Murphy’s Law and Eschatology — Connection?

Kiernan Dean-Hall
2 min readJun 11, 2021

It is often said the Murphy’s Law states “anything that can go wrong, will”. However, some things have not (at least so far) gone wrong. The sun has always risen (the “can” is debatable here), nuclear armageddon has not rampaged (it could have. Ask Stanislav Petrov), and though much is going wrong with environmental catastrophe much is reversible/manageable, and these issues are not a matter of “can” coming to fruition, but rather poor decision making.

Does Murphy’s Law apply to the end of the world? I don’t think it nessessarily does. Murphy’s Law seems to imply some sort of cosmic certainty, and I believe that we have more power to overcome obstacles than to fall to cosmic probability that “x will occur by t →∞”.

In the german TV series Dark (minimal spoilers), various characters work tirelessly to achieve certain goals, but find themselves stuck in an infinite loop which resets itself. Depending on one’s goals, there are many things that could go wrong, and it seems that for every character these possibilities manifest as reality, a cosmic certainty that will frustrate all. In the end however, it turns out that there exists a way outside this infinite loop in such a way that all who were frustrated by it, no longer have an issues with it (for those who know the final ending, there is obviously a lot to unpack there).

The point however, is that Murphy’s Law did not apply during the final end (which comes after cycles of nuclear disaster) which suggests to me that Murphy’s Law holds no power over the end of all things, only we do.

--

--

Kiernan Dean-Hall

2021 — A year in eschatology. The Apocalypse remains every Friday