Some Time

Twentieth century’s persuasion⁠—the End far and wide⁠—is founded on five chief things.

First, on sheer optimism, in its turn founded partly, if unconsciously, on the present trend of teaching and preaching, itself founded partly on the comfortable situation of most folk who preach and teach. Were the world’s past described by the downtrodden or the suffering or the hungry, by cargo of slave-ship or girls of a brothel, by children of galleys or gallows or caste-bridehood or race-hatred or festering slum, it would wear different hues and darker; were the world’s future descried by the world’s victims⁠—the world’s majority⁠—it would be coloured by less joy of continuance. Long life for the world is predicted by a small and special class who find its life worth prolonging.

Second, on a kind of logic akin to but less ignoble than such complacency; which, well aware of his sorrowful past and suffering present, yet has faith in man’s ultimate destiny and regards it as against all meaning and all reason that he should be cut off before the flower of his age⁠—so reasonless, so meaningless as to be beyond conception. Near doom is not conceivable; so doom is far.

Third, on the new sense of time created by, and that has created, the new theories of time’s nature. What they say, the strange priests with the strange names⁠—Weyl and Cassirer; Bergson, Bolzano; Einstein, Minkowski; Poincaré, Palágyi⁠—who tug at the mantle of Chronos and send his scythe swerving through nightmare, what they mean: who knows? They themselves? their warring acolytes? the chronic hierophants who would harmonize, synthesize, their magic and discordant speech? Perhaps none of these. But plain men scent the plain upshot: that through their words and their worship the old God’s life is made longer, Time’s boundaries pushed backward, world’s respite increased.

Fourthly, and fundamentally, on a consideration one by one of the various manners of the end. A distant answer to When? is, by Probability, deduced from the different answers to How? The most probable of these are those probably most remote.

To each of the Ways allot its percentage of likelihood:

This is a very unsatisfactory table. To avoid fractions, proportionately too many marks, from the scientist’s point of view, are doubtless given to the ways he deems least likely. To ignore for the moment the distinction between man’s end and the globe’s, the figures apply⁠—where there would be a difference between the two⁠—to the former, Collision thus getting one mark instead of (say) ninety-nine. The supernatural end, God, is excluded as not amenable to natural percentages. All the figures are quite arbitrary. Fire, for instance, is particularly unassessable at this juncture of particular doubt and dispute as to the sun’s age and constitution and source of self-renewal. Cold and Drought are really one. Water’s scarce worth a fraction. Comet is claptrap.⁠ ⁠… It is a very unsatisfactory table.

It could hardly be otherwise. The very ways being guesses, so much the more so their comparative likelihood. Each way had many variants, each variant many variants as to time. One way is bound up with other ways, often inextricably. If (under Cold) the earth’s oceans freeze or (under Drought) disappear before the moon’s return (under Crash) upon us, then tidal friction will abate, and the moon’s advance be arrested; and there will be no such Crash, and Cold it will be. If, on the contrary, the moon makes haste and comes before the seas are either frozen or dried up, then Collision has it.⁠ ⁠…

The broad result is not affected. It is unequivocal. Comet, Fire and Crash, the three accidents⁠—which, being the least precisely predictable, cannot be refused therefore the theoretical possibility of coming soon⁠—manage all three together to reach a paltry 4 percent. No less than 96 percent is shared by Water, Drought and Cold, which should come upon us in a far future only. Drought-Cold, the composite end, that according to almost all latter-day conjecture, we are bound for, is, according to almost all present-day assessment, not less than thousands of millions of years away. The answer to When? as based on the answers to How? puts early consummation beyond the pale of all human plausibility.

Fifthly, and most persuasively, on the companion belief that the beginning is far away.

Here abandon intensive figure-play for extensive, the humble sums and subtractions of the older prophecy for the bold zero-games of the new. If the calculations are remoter from lay understanding, more fantastic, more visionary, they offer the great compensation of vagueness⁠—more elbow-room. With Millerists and Millenarists one wrong is all wrong; with geologists a million years out is no error; with astronomers a hundred million margin is sheer finicky precision. The new magic has the further advantage of not having yet been caught out; no date of its choosing has ever been reached, so none has ever been proved wrong. Some may dislike the airs of the latest holders of the temple, their contempt for their predecessors, exaction of blind acceptance, unwillingness to see that as the wizards and astrologers to them so they will appear to the next age’s priests of knowledge. But once you accept their premises, once you share their assumption that the external world they speak of is there, you must admit them without rivals at explaining that world, and must applaud alike the triumphant mechanism they have built up on that assumption and the skilful notations in which they describe it: the chemical notation, the mechanical notation, the mathematical notation; the rows of huddling noughts.

Noughts divorced, if not from beauty, from experience; not to be grasped with the brain, though the eye lends mystical help. A bit-by-bit method, dealing with moderate multiples, persuades a few. By express train the moon is only six months away; that Flying Scotsman which for eight hours bore you northwards you can perhaps, with an effort, conceive having carried you on for five hundred times as far. The sun is not four hundred times further again; you can, maybe, just visualize the journey. The old Queen was born only some three times as long ago as you and I. All previous recorded history, from Memphis or Babylon the first city, from great Cheops to great Victoria, is but fifty times longer ago than that. The post-Tertiary period is but twenty (or thirty, or forty) times longer ago than recorded history; the earlier geological periods each not more than two or three times as long as the post-Tertiary; the pre-geological period not more than half⁠—or twice⁠—as long ago again as all the geological eras added together. This method may help, or it may not. The persuasive “buts” and “onlys” may assist the vision of certain piecemeal and analytic minds, or may defeat their own ingenuous end, and make the years’ confusion worse confounded. The jingling millions and billions are better; the rows of huddling noughts.

With their aid, how runs the answer? How long has the world been? Ussher’s brevity is brutally avenged; the new doctors vie in prodigious estimate:

First the humble philologists, who for the evolution of human speech require a year allowance of some

80,000.

Next the anthropologists, who put man’s reign as man, since back in the early Miocene he took farewell of his anthropoid brethren, at

200,000.

Then the biologists, who for the full evolution of life, want a mere

80,000,000.

Passing from life to the lifeless earth, with the geologists we take a jump. The old man with his salt machine, turning it out like mince: how long has he been turning? All the rivers run into the sea: how many years has it taken them to bear down the sodium now found there, allowing for so much originally present, so much blown back to the shore by winds, and this correction and that?

1,600,000,000.

Sea is deep; land is deeper. How many years for the depths of the different sediments that encrust the earth to have been deposited, for the oldest Algonquins to be laid down? Maybe

1,650,000,000.

Land and sea, in even battle, have since the beginning been warring together, an age of the raising of mountains alternating with an age of the lowering of lands. There have been such and such a number of alternations. How many years have been needed to fulfil them? A rough

1,800,000,000.

Chemist joins geologist to take up the tale; together they meditate on the radioactive elements in the earth’s crust. As Paracelsus saw long ago, all stones are philosopher’s stones. Alchemy is a matter of temperature; each metal holds within itself the principle of self-transmutation. Uranium for instance, debauched uranium, goes on changing from one element into another, usually ending its fickle career as lead. The rake’s progress is long, but the spies of science have found out just how long. The rate of disintegration has been discovered, so that if there is so much uranium in a given rock, and so much lead, the age of the rock is “known.” The figure for the oldest rocks is

1,900,000,000.

Strike the balance of these four to get, as the age of the solid earth, over

1,700,000,000.

Pass from geological to astronomical mysteries. The left-hand integer rises.

The years required for the solar system to have accomplished its long journey from its nativity-place in the Milky Way⁠—if it was born there:

3,000,000,000.

To cover the age of the moon, our child⁠—if she was born of us:

4,000,000,000.

To account for the eccentricity in the orbit of Mercury⁠—if one can account for it by zeros at all:

5,000,000,000.

To fit the tidal hypothesis of origin⁠—if the true hypothesis:

5,600,000,000.

Average these four astronomicals:

4,000,000,000.

The world, then, is held to have existed as a solid globe for one thousand seven hundred million, as a separate one for four thousand million years.

As though the clues Earth affords were not obscure enough in themselves, the varying ardour of the suitors, by interpreting them most variously, has made matters worse. The physicists, half envying Genesis, have assured her she is young, always construing her shy hints as conservatively and courteously as possible. The geologists are less gallant, the chemists mere churls. From decade to decade too the estimates have varied, moving up and down in great curves, all sciences together. They were a little lower just before the last war than just after Darwin; they are higher today than at any other time. How bold was Lord Kelvin when, arguing from the laws of thermal conductivity, he demanded for the time since the crust became solid over a hundred million years; arguing from the polar flattening and the rate of rotation, several hundreds of millions! Yet to the salt or sediment schools or the uranium-zirconium schools of today he is a timid fellow, a second Ussher; as they, perhaps, someone’s Usshers tomorrow. Maybe the hints are deliberately misleading. Maybe, like ancient kings who hid the day of their birth lest astrologers should cast them an ill horoscope, for a like reason the world hides hers. Somewhere, in the numbered heart of God, her birthday is known. But not to human calculation, which can only use those poor averaged guesses at the past as ground for new poor averaged guessing at the future.

Four thousand million for the past. Now the evidence, though technical, that the earth is a comparatively young earth, with noontide and meridian far ahead, is described as overwhelming. So put her future at whatever figure you like; put it at nearly double her past: put it (with almost any other integer instead of the seven fairly acceptable to 1930 theory) at

7,000,000,000.

Last of all, to crown us with length of days, come the sidereal actuaries, who place the Sun’s own birthday⁠—that he shared with his brethren in the Galaxy, at the parturition of a great spiral nebula⁠—in a far remoter past, reaching twelve digits, and who make his expectation of life, as the earth-assessors ours, proportionately still longer; make it, with their new notions of matter, of star-centres more radial than radium, of energy subatomic sub-eternal, of ions bombarding each other into outlandish senility, a wild fourteen-digit thing: some

10,000,000,000,000.

It being not known, nor to be sanely guessed, for how much of this ten million million period his radiation will be sufficient to keep earth’s creatures alive, nor what share of his future will be ours also, as earth’s Ultimate Figure choose one somewhere, anywhere, between this outside limit for the sun and the seven thousand million chosen for the earth’s chance on its own.

Choose

1,000,000,000,000⁠—

that is, a million million, or (as in England we say it) a billion.

The World Will Last a Billion Years

What of it? What upshot of this our longevity?

Scarce any. A time so far away cannot be comprehended, and is not comprehended. It has no reaction on human understanding, leave alone human conduct. It hides so distant that it holds no fears, no more than death for a hopeful boy. It holds no interest either. Who wants to hear about it, read about it, think about it⁠—do anything at all about it?

Certain tendencies are no doubt strengthened by, after strengthening, this postponement: the decline of fear, the decay of religion, rising ambitions for man’s destiny. Distance lends enchantment. The Delectable Mountains are ahead. We shall become supermen, then gods. There is time for anything, everything.

This adjournment, like all adjournments, like all optimism, in practice discourages action and defeats its own desire. Time for everything means time for nothing. Dwell careless. Eat, drink and be merry. You’ve till the year one billion ere you die.

Being built on the quicksands of contemporary speculation, the far-off dogma may crumble of course tomorrow. Choked by the armour of many dimensions it is forging for itself, strangled by the mathematical network it is getting entangled in, Science will suddenly be seen (unseen) for the dream, outside God’s reality, that it is. Then its prorogations will be denied, and a new vision of hope or despair, or neither, be revealed.

Till then why not trust the naturalists? They tell so little. Not what the world is, nor where its first substance first came from, nor what the men upon it are or mean; only when this globe as real in the way they suppose, and when life upon it as the physical thing they describe, may, with most fantastic margin for error, be guessed⁠—may appear⁠—to disappear.

Not soon. And not signless.

What shall the sign be, the sign of Thy coming and of the end of the world?

The reappearance of the two men who have lived but not died: Elijah, prophet and Tishbite, and Enoch father of Methuselah⁠—himself no ready dier? How shall they be known?

The sign of the Son of Man in heaven? What shall it be?

The destruction of Rome? While she lives, aureal, imperial, leonine, capitoline,

O fior d’ogni città, donna del mondo,

city of cities, Babylon the third city, Caput Mundi, then lives the world. When she falls, the world falls. To this day the Romans will have it (I am husband of a Roman and know) that when the statue of Marcus Aurelius shall turn golden again then the sun shall turn black; that the last sunset over the Colosseum will be the last sunset over earth.

Or, not rather, the slow signs that Science will discover? For if not soon, not sudden.

Flood will advance painlessly and to programme; there’ll be time to plant gopher-trees. The brains of those latter days will compass every chemical trick to combat Drought and postpone his hour, then to foretell the hour beyond which postponement cannot go. They will raise batteries against the Cold, using devices and deftnesses we cannot conjecture, eking out the reduced rations of radiation according to a timetable corrected continually in their favour, and accepting defeat, accurately forecast, only when the sun as ally indispensable can help them no longer. Centuries soon, by high celestial mathematics crash with comet or star will be deduced. Striking-chance, size, speed, noxiousness, all will be published generations in advance. Stellar waverings inconceivably far will constitute the first warnings, and will continue and increase through the first period. The mathematical stage, concluded by disturbances in the orbit of Neptune or of Chronos, named but still to be found,1 will be followed by the stage of telescopic visibility, then by the naked-eye stage, as the foe moves through the six magnitudes till larger than Sirius or the Morning Star at her brightest. Then the seasons will begin to go wrong, and the thermometers, and the clocks. If the first warning is given today, that is at a moment when, as the accredited magicians of the age, astronomers and physicists happen to be enjoying enormous prestige with common men⁠—a prestige they may lose tomorrow to the spiritualists or the mystics or the priests⁠—incredulity, if any, will cede swiftly, and long before the naked-eye period the psychoanalysts of the heavens will have permeated the mass of the people with their prediction.

What then will come to pass? First, covering all men, a slow surge of fear⁠—fear, with Love and self-love, the third director of men’s actions. When fear rises self-love rises with it, and Love goes under. In hearts stripped naked by terror, the beast will hack through and triumph forth; their death before their eyes, their faces turned monstrous with their hearts, cruelly they will fight to get or keep for themselves alone the best places or best chances (if against Cold not the Star, the last stocks of preserved sunlight or synthetic warmth), cruelly rejoicing in the suffering of those whom they deprive or despoil. From craftier hearts “What must I do to be saved?”⁠—all fear-moments are religious moments⁠—will go up in clouds of servile prayer to the advancing star (the dying one), with incense of propitiatory virtue and pious works. In a few heavenly hearts Love will stand firm and victorious, in might of self-sacrifice giving up its share of scant coolness (scant heat) unto others. In the few maddest hearts will shine exultation, glad welcome to death as victory, Annihilation as the Bride. Until, as the heat (cold) waxes, and pain and disease oust (numb) even fear, and the horror of physical suffering blots out even the mental horror at the world’s fate.⁠ ⁠…

Except⁠—who knows? Who knows what happens, as he dies, in the heart of another? Some go fearing, some cursing; some in peace, some in pride; some struggling passionately to live, some knowing that there is nothing better for a man than that he should die; some beholding the darkness, and some the King in His beauty. According to the manner of his individual soul and according to the manner of the general end, so amid these various ways for man’s choosing will he choose to die.

Foreknowledge must be his comfort. By large increase of memory and foresight, by calculus more powerful and machines more marvellous, by telescopes to watch each sunspot on each farthest star, by microscopes to watch each proton and electron at work or play, by subtleties of mind and contrivances of matter that at the last instead of merely adumbrating will seek to direct the destinies of earth and of heaven, by all these and by God’s pity⁠—whichever the way, whatever the end, it will be foretold in time.

In time for what?