The end.

If the ultimate end of the universe could be considered  a topic under the umbrella of “the end of the world,” then I’d like to discuss it (briefly). There are several plausible ideas for the end of the universe, but the likely end of an ever-expanding universe is heat death, which, although it may sound like it, does not mean the universe will reach a temperature that somehow destroys everything. What is does mean is that the universe will reach maximum entropy, meaning that at that point nothing in the universe can do work. If you took physics, you know that work deals with the transfer of energy caused by force displacing an object. Thus, if you understand this definition, you can envision a universe in which no work can be performed; nothing that remains at that time will move or transfer any sort of energy. By that time, the universe’s so-called “dark era,” no black holes, planets, stars, etc. will exist – most likely, only photons, neutrinos, electrons, and positrons will exist, and even then they will all be dramatically separated from each other. This is projected to happen roughly 10¹⁰⁰ years from now; in other words, the earth will be long gone and you will be long dead. Bummer, isn't it?

Poor Earth getting devoured by the Sun, a possible event 7.6 billion years into the future. This is exactly what it will look like to a T. Accurate portrayal drawn by Graham Roumieu.