The Hindu Business Line : Death and obliteration

One hundred years ago, in the cold wastes of Siberia, the sky was suddenly lit up by a blinding flash which was followed by some milliseconds of eternity. When the momentary cataclysm was over, the landscape had changed beyond recognition. It is as though a fiery, magic wand had descended on Earth and, at the bidding of some distant magician, had altered the terrestrial scene in a matter of moments.

Later reports on the event, which took place precisely on June 30, 1908, said “a shock wave with the power of a thousand atomic bombs (had) flattened 80 million trees in a swathe (extending) more than 2,000 square kilometres”. It is said that “the fireball was so great that, a day later, Londoners could read their newspapers under the night sky”.

What was it that hit the planet on so mammoth a scale a century ago. Was it a comet, an asteroid, or was it as, as has been claimed, the release, all of a sudden, of millions of tones of methane-rich gases from deep within the Earth’s crust?

No answers yet

The answer is not yet known mainly because no extra-terrestrial evidence at the “impact site” has been found. But this does not mean that a visitor from outer space did not hit our planet on that fateful day last century. It may simply be a case of evidence not yet being discovered because, according to scientists, such impacts “occur with an average frequency from one in 200 years to one in 1,000 years”.

Let us now shift to Mars for another similar event the scale of which, however, was much larger, in fact so much larger that the shape of the planet was changed forever by it. Mars, it is said, has a strange shape: it is lopsided, “with a basin in one hemisphere and high terrain in the other”. According to scientists, this was the result of a hit by a comet or an asteroid which carved out a crater 5,200 miles across and 6,500 miles long, “the size of the combined land mass of Asia, Europe and Australia”.

Describing the impact as perhaps the largest one ever discovered anywhere till now in our solar system, scientists estimate that the event probably took place about four billion years ago when “big objects often smashed into one another”. That the frequency of such events has been reduced drastically perhaps tells us that the wayward offenders crisscrossing each other’s paths and creating traffic problems of a sort have gone out of the solar system and are now, perhaps, trillions and trillions and trillions of miles away from us, wandering about worlds unknown.

Words into nothingness

We cannot imagine or comprehend such distances, but the fact remains that the statement relates to something which is as real as, say, the local grocer being five minutes away or, come to think of it, the keyboard into which this piece is being punched into.

It is perhaps a bit like imagining what Death is all about. How can worlds collapse into nothingness? What is the meaning of words like Forever and Eternity? Is Life eternal? In fact, what is Life? Is our Universe real, in the true sense of the term? Does it have an end, a conclusion?

Where, at this very moment, is my friend Alok, who died early one morning a couple of days ago? He had a view on Life, on people, on the sensations he felt. Has all that been reduced to Zero? What, in fact, is Zero, if there is no end or a beginning to Existence?

RANABIR RAY CHOUDHURY

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