In the early 1980s, John Sepkoski and David Raup, two University of Chicago paleontologists, reported evidence of periodic mass extinctions which eradicated upwards of 75 percent of all species every 26 million years. One theory accounting for this regularity is the postulated existence of a dwarf binary sister of our sun. Some of these collide with earth, filling its atmosphere with dust that blots out the sun for months, leading to global death. There are two rival theses about the ultimate fate of the universe, both originating from the Big Bang Theory. In other words, the death of the universe is predestined and inevitable, in 100 billion years the energy needed to sustain life anywhere in the universe would be so dispersed as to be unusable.
Death is nothing more than entropic disorder and life nothing more than entropy reduction.
This cosmological conception of time is only the most recent of a long line of speculations. Later, the Newtonian notion of time existing uniformly throughout the cosmos was to be overthrown by Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity . Currently Einstein's conception of time is being superceded by developments in quantum mechanics. As can be gathered, power comes to those able to predict natural events. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive of predictions cross-culturally in the ancient world involved the timing of the solar eclipse.