Did The Past Really Happen?

A dog’s grave can be erased by a highway—and that small, human-scale loss points to a bigger question: how can anyone be sure the past happened, and how will future people interpret what remains? The story begins with Terry, the real dog who played Toto in The Wizard of Oz. After Terry died in 1945, her owner and trainer Carl Spitz buried her on his Los Angeles ranch. In 1958, the Ventura Highway was built through her grave, disturbing her remains so thoroughly that they were never recovered. A memorial later went up in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but because Terry’s body isn’t there, it’s a cenotaph—an empty tomb—highlighting how easily “evidence” can be displaced, destroyed, or misread.

That fragility of records becomes a springboard to a philosophical and scientific problem: proving that the past is real, not just the product of a universe that “popped in” moments ago. The transcript introduces Last Thursdayism, the belief that the universe was created last Thursday with memories, photos, and records already in place. It has no followers or rituals, but it’s difficult to disprove not because it’s true, but because it’s not falsifiable: any counterevidence can be explained away as part of the same last-Thursday creation scenario. That puts it outside standard scientific testing, pushing it toward philosophy—where “razors” like Occam’s Razor help prefer explanations that require fewer special assumptions.

From there, the discussion pivots to what can and can’t be tested about time itself. Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword is invoked as a rule: if something can’t be settled by experiment, it isn’t worth debating. Since the past can’t be put into control groups or revisited with time machines, future archaeologists will inevitably reconstruct it from incomplete traces. Even if they know far more about medicine, exoplanets, and physics, they’ll likely know less about individuals than people assume—because names, stories, and cultural context are vulnerable to forgetting, misinterpretation, and physical destruction.

The transcript then lands on a different kind of “inevitability”: not whether the past happened, but what people leave behind in the physical universe. It argues that the most certain legacy is thermodynamic. Turning off lights doesn’t change the total energy in the universe; it changes how energy is distributed and used. More broadly, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says energy tends to spread out unless hindered, increasing entropy—often mislabeled as “disorder.” A shuffled deck of cards may look messier, but it doesn’t necessarily raise the deck’s entropy; the real increase comes from the work required to shuffle, which disperses energy into heat and motion. Over a lifetime, that means every action contributes to a net rise in entropy that can’t be undone. History may forget individuals, but the universe can’t erase the entropy added. The endgame is “heat death,” an eventual thermodynamic equilibrium where nothing can meaningfully change—estimated on the order of 8 googol years. Even inactivity is reframed: slowness doesn’t stop entropy’s march, but it slightly reduces how much energy dispersal a person contributes, theoretically extending the universe’s timeline by a vanishing amount.