Eternity

December 22, 2023

"There may be good reasons to be worried about this day, month, or year but God doesn't promise good days.  He promises a great eternity.  Stay focused on eternity; it changes everything."  ~Unknown

As I journey through my life and towards eternity, the idea of existing forever has always fascinated me.  To step 'out of Time' and into something we can't quite put a finger on has always captured my imagination.  This page is an introspection of my thoughts on the subject as I attempt (and fail) to wrap my brain around what the word means.  In our weakness, human beings are, for the most part, incapable of fully comprehending the concept of eternity, our minds simply can't grasp it.  However, God has made it clear to us that our souls are eternal and will exist forever.  This is what spurs us on and is why are hearts are empty until they rest in God.

As humans, we are in time, limited by time, and we think in terms of time.  This is why it's so difficult for us to seize on the concept of eternity.  

Science estimates that the universe is almost 14 billion years old but let's imagine for a moment that it is 14 billion years old.  I think we can all agree that that's a very, very long time especially when we consider all that has happened since the beginning.  But imagine for a moment that our universe is one googol old.  What's a googol, you ask?  A googol is written as a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, in other words a very big number.  If we use a bit of math, we can determine that 14 billion is less then 2% of a googol...!!  So, while 14 billion is big, a googol is really big, and while it's not the largest number, it's really, really big nonetheless.  Maybe this will sort of put it into perspective: astronomer Carl Sagan¹ says, "If you filled the known universe with grains of sand, the total number of grains would be less then one googol.  In fact, another 100,000 universes filled with sand would be necessary to make a googol."   

Uh, hellooooooooooo!!!!!  I don't know if this boggles your mind but it sure boggles mine!

Then, as if that isn't big enough, there's a googolplex which is a 1 followed by a googol of zeroes.  And after that, a googolplexian which is a 1 followed by a googolplex of zeroes.  While we can write out a googol, it would be virtually impossible to write out a googolplex, let alone a googolplexian.  Sagan says, "Writing a googolplex in full decimal form (i.e., "10,000,000,000...") would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than is available in the known universe."  There are numbers even larger, for example 'Graham's number' but I'm not even going to try and explain that one!  You can look it up for yourself if you're interested.

So, with all that out of the way, let's see if we can gain a better understanding of the extent of eternity. 

I love trying to understand eternity by comparing it to a little bird (I'll use a chickadee in this story) picking up a grain of sand in its beak, flying it to a planet on the other side of the universe, then returning to repeat the process until every grain of sand on Earth had been moved to that distant planet.  This includes every single grain of sand on every beach, the bottoms of every ocean, all the deserts on every continent, even all the backyard sandboxes around the globe.  As the story goes, at that point we wouldn't have even made the slightest dent in eternity!  Let's break that down just a teeny bit shall we?

No one really knows exactly how big the universe is but for the purposes of this story, I'm going with one scientific study that estimates the size of the known universe at 93 billion light-years across!  So, if our little chickadee could travel at the speed of light, it would take him 93 billion years to get to the other planet and drop the grain of sand and then another 93 billion years to get back to Earth.  Unfortunately, a chickadee can only manage about 12 mph, which is woefully, painfully slow when faced with such a prolonged flight.  A bit of math concludes that it would take our poor little chickadee 45 hextillion years (4.5x10²²), which is 3.3 trillion times older than our universe, too many years to realistically count, just to make the one-way trip with the first grain of sand!!  And that's if he didn't stop to eat or sleep and of course, was immortal.

Now think about how many grains of sand there are on our beautiful planet as you imagine a child building sandcastles at the beach, using a toy bucket and a shovel.  It's a beautiful image of youthful exuberance and creativity.  Assuming the toy bucket holds two litres of sand, that could, depending on the coarseness of the sand, equate to approximately 15 million grains!!  So, just to move a toy bucketful of sand to the other side of the universe would take our little guy 45 hextillion X 15 million years, however many years that is!!  Are you kidding me right now?!!

And don't forget, our little chickadee is going to move every grain of sand on Earth to the other planet and when that grueling task has been completed, eternity hasn't even really begun!!! 

Sagan extrapolated that the number of stars in the observable universe is reasonably well defined, because it is known what stars are and what the observable universe is, but its actual value is highly uncertain.  In 1980, Sagan estimated it to be 10 sextillion (in short scale 10²²).

In 2003, it was estimated to be 70 sextillion (7 × 10²²).

In 2010, it was estimated to be 300 sextillion (30 × 10²³).  As big as this number is, it equals the number of H₂ molecules in a single gram of hydrogen!²

These narratives are what make the conceptualization of eternity so difficult to comprehend and I think we can all agree that our human minds are incapable of ever fully grasping it.  Try as we might, we just can't quite get there.  Even math can't help us!  As immense as a googol, a googolplex, or a googolplexian of years is, there isn't a fraction or a percentage small enough to compare any of them to eternity!  Even a googolplexian of a googolplexian of years is too small a number to make even the tiniest of dents in eternity.  Wow!

Eternal (adj.) vs. infinite (adj.).  You might hear these two words used interchangeably but they refer to different things, 'eternal' is related to time ("i.e. God is eternal") and 'infinite' is related to something which can't be counted or measured ("i.e. The stars appear to be infinite in number.").

Eternity (n) vs. infinity (n).  Again, used interchangeably but still not the same thing.  Eternity refers to unending time or a state to which time has no application ("immortal souls destined for eternity").  Infinity refers to the state or quality of being infinite ("the infinity of Space").

The only real reality is God, He is the only non-contingent Being in existence.  Everything and everybody else is contingent (only exists because of something else). 

Eternity is the exact opposite of time. We are in time, which is nothing else but a measure of change. Eternity means no change, no 'before' and no 'after'. God simply IS, and He is by definition in eternity.

From Eternity, God created the universe, the world, and all of us.  We are all contingent, and subject to change, thus we are in time.  The whole and entire point of this world of time and change is so that we can freely choose to love God.  When we make that decision and after we become perfect (either in this life or in Purgatory after we die) we will enter eternity to be with God (called 'heaven').

If we fail to die in God’s love, or if we fail to die perfectly free from serious sin, then we still enter eternity, but it is an eternity of emptiness and pain (see Nothing Else Matters).

Thus, there cannot be anything after eternity, because the very notion of 'after' implies change and time, and there is neither in eternity.

So, what point am I trying to make here?  Well, the universe hasn't even come close to a single googol of years of existence and we humans live for what, 60 to 90 years, maybe a bit more if we're lucky?  Perhaps when we realize how truly short our life is, we will have a different attitude towards what's important now and what eternal life should mean to us.

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

~C.S. Lewis 

¹Carl Sagan (c. 1934 – 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator.  His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation.

²Hydrogen gas (H2) has a molar mass of 2g.  Molar mass of a substance is defined as the mass of 1 mole of that substance.  And by 1 mole it is meant a collection of 6.022*10²³ particles of that substance.  So number of moles of H2 are times 0.5 in this case.  And thus it means there are (6.022*10²³)*0.5 particles (here they are molecules) or (3.011*10²³) in 1g of H2.

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