beka-tiddalik:

writing-prompt-s:

Give the reader a sense for how long eternity is.

Diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth. You’ve maybe seen what a diamond ring can do to glass. I know you’ve heard that diamonds are forever.

But there are minerals out there that are harder than diamond.  Lonsdaleite is sometimes formed when meteorites containing graphite hit Earth. Scientists reckon that Lonsdaleite is about 58% tougher than diamond when under stress. So that’s more than half as tough again compared to a diamond.

So, say that out there in space, there’s a giant ball of Lonsdaleite, and it’s big. It’s really, really big. Forget fitting multiple earths into this ball of Lonsdaleite, forget fitting in multiple suns, this ball of Lonsdaleite is big enough to fit the Milky Way, ten million times over.

Now imagine that there’s a kind of immortal spider that can survive in space. It’s a small spider. No bigger than the littlest fingernail on a baby’s hand. The spider is walking all over the Lonsdaleite ball, and as it does, minute amounts of wear occur on the surface of the ball.

By the time the Lonsdalite ball is the same size as the spider as big as a baby’s littlest fingernail, worn down slowly, gradually over millennia by the immortal spider walking on it, there are ten more waiting. There will always be another ten more waiting, billions of light years apart, each set of ten springing into existence during the wearing down of one of the Lonsdaleite balls that are ten million times bigger than the Milky Way. 

And there is only one spider.

That’s how eternity begins.