Religions and physicists alike have imagined how everything ends
Every culture seems to wonder how the story finishes. Abrahamic faiths picture history moving in a line toward redemption, Indian traditions see ages turning in cycles, and cosmologists debate a Big Freeze or a Big Rip. The study of these last things, eschatology, takes its name from the Greek word for last.
The English word appeared around 1844, and the Oxford English Dictionary ties it to death, judgment and the final destiny of souls and humankind. Yet the questions are ancient. Zoroastrianism holds one of the oldest recorded visions, with a fully developed end-time doctrine by about 500 BCE. It teaches that a good creation was spoiled by evil and will finally be restored in a renovation called Frashokereti, when a saviour figure raises the dead, humanity speaks one language with no borders, and bodies grow so light they cast no shadow. Each person's fate depends on the sum of their thoughts, words and deeds.
Jewish tradition speaks of the end of days: a return of exiles, restoration of the House of David, and a Messiah who ushers in an age of justice and peace. Isaiah's image of swords beaten into ploughshares captures that hope. Some Kabbalists linked the seven days of creation to seven millennia, making the seventh the age of rest. Christian thought centres on the Second Coming of Christ, and interpreters read the Book of Revelation in contrasting ways, some as prophecy still to come, others as describing events of the first century.
Indian religions tend toward cycles of decay and renewal. In Hinduism, Kalki, the last incarnation of Vishnu, arrives on a white horse to close the current dark age, after which the world begins again. Belief that the end is close, known as apocalypticism, has surfaced repeatedly among both mainstream believers and smaller movements.
Science entered the conversation once 18th-century thinkers grasped deep time and began estimating Earth's age. Cosmologists now weigh possible fates for the universe: a Big Crunch collapsing inward, a Big Bounce restarting it, a Big Rip tearing it apart, or a slow heat death. Closer to home, researchers study global catastrophic risks that could threaten human survival.
Source: Eschatology
