It all ends tonight. Years of free mixed-martial arts programming will come to a sudden end when WEC 53 goes off your television tonight. There will be no other WEC shows to look forward to. That infamous blue mat will be no more, nor will that introduction with the tribal graphics and parchment overlay. Commentating gigs for Frank Mir and Stephan Bonnar are over, at least for the time being. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Well, it’s not quite the end.
In our lifetime, we won’t be able to witness the ultimate end of reality since it’s about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years away (that’s the estimated year by scientists, commas were left out in order to not make your computer have a nervous breakdown). That’s actually a googol of years and if you squeeze the entire history of the universe into the width of a dollar, a googol of years would give you a stack of money so high that it wouldn’t even fit in our universe (one hundred quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion light years high to be exact). From now until that incomprehensible time in the universe: WEC will cease to exist, Georges St. Pierre’s reign will come to an end, MMA will become the biggest sport on the planet (maybe) — and then the sun will eventually explode, our Milky Way galaxy will collide into the Andromeda galaxy and the cosmos will probably collapse. The impending crisis the universe faces is its ever-expanding nature. Stars will burn and entire galaxies will dissipate, leaving the universe into a carnivorous graveyard filled with dead planets and black holes. Eventually, black holes will consume other black holes and there will literally be nothing left but ‘space’. Wait a few more trillions of years and you will notice that even the stuff that ‘space’ is made out of will eventually disappear from existence, including photons. Even particles have a life, and when that ends (like everything else) it will ‘die’. This means that all light that was ever created from the start of the ‘Big Bang’ (or ‘God’s magic wand’ for all you republicans out there) will be extinguished. Everything that encompasses us will come to a total oblivion and there is no possible way for humans to stop this process. Darkness, a universe devoid of even a single atom. An infinity of nothingness. That is where we will all be (or won’t be) at one googol years from now.
Don’t start getting depressed folks, it’s not over yet.
According to theoretical physicists like Stephen Battersby, if we wait long enough in this boring period of our universe, hyper-rare quantum occurrences that happen perhaps once in a quadrillion years will become quite frequent (being that we’re facing infinity, and all). Scientists have already discovered that in a quantum vacuum, small particles will randomly pop into existence. Eventually in this oblivion of a universe that we found ourselves in, entire atoms will appear from no where. Give it a few googols of years and bits of objects will appear. Wait a few more googols of years and on the very rare occasion, stuff that existed in our universe prior to its demise will appear, like IKEA sofas, slabs of limestone rock and packets of used ketchup. According to physicist, Katherine Freese of Michigan University, in a long enough time span into infinity (which is incomprehensibly long), entire planets and stars will appear in this quantum vacuum and researchers of the University of Chicago even predict that an entire new Big Bang will happen in about 1 with 1,056 zeros behind it years.
The Doors are wrong. This may be the the end, but only for a short while (compared to that of the infinite, at least). Eventually, the WEC will return to this universe again. See it’s true, ‘WEC never die‘.
Sidenote, if any of you want to learn more about the way our planet and universe will eventually end, check out Exit Mundi, a collection of end-of-the world scenarios.
