Chapter 16: The Heat Death of The Universe

During the time it takes the muse to read what’s been written, the Not Quite Omniscient Narrator would like to remind you that your life is precious and you should enjoy it. Enjoy it! Every moment! Because you’re going to die. It’s not bad luck. It’s not a personal defect. It happens to everyone. And everything. Not right away, of course. In your case, the Not Quite Omniscient Narrator knows that you, the person reading this, have a while to go. So enjoy life, while you can. But enjoy it. Life is precious. As you learned in Prologue 1, “Improbability,” you’ve spent billions of past years being dead. You will spend trillions of future years dead. But right now you’re alive. So enjoy your life while you have it. It will probably be your only chance. God invented death. It has a purpose. Without death, planets would be full of old, feeble creatures, universes would be full of old dead stars, and old dead universes would hang around forever, littering Creation. Almost all of every universe is cold and still and dark: the temperature is close to absolute zero, there’s nothing to see, and no light to see by. Only a very few parts are warm, bright, and active. But that won’t last for long. Eventually all the stars will die and those few warm spots will freeze. There will be no new photons. The ones traveling through space will each run into a bit of cold, dark matter, give up energy and die. For reasons that no one really understands, phys­ icists call the death of the universe its ‘heat death.’ It’s really a cold death. No matter what you call it, when the last photon is absorbed, Metatron will call God, and God will say what She always says: “Let there be Dark.©” And there will be Dark. This metauniverse will die. So will the universe in which you live. Neither should affect you unless you are a very, very, very slow reader. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for D*mmies