Never

World not longeval, but eternal. World without end.

There is a halfway house, a high intermediate possibility: of a termination so remote, so far beyond the proudest chain of ciphers in astronomy as, though short of eternity, to be for the human mind almost indistinguishable from it.

Brahma divided the time of the world into Days, each Day consisting of 2,000 divine periods, each divine period consisting of 12,000 spiritual years, each spiritual year consisting of 360 terrestrial years of 360 days each. A Day thus contains 3,110,400,000,000 days. How many Days will there be?

Buddha divided the time of the world into Great Periods, and each Great Period into four Incalculables. Asked the number of years in an Incalculable, he replied: So great that no writing of zeros would ever attain it. A Cingalese doctor, glossing Gautama, estimates that if once in a hundred years an iron mountain were touched lightly by a light muslin veil, the length of an Incalculable is the length of time required for that veil to wear away that mountain. Unmindful of the master’s warning, a Burmese horologist lays zeros together, and his Incalculable estimate⁠—at once the most liberal and the most precise that we have⁠—is two hundred septillions of miles of noughts. For a Great Period multiply by four. How many Great Periods may there not be?

Likewise modern lovers of number have imagined the time of the world as of a magnitude that bedwarfs the astronomer’s billions. A billion written out contains but thirteen digits, a million billion but six zeros more; there are the numbers containing a billion of the zeros themselves, and the staircase-numbers a billion digits of times yet bigger. The total number of the atoms that make up this earth contains but some sixty noughts; that make up the whole universe of matter, as today judged finite in space, some four hundred; that made up Archimedes’ cosmos, as described in the Psammites, the Sand-Reckoner, some fourscore thousand. Number transcending matter, the total of seconds in the universe not of space but of time may run to a sum decillions of staircase-numbers greater than those fourscore thousands of noughts, to a figure so flagrant that no way or system of human words or symbols is able to show forth or dimly shadow it. How many separate decillions of those decillions may there not be?

It is vanity. In His sight all the noughts round all the universes are a noontide. They will pass. Eternity ahead of them will be no briefer than before.

Not, like these divisional schemes, short of Eternity, but a special way of conceiving it, is the World of Ages or Cycles; Palingesia perpetual. The doctrine has had its finite variants: so many deaths, so many rebirths, and at last the final end. But Arabs, Arawaks, Aztecs have implied the eternity of the series. The Mayas of Yucatan⁠—the great American people⁠—taught that there had been four past Ages or Suns: the Sun of Earth, ended by the Great Drought; the Sun of Fire, ended by the Great Conflagration; the Sun of Air, ended by the Great Hurricane; the Sun of Water, ended by the Great Flood⁠—in world tradition generally the last general world disaster⁠—and indeed the whole sequence is an accurate account of what has happened, if not to the planet, at least over large areas of it. The Suns will continue; Nature has resources enough to find new destructions for each, vitality enough each time to atone.

For Heraclitus each end is identical, always the Sun of Fire; each time a counterfeit world will rise from the ashes; Earth is Phoenix. Collisionists concur. From nebula to sun and planets; crash, and then back to nebula; then back again, repetitional, iterative, ding-dong⁠—and so forever.

Beyond all septillions and decillions, beyond life and death sempiternally recurrent, thrones the pure form of the Everlasting dogma. Without sensible change, without intervening destructions, without parcel or periods, the Earth abideth forever.

The phenomena of science and experience, the water and the cold, the maternal nebulae and paternal impacts that give birth and death and birth again, all matter and its manifestations, all visible tangible things, are pure illusion, a trick of the beholder’s brain. There is no world. The world is but the form or mode of a dream or vision. In that dream sense in which it exists now, it will exist forever.

Though Brahma pass from dream into a dreamless sleep, only apparently will the world come to end.

The world is God. God by His nature is eternal. The world is eternal.

Rome is deathless:

His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono.

Roma Aeterna: Mundus Aeternus.

Physics too, if sheepishly, is beginning to smile on metaphysics, and both to lend colour to the truth. Time has no independent existence. It is but a manner of conceiving things. Eternity therefore, time’s extension to the nth⁠—to beyond the boundaries of the brain, the confines of sane beatitude or sane terror⁠—has no existence either. All times being the same, because there is no time, anything that exists forever exists now; all that exists now exists forever.

From yet more orthodox throats the same witness is borne. The earth, whatever the precise way, came out of the sun and consists of what were originally the sun’s outer layers. These were made of the lightest atoms, the permanent atoms, the only ones not dissolvable into radiation atoms, the only matter not transformable into light. The sun, as after parenthood he remains, now consists of dissolvables only; whom the earth, consisting on the contrary of final-inconvertibles only, will outlive, and all his brothers the mighty stars.

Avoiding also collision. Space as well as time being infinite, an encounter with other bodies need never take place; to assume that in infinite time it must, is to forget that infinite space redresses the balance.

Sailing but bound for no port, from impact immune, of indestructible substance compounded, our globe will wander through the sunless starless universe forever.