Then comes Rand's age, the 3rd age. After Tarmon Gaidon, the 4th age begins. This is the age from which some of those quotes at the end of the WoT books come. We believe that somehow, during or after the last battle, the True Source could be once again sealed away from the world, so we can no longer touch it. This event would be the beginning of the 4th age, an age without the One Power, as ours is. Who knows what the 5th and 6th ages will be like, for they are surely thousands or millions of years in the future. But we believe that the 7th age lasts billions of years, as the 1st age does. During this age, our solar system becomes extinct, possibly humanity with it, and the once expanding universe begins to contract (a possible future, according to scientific theory), leading to the end of the universe as we know it, in an event called the Big Crunch (a 2nd grader named it???), where the universe will once again become a single point of infinite energy.

This will signal the end of the 7th age. At that instant, the universe will be reborn in another Big Bang, and the 1st Age starts all over again. Nice theory, eh? of course, there's little evidence to support it in the books, but it makes sense, I think. It also explains why, by freak chance, we never discover inventions from our future that could have somehow survived the turning of the Wheel, and why cars or computer chips or nuke bombs and radioactive waste from our age don't survive when our age comes again by the turning of the Wheel.