It’s always possible that one of these massive stars will reach the end of their lives at any moment, going supernova and taking out a large portion of one of these major internal structures that make up the Eagle Nebula. As it stands right now, however, it looks like evaporation, not a cataclysmic explosion, is the cause of the changes going on in the nebula right now. Unless there’s a catastrophe in the near future, it will be the slow process of evaporation that dominates, eventually blowing the gas off and revealing the newborn stars within. The Pillars of Creation won’t be around forever, but all signs point to them still being there today. They haven’t been destroyed, and as the light continues to arrive over the next thousands of years, we’ll see them shrink only slowly, likely for hundreds of thousands of years to come.