Welcome back everyone, and welcome to the last week of our course. And so today we ask the big question. What is the Origin and Fate, in particular the fate, of the Universe. So this is a really old question, in fact it's probably one the oldest questions that we have. Every culture has its creation story, its creation myth. And these questions always ask, where did we come from? And you know, where are we going, right? Where is, what is humanity's place in the universe but more important, where did the universe originate from? And so every culture and religion has one of these stories and those stories are usually built from ideas that mirror the kind of geography that you're experiencing, the kind of conditions you're experiencing. So you know, desert cultures tend to produce sort of deserty kinds of stories. And you know, rich tropical cultures tend to produce stories that have you know, reflect the kind of lives that they're living. So but there's also an equally interesting question which is, you know will the universe last for ever? How does the universe end. So that's really where we're headed towards. But in the process we're going to have to ask, ask the question of how did the universe begin. So it's interesting you know, we're all familiar with in the West, with this story, the Biblical story of Genesis, in the beginning God created the universe. You know, let there be light, et cetera. So you know, we're very much familiar with that one. But it's important to understand that these different versions of the creation story have they're different, imaginative responses to this question. So, in the West we have this idea that there was nothing, and then there was light. And the universe began. But for example in the Hindu cosmology, the universe is an endless cycle of birth and death. So for example, the god Indra speaking in the Brahma Vaivarta Purana is, speaks, thinks of himself as being the supreme deity but then is sort of, you know, schooled out of that. Where you know, one of the characters says, out of the pore of the body of Vishnu, a universe bubbles and breaks. Will you presume to count them? Will you calculate the gods in all those worlds, the worlds presents and the worlds past? So, this endless cycle of universes is something that the, the Hindu cosmology understood and remarkably, you know, there's some ideas in modern cosmology that say oh yeah there's actually a cyclical universe. So, you know, there was an imaginitive response to this question that dates back to our beginnings as culture, and then there's the scientific response and the scientific response also pulls from the imagination, but of course it has to work with the data. And that's what makes cosmology, scientific cosmology, different from the narratives, the creation narratives, from myth and religion. And so what we're going to look at this this week, is the scientific narrative of cosmology and how we believe why, or why and how we believe that this narrative actually has you know, a great deal of truth to it. so, let us go on from there. So the question really that we're interested in, we're going to be asking, are going to be, how did the universe begin, what is the evolution of the universe, and how do we think the universe is going to end. [BLANK_AUDIO]
