Are you ready for Eternity?

Anton Chekhov in 'The Three Sisters' (Tri sestry), 1901: "Well, maybe we’ll fly in balloons, the cut of jackets will be different, we’ll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it - I don’t know. But life will be the same - difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They’ll still be scared of death, and won’t want to die.”

महाभारत १/१/२४७: कालमूलमिदं सर्व भावाभावौ सुखासुखे॥

(Mahabharat 1/1/247: Living and death, happiness and sadness all originate in time.)

महाभारत १२/२२७/५६: कालेनाभ्याहताः सर्वे कालो हि बलवत्तरः॥

(Mahabharat 12/227/56: Time has killed all. Time is the most powerful.)

Simone Weil:

“All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.”

Roger Penrose:

"So this means that in a sense, the present past and future are out there, and that also gives us a very deterministic view of the world. We have no control of what happens in the future because its all laid out. I think the trouble that people have with this idea is that you think the future is under your control, to some degree, and so this means that if the future's laid out then in a sense its not under your control.

The question of the passage of time is something the scientists have rather set aside, and taking the view that its not really physics, it's a subjective issue; and subjective questions are not part of science. Now when you start talking about phenomena like one's own perception of the passage of time, then that is a subjective thing. And that's almost a taboo subject for science because it's subjective. The physical world at least according to Relativity, is out there, and there is no flow of time, it's just there; whereas our feeling (we have this feeling of the passage of time) are intimately connected to our perceptions."


Artist: Robert J Day, The New Yorker, December 4 1943

Mark Twain has tried to answer the question:

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."