This much is certain: The sun, like all stars, will one day die. Its demise will begin five billion years from now, when it starts running out of fuel. It will slowly bloat into a red giant, becoming over two hundred times larger than it is today and thousands of times more luminous. As it expands, it will consume nearby planets—including, most probably, our own. After devouring the planets it helped sustain, it too will die.
This cosmic fate—distant, inconceivable, and inevitable, all at once—occurs only three minutes into Melodysheep’s half-hour-long video, Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time. The viewer hears the voice of British physicist Brian Cox coolly narrate the end of life as we know it while the incendiary expanding fireball of the sun swallows up Earth. A counter on the bottom of the screen adds to the tension, moving exponentially through time by doubling every five seconds. The description next to the counter (“EARTH DESTROYED BY THE DYING SUN”) is chillingly matter-of-fact.
The effect of this demise coming so early in the video is unsettling, akin to Hitchcock killing off Janet Leigh’s character less than a third of the way through Psycho. What comes next, now that the top-billed star has met its end?
Quite a lot, it turns out. If Timelapse of the Future has any message, it’s this: the universe has only just begin. Cosmic milestones whizz by in dizzying fashion as the timelapse reaches trillions of trillions of years into the future: stars begin to die off, neutron stars collide, black holes swallow stray matter, atoms decay, and the universe cools into a void of nothingness. The computer-generated visuals are complemented by narration from some of the world’s foremost cosmologists, helping provide perspective for what are strange times ahead, indeed.
This is heady stuff, and not the kind of material you’d think would go viral on YouTube (The video currently sits at 7.5 million views). But MelodySheep, whose real name is John D. Boswell, has made a career out of remixing science and making it palatable for the masses. His first hits were catchy three-to-five-minute-long music videos that featured auto-tuned raps from scientists like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Feynman as they held forth on quantum physics, Mars, and our place in the cosmos. Boswell’s videos splice together from clips from science documentaries and lectures, and feature music and animations Boswell creates himself.
“That sense of wonder you have as a kid? It never goes away,” Boswell said in a 2016 talk. “It just needs to be rekindled in the right way. Dinosaurs and space are just as cool to adults as they are for kids.” Boswell sees his science videos as a way to “spark that wonder again in people it might have faded for.”
But he’s never made a video longer, or more cosmically out there, than Timelapse of the Future. Creating it required months of research into physical cosmology, where speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are legion, and often contradictory. Watching it requires a commitment that goes beyond the normal social media attention span, and a willingness to countenance our smallness in the face of long-lasting cosmic forces.
Boswell is surprised that the video has garnered millions of views. But he has a few ideas as to why it’s resonated.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
