The universe doesn't end as such, but keeps fading away, entropy ever converging on zero or whatever background energy / quantum foam. — jorndoe

Should we not believe in God since nothing lasts?
Well, if nothing lasts then of what our purpose past?

Is a purpose really required, so constructive,
Or would that really be quite restrictive?

No realm could really be special or sent,
Its becoming being of some specific intent,
For all has arrived as a causeless non-precedent.

Is there anything wrong with the freedom to be,
Anywhere, any how, or any time during eternity?

Should we rail against the law of entropy—
The ‘heat death’ of thermodynamic energy,
The second of its final laws, you see,
Because it would destroy all of history?

There are so many ways for disorder to be
Than any one ordered state specifically.
Would even a heaven on Earth become a misery
If as it might, contain no more novelty?
Must there be an end to our revelry?

Can’t we at least hibernate eternally?
Won’t all matter too last eternally?

Will Shakespeare’s works live on, paternally?
Is this not a Wagnerian struggle for eternity?

Science Can Settle Whether a Last Day
Is Ever Going to Come this Way

Only a decade or so ago, with consternation,
We discovered the universe’s acceleration,
Its expansion even increasing, onto a thin disaster,
The galaxies getting further away ever faster—
Then one last snapshot taken, for all to remember.

The accelerating expansion of the universe’s rafters
Means that the universe will cool even ever faster;
So, any rare forms of the future’s life prolongers
Will have to keep themselves ever more cooler,
Think more slowly, and hibernate ever longer.

One day even the protons will fade away,
Leaving but dark matter, electrons, and positrons.

I like that thought though, at the end of the universe there's a to-do list that will never get done.

The whole, including time, cannot have an end, as I argued in this thread.

Part of the reason why I have not written more in the thread which I created is because I do see the 'end' of time as problematic. It would require stepping outside of the space-time level of existence, which would require going beyond physicality.

One significant aspect is the concept of time's arrow in this. There is the possibility of its reversability; this has been explored by some writers, including the novelist Martin Amis. However, the idea of the reversability of time remains a thought experiment, as does the idea of time ending.

Part of the reason why I have not written more in the thread which I created is because I do see the 'end' of time as problematic. — Jack Cummins

I explained why the spacetime cannot have an end in that thread as well, here.

Somehow, I missed your post, but it makes an important point about the unknown. What came before the 'big bang' or after any 'end' remains unknown. That is why it is hard to know for certain whether linearity of time is part of larger cycles or cycles as part of a linear plan. I am inclined to the picture of the cyclical but certainty of this may stretch beyond the limits of human epistemology.

this may stretch beyond the limits of human epistemology. — Jack Cummins

The Waves of the Ancient Swells
Of Time’s Eroding Swells
Swept Ever On…

As Time, now hoary with age,
Yet hurled forth its ashen change,
The charge ever san, pale and colorless,
That force born to summon decay, so endless,
‘Gainst Nature’s Universe, every day.

Time and time again, Time fed all upon,
In its bloodless, white, and waxen way,
But our everlasting rose would not fade,

Its luster even brightening by the day,
Ever unsuccumbing to the sickly, peakèd
State draining drawn Earth’s life away.
 Entropic seas yet denude the mountains,

Yet our enduring flower never-endingly
Has cast Deathly Time aside, as now,
Ceaselessly somehow thriving on
Toward that which is the near imperishable,

As beauty’s flame e’er inextinguishable,
Forever celebrated as immutable,
Gaining a seemingly perpetual permanence
From the undying love of this glorious dance.

Yet, everything was moving apart, cooling off,
The big slowdown not really so very far off;
Ultimately, even the black holes of late
And the lightless planets would dissipate.

The primordial soup once so rich and hearty
Was now a thin gruel that couldn’t serve the party.

One day, every particle will be moving away
From every other particle, so much out of the way
That they won’t even be able to see one another;
Thus, for all intents motion will have ceased forever.

I like the way in which you personify or anthromorphise time, especially as all forms of existence are dependent upon it. Time may be a dimension, or an illusory phenomenon, because it is matter or nature which changes. Yet, without it, nothing in the material sense, could exist.

Of course, time could appear to have ceased to exist but may remain dormant. In that respect, it may be one, if not primary, archetype, of all forms of existence.

What came before the 'big bang' or after any 'end' remains unknown. — Jack Cummins

There is no time before time began, or after time ends, by definition. It's not that it's unknown, it's that there can be no such thing; these are limits to being such that 'before' and 'after' do not apply. There is nothing to know or not know.

Of course if you take a God's eye view - the view from eternity - then you can say "Before Abraham was, I am." That is, all times are present to God, and all places are here; the whole universe of spacetime is in His hand. But this is poetic talk that no one understands.

I don't think time is something which has properties. It is a situation of 'everything else', individually, in relation to all of those other 'else's (from each perspective).

Seems inapt for discussion other than as a relation between objects. I don't think, for instance, imagination engages time other than as a relation to the world going on outside the mind imagining whatever..

I like the way in which you personify or anthromorphise time, especially as all forms of existence are dependent upon it. — Jack Cummins

Our spurt of life followed by an infinite stretch
Of dark equilibrium was but the briefest sketch—
A warm and fuzzy stage, so interestingly active,
Whose time relatively was but infinitesimive.

Yet we were there in all our glory,
For whenever else could we have been?
In the future, uncounted societies of
Overlapping minds accumulate, with love,

In island redoubts, their preserved data burning
With a vital remembrance, in which, returning,
The past is the present and future, they all reliving
The data, even animating it, and ever altering.

Without any new enrichments, the present and future
Reprise the past in this retreat from external nature.
Their candles would have been near invisible to us—
They enduring by diminishing so as not to exhaust.

They made few new memories, a kind of blind sight,
For whatever realities had ever existed out of sight
Of their own mental structures were now fractured,
And thus not so different from those manufactured.

The Penultimate Part of the Final Dark

An Escalating One-Way Trip
From a Fluke to Oblivion

The majority of the energy
Of the universe is dark today,
Although everything else passes
Through it in every way.

It’s everywhere,
Having a component
That repels its own state,
Which cause the expansion of
The universe to much accelerate.

Dark Energy Matters: The Escalation

We’re on a one way trip from a quantum fluke,
That maximal energy within old Planck’s nook,
Heading toward the oblivion of sparse expansion—
All that we ever loved and knew going to extinction.

They sent message of early warnings to some,
In those castles of illusion, yes, many a one—
That they would face the decay, not so far away,
Of the heavy particles—the ‘proton pause’, one day.

No self-assembled granularity can endure
Forever but must return to the substructure,
And so the lives must all transition, it seems,
From heavier to much lighter regimes…

Although this too would not be permanent—
All destined to be swallowed by the firmament.

We have often asked why some space exists,
Why it permits the countless to briefly persist
On Mother Earth, nourished under Father Sky—
All of those finite sparks that light and die.

There were those who endlessly debated
Whether to live in their virtuals unabated
Or to press forwards and outwards, in delirium,

To seek out new localities in the mysterium,
But the pauses of the heavy particles continued,
And so there was nowhere to go for the retinued.

Yep, it could be a circular thing. But I think it's impossible to find evidence for it that may corroborate the theory - hence leaving us in the same place.

It was much simpler once, in those days of old
When we thought that universes didn’t go cold,
But that they expanded and then collapsed,
Still destroying all, yet ever giving more to last.

And well before that, once upon a storied time,
We simply made it all up, with tales and rhyme,
In place of any physical observations,
Such as through revealing experimentations.

The past was now a reef of dead accumulation,
A graveyard of various useless information,
Which despite its splendorous beauty
Could not provide for a novel futurity.

The last one of us, born of the sparkness,
Kept a window to the outer darkness…

She looked out from a once brightly
Colored and sparkling inner reality
Into the dark abyss…

There was nothing out there,
All being so lonely and bare—
No more singing of life’s song,
For now everything was gone.

That is, all times are present to God, and all places are here; the whole universe of spacetime is in His hand. But this is poetic talk that no one understands. — unenlightened

The Final Epilog

There could not have been any specific time,
One that was privileged over any other chime,
Nor any special place, nor any certain form
Arising out of the necessarily causeless realm.

Even the locally specific dates and places past
Of the events’ novel memoirs couldn’t last,
They being writ on water, with no meaning vast,
Disappearing in significance so very fast,
Since it’s only the universals that last.

The protons were now gone from the show,
Having decayed so very long ago
Into positrons—ever canceling the electrons,
And emitting the fleeing light of photons,
There being of course an equal amount
Of protons and electrons in the count.

And of course along with all the protons
Went all of the atomic elements—the end,
All of their forms becoming myth and legend,
As they were still dreamt in night dreams,
Those forms that we once had, so it seemed.

She, as many of a luckily adaptable kind,
Had long since lightened and lighted her mind,
With the dwindling electrons and precious photons—
That beginning light of ancient times growing wan.

Ours had been the first line in the universe,
One that had become sentient, with proto-man first,
The rest of the Cosmos being but a colossal waste,
A foreboding, harsh, and very dangerous place.

She was now the only one left,
Having outlived all of the rest.
The universe was near crumbling away,
Having run out of space, time, and all its sway.

She was dispersing, melting, into the vacuum, lone,
But she held on for another thousand years, alone,
And then she too was gone,
Being the last of the hominid’s song,

Of all that was sapient: the Magnificat,
The composition of Earth’s sweet plot,
The greatest symphony that was ever sown,
It now having faded into the unknown.

From near nothingness our forms became,
And into the same must go our remains.

If the unknown be such, though it’s otherwise;
But if it’s yet called ‘unknown’ then the reply
Is still for sure that we’re free to be, anywise.

If you’ve shed a tear reading here
For both the far and the near and dear
It won’t make their graves green again,
But it’s possible that life could begin again…

Be of Good Cheer-—the sullen Month will die,
And a young Moon requite us by and by:
Look how the Old one meagre, bent, and wan
With Age and Fast, is fainting from the Sky!
(Omar)

If there is no human mind, then there is no time. Time will end, if the last human dies on the earth.

This is an interesting questionable area, whether time is a concept in the mind, or an independent aspect of existence. Time is about the experience of past, present and future, with 'now' being central as Eckhart Tolle argues. There is also the experience of 'time's arrow'. This is based on observation by human observers, but it is also based on changes in nature, including ageing and decay. These are a phenomenal aspect of the human mind, in relation to change, but it may be a grave mistake to reduce these to the human mind completely.

I don't think it was a reduction of any sort. When you reduce something, you make it less or simpler. I didn't make anything less or simpler in the point.

My point was to stress the place where we find the existence of time. And it is not any where in the world, or indeed any physical or material objects which is called time. But time exists in our perception when we notice the changes in the world which happens in regular manner e.g. the Sun sets and rises, the change of seasons, births and deaths of people ... etc.

This is an interesting questionable area, whether time is a concept in the mind, or an independent aspect of existence. — Jack Cummins

The Eternal Return

Behind the Veil, being that which e’er thrives,
The Eternal IS has ever been alive,
For that which hath no onset cannot die,
Nor a point from which to impart its Why.

Some time it needed to learn Everything for,
And now well knows how these bubbles to pour,
Of existence, in some like universe,
As those that wrote your poem and mine, every verse.

So, as thus, thou lives on yester’s credit line
In nowhere’s midst, now in this life of thine,
As of its bowl your cup of brew was mixed
Into the state of being that’s called “mine”.

Yet worry you that this Cosmos is the last,
That the likes of us will become the past,
Space wondering whither whence we went
After the last of us her life has spent?

The Eternal Saki has thus formed
Trillions of baubles like ours, and will form,
Forevermore—the comings and passings
Of which it ever emits to immerse
Of those universal bubbles blown and burst.

So fear not that a debit close your
Account and mine, knowing the like no more;
The Eternal Cycle from its pot has pour’d
Zillions of bubbles like ours, and will pour.

Our fruits are of a universal seed
As the yield of All possibility treed,
And siblings elsewhere in the entropic sea
Will also be born of such probability.

When You and I behind the cloak are past
But the long while the next universe shall last,
Which of one’s approach and departure the All grasps
As might the sea’s self heed a pebble cast.

I do realise that you were not trying to be reductive in a minimising or reductive way. The argument which you develop is similar to ideas developed by Michael Frayn in 'The Human Touch', which looks at the significance of human consciousness in the cosmos. It looks at phenomenological aspects of time and space. It also goes on to suggest that there is a linguistic aspect of this, with the human grasp of concepts; including space and time.

In a way, it could be argued that time ends for each individual when life ends. Death involves the question of existence outside of space and time. Its possibility is plausible in a idealist perspective, especially in esoteric spiritual ones.

The concept of eternity and the idea I'd eternal recurrence are interesting in relation to the question of how will time end? It is a perspective in a number of philosophies, significant notably in Nietzsche's ideas. I understand that he took the idea literally initially. This involved repeated births and deaths, with only small changes. Later, he saw the the concept of eternal recurrence as being symbolic mainly.

The idea of eternity, like infinity, conveys the way in which time and space are beyond human measurements. It is hard to know where anything starts and ends definitively. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang and about past and future universes. There is no reason to suggest that they are impossible. Starting and ending are not absolutes necessarily.

I tend to agree with your cyclical reading of the universe, so theoretically the only points where time would "end" would be in the infinite singularity between the formation of realities. Like how the covers of a book mark its beginning and end, but the row of books stretches on into the distance.

Death involves the question of existence outside of space and time. — Jack Cummins

I have been thinking hard on the topic i.e. existence outside of space and time. Wouldn't it be a contradiction? Existence outside space and time would be non-existence or unperceived existence. Would it be meaningful object in ontological and logical sense?

I have thought about how time began in my world. There was no such thing called time in my own world when I was a child. Time didn't exist at all in my world. It was only when I went to school, I had to learn how to read time because teacher kept on teaching us how to read time.

When I learnt how to tell time from the watches and clocks, I knew keeping time was important in daily life and survival because everyone was moving and doing things around the time table. That is how time began to emerge in my little world from my reflection.

Now I have been inclined to believe time doesn't exist. Time is one of the worldly contract between folks that has been in force for thousands of years which started by a some bloke who were powerful in the ancient time somewhere.

The world might decided to call it off, and start new time system from tomorrow starting year 0, if they wanted to by another some powerful bloke who has power to do so. There are numerous different timing systems in use by different countries even now e.g Chinese Lunar calendar, Japanese royal family based calendar ... etc.

Its possibility is plausible in a idealist perspective, especially in esoteric spiritual ones. — Jack Cummins

Esoterically and spiritually of course even gods and after life and heaven and hell all exist. But it is another realm of thoughts or world if you like. In philosophical analysis, not sure if they are thought of valid existence.

Not denying the existence of time reading system such as the western solar based 12 month 365 days a year 24 hr in a day what have you, as some sort of civil contract. Of course they do exist, and we use them in daily life. But time itself as some sort of being or existence is a daft illusion propelled by SF or the silly physicists.