CAMBRIDGE, MA -- On Saturday, one really, really old student-run publication released its annual parodical version of another really, really old student-run publication, despite the fact that the weighty inevitability of death continued to cast an ominous shadow on all involved.
Some students chuckled, recognizing the effort that the first publication had gone toward putting together a fake campus newspaper. Indeed, these readers momentarily forgot the inevitable truth that one day the sun will literally explode.
The tit-for-tat between the groups, which has gone on for many years now, has continued without any of them even trying to imagine a scenario in which the sun is in the sky one moment, and then suddenly it is not. But that will be the case one day, and all hundred-year-old feuds will turn to atoms in space, separated by light-years in the vacuum.
If this year’s iteration of the back-and-forth is anything like last year’s, someone spent 12 to 20 hours or something putting together the fake newspaper, with actual staff writers’ names. On the other hand, the universe is approximately 14 billion years old and is continually expanding. Faint stars serve as our only guides in the vast eternal nothingness, as planets spin and comets get caught in their cosmic nets. In just a few billion years, it could all be gone. All traces of human history and every one of our accomplishments will dissolve into dust, and then into oblivion.
It will probably happen next year, too, barring any unforeseen circumstances or something. But who knows? Although this tiny blue rock we call home will have completed another rotation around our mortal sun, who knows what the fickle hands of fate have in store for our species? All it takes is one wayward asteroid for this experiment we call life to end. And end it will, either this day or the next.
But we guess it's pretty funny.
Image source: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/Wikimedia