Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus starts with the statement “The world is everything that is the case”. I’ve never got far past that sentence, being diverted into pondering whether it’s a synthetic or analytic a-priori truth and crashing my operating system. Anyway, it serves to highlight the difficulty with the meaning of the word “case”.
It must take a long time to make a Universe. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, you might think it takes a long time to powerwash the front drive, but that’s just *peanuts* to making a Universe. Douglas managed it with his Hitchhiker Universe, and its now difficult to imagine there was a time when we did not know that Vogon poetry was among the worst in the Universe, that the way to travel vast interstellar distances is by using an infinite improbability drive, and that the answer to the untimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.
I’ve always been a big fan of end of the world fiction. I think it goes back to me reading ‘War of the Worlds’ when I was a kid, and seeing an early BBC adaptation of ‘Day of the Triffids’. It was repeated on a cable channel a few months ago, and although the walking plants looked exactly like large wood and rubber models, some of the images of deserted London still struck home. It seems every disaster movie now has to have that iconic image of an empty city, abandoned transport and a fluttering newspaper with the revealing headline.