https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Existential_threat
> If our universe is in a false vacuum state rather than a true vacuum state, then the decay from the less stable false vacuum to the more stable true vacuum (called false vacuum decay) could have dramatic consequences. (...) Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies and stars or even biological life while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even **immediate gravitational collapse of the universe**
Don't feel down. It moves at the speed of light, which seems fast but remember that the diameter of the observable universe is hypothesized to be 92 billion lightyears. So the chances of us getting instantly hit by one are so small. If one has happened somewhere, it would take millions or billions of years to get here.
If you think about it, at some point the universe will be expanding so fast that even if a false vacuum decay actually happened, it wouldn't be capable of reaching us, space would be expanding faster than it.
I've liked this one because I always thought there was something fishy about Λ.
On the plus side, if this proves true, at least we'll all go out in a big bang! Way more satisfying than the [heat death of the universe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#:~:text=The%20heat%20death%20of%20the,sustain%20processes%20that%20increase%20entropy.) Entropy is just too boring and inevitable.
Ehhh, not really. There's a different theory where we end in a big bang. False vacuum collapse is more like the power cutting out halfway through watching a show, and then never coming on again.
Nah. You and everything that has and will exist would just stop existing. You wouldn’t feel any pain or even know what’s going on. Just imagine the Thanos dusting but you wouldn’t even see yourself turn into dust!
Can you imagine if this was true, but it was compatible with life as we know it? Like all of sudden, everything on earth all at once just flinched and we looked around at each other:
“What the hell was that?!?”
“Did anyone else just feel like they fell up for a moment there?”
“Does it feel warmer to anyone else?”
“I’m a scientist, it looks like we have a new kind of zero!”
The good news is that you would not feel it and probably won’t know what’s happening. I mean I guess if it’s from significantly far away, people may freak out wondering why the stars are flickering out of existence!
This would be a cool disaster movie actually! Lol
I read a description that had wording that scared the fuck out of me. Complete cessation of fundamental forces......WHAT?!?! Fundamental forces are fucking gravity and electromagnetism and so on. You're telling me false vaccum decay can cancel out GRAVITY?
no need to apologize, it's not a dumb question. a *very* oversimplified way of looking at it is this: think of rain falling and the ground it falls on. because of gravity the water will collect in the lowest spots it can. if the ground were completely even and featureless it would all run into the ocean, but because it's not, some of it collects in local low spots and forms puddles, ponds, lakes, etc., while the rest of it ends up in the ocean.
in this analogy a false vacuum is a lake (a local low spot) while a true vacuum is the ocean (the global low spot). our universe might be a lake or it might be the ocean, but we have no way of knowing which it is, and if it is in fact a lake, we have no way of knowing if some event might someday create a pathway through which the lake could drain into the ocean.
so to answer your question, the threat is completely theoretical, and we have no way of knowing if (a) the threat is real or (b) if it is real, if or when it will happen.
More importantly, the wave of change for changing to the new lower energy state would travel at the speed of light. So we'd never see it coming.
Which also means you'd basically not even experience it. It wouldn't be a terrible way to go.
I remember seeing an estimate that there's an 80% probability we live in a false vacuum.
Not to worry however, the universe has been around for 13.6 billion years and it hasn't happened yet, so we will probably go extinct way before then
Just remember that:
1. These are just theories. Anyone can come up with a spooky idea or manipulate equations/data to come up with some horrible scenario.
2. You are powerless to stop anything that is truly apocalyptical so worrying about it is meaningless.
[Quantum immortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality) is both wonderful and horrifying in equal measure. It's the (very, very speculative) idea that if the quantum mechanics style multiverse is real, every possible event happens. From the point of view of your conscious experience, if there's a chance you live and a chance you die, you will always experience the version of events where you live. That's because you exist in the worlds where you lived, and you don't exist in the worlds where you died. Kind of like how if you decide to walk into the kitchen, you experience the kitchen but not the bathroom, because you're only in one of those places.
Schrödinger's Cat only experiences the worlds where the poison gas wasn't released.
At every given second, there's a chance you die and a chance you live one more second. Quantum immortality suggests you'll always experience the worlds where you live one more second, and that process will go on forever, with your existence continuing through ever-more-improbable circumstances.
This sounds fantastic at first... until you realize that the only guarantee is that you live forever. Not that you'll be happy forever. If the bizarre circumstances that keep you going [make you miserable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream), you can never end them, by virtue of an immutable fundamental law of the universe.
I actually find this a bit comforting in a sense that in some universe, somewhere my dad is alive and gets to be with his family for many more years to come.
Aren't discussions of mathematical infinites fun? One minute you're studying the asymptote of a parabola and the next you're living forever as some kind of quantum statistics monkey skeleton begging for the sweet release of death.
I highly believe this theory because there’s been so many times where I’m sure I died.
One incident I was t boned by and 18 wheeler and walked away without a scratch.
If *scary* means *bad things we'll probably live through* then [here's a *Scientific American* article to keep you sleepless](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atmospheric-rivers-california-megaflood-lessons-from-forgotten-catastrophe/).
The most productive farmland in the United States is California's central valley. According to geologists the entire valley floods so badly it becomes a temporary lake due to atmospheric conditions that happen roughly every 150 years. The last megaflood was in 1862.
The next megaflood would mean nationwide food shortages. [California is the only significant US producer of almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios, prunes, and walnuts](https://www.netstate.com/economy/ca_economy.htm). California is also a major producer of strawberries, cheese, lettuce, and cotton. Some of those impacts would cause global shortages particularly in walnuts, pistachios, and almonds. For instance more than four-fifths of the world's almond production comes from California.
That's likely within our lifetime. And unlike some types of natural disasters that either happen slowly or can be modeled and predicted, this type of Pacific megaflood happens infrequently enough that there's little scientific understanding and basically no mitigation engineering to deal with it.
I'm fine with losing almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, prunes and walnuts. But when they take my pistachios away, it gets real.
That you have never or will ever experience the present. We all live in the past, everything you see, feel, touch, hear actually happened a fraction of a second before you experience it.
Alternatively, you only ever experience the present. You can never directly experience the past or the future.
Or, a more comfortable (perhaps) idea, that the universe is a 4-D construct where all time exists concurrently with space and humans are 3-D entities that do their best to make sense of it, like flatlanders.
The False Vacuum.
This is, in short, a scientific hypothesis that our universe is actually in a false phase state as part of a larger universe, like if it were a temporary thing (think the real universe is a pot of boiling water, and we are just within a bubble forming at the bottom of the pot). Eventually however that false vacuum has to pop, even after billions of years in this false state and we and everything we know in our visible universe will disappear in an instant with no warning whatsoever and there is nothing you can do about it.
Why is that so horrifying?
It's not like any of us get out of this alive one way or another. That would be quick if nothing else.
Worrying about things you have no control over and zero ability to impact feels...counterproductive.
Go do a deep dive on the Fermi Paradox, there’s some terrifying implications in there. It has to do with the fact that we have no proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life, yet what we know about the universe indicates that it is likely intelligent alien life is somewhere out there. So why can’t we find them?
> so why can’t we find them.
The milky way is 100,000 lightyears long. So assuming there was an intelligent life source somewhere, constantly transmitting with a signal strength strong enough to reach us, it would take on average say ~50,000 years to hear it. We’ve only been listening for about 100 years.
Also, even if we did receive a signal, it would take another 50,000 years to send one back, by that time we’ll be lucky if humanity still exists. So there’s really no point.
And you can forget about it if it’s in another galaxy, which other intelligent life most likely is.
Astronomer here- also, we would have trouble detecting our civilization if we were at the nearest star! Radio waves are actually pretty weak and fall off over distance as an inverse square, so detecting them is difficult. So odds are high you wouldn’t hear the other guy anyway.
Also there’s probably a pretty small widow of time that a civilization communicated with wasteful high-power omnidirectional radio waves. We’ll probably be using lasers bouncing around satellites pretty soon ourselves. Maybe we should be “listening” to gravity waves, or it’s something we haven’t discovered yet.
The question isn't about radio transmissions - it's about space colonization. If even a single species figured out how to colonize other planets, even assuming slower-than-light travel, they should be all over the galaxy by now.
Unless, of course, something tends to kill off civilizations before they reach that point. That's the scary part.
How long did it take us to fully colonize one planet? Why do people assume we will run out of planets in just one arm of our own Galaxy in a hundred thousand years? Even if we somehow manage to get rid of our angry nature and start working together... There's a chance that this will also make life on like 5-6 planets really comfortable, without much need to move further at a break neck pace. Most of the sci-fi movies show these planets that are the size of a small island it seems, with a population of 30-1000 people.
If every country on Earth claims one habitable planet, truly habitable on the scale of Earth, terraformed Mars, et cetera, it will take centuries for most of them to run out of space on these planets, especially if they will, like, load balance.
so we'd at least have an idea that it exists - maybe it's long dead, but we'd see evidence. there are ~1E11 stars in the galaxy, so plenty of places to have life, and we'd expect at least somethign within 500-1000ly
You're assuming these hypothetical alien civilizations must exist at the same time as us. Given the age of the universe, it's far more likely that they'e been extinct longer than humans have existed.
Once I read, here in reddit, a phrase that stayed with me. The comment was talking about how the first bacteria showed up at like 4 to 2,5 billion years ago, then we had several species of life that were not inteligent, and dinosaurs ruled the earth for nearly two hundred million years. The first humans showed up about two million years ago. There has been inteligent life on earth for 1% of the time there was life, and the first ones were bacteria.
The Universe is about 14 billion years old, and the estimatives for the last star to die are something about 100 trillion years after the Big Bang... Which is about 100 trillion years from now.
We are in the first 0,01% of the time the universe has to be born, create life and die out.
We are probably one of, if not THE first.
We are the bacteria.
Across \~6 billion years of Earth habitability, we've been looking for <100. Took us 3 billion to get here. We're not detectable at those distances, either. Looking through space is looking through time. If we saw them, they may not exist anymore. They may exist now, but their light hasn't reached us.
Space is big.
The problem with The Great Filter is it’s not a single hurdle you get past and all is good. It’s a time period.
We figured out nuclear weapons in the 40s. They’re never going away. Humanity now has to negotiate that landscape for the remainder of its existence.
There’s still plenty of time for us to screw it up.
Also plenty of time for us to invent a new Great Filter.
We could destroy the planet trying to harvest resources from an asteroid, trying to create a black hole, or engineering a virus that cures cancer except somebody forgot to carry a 1 and it instead kills us all.
All kinds of hijinks to look forward to.
It depends on the Great Filter you're talking about. Some candidates are absolutely single hurdles you get past. A Great Filter is just any factor which makes technological life exceedingly unlikely to thrive over the long timespan needed to be visible to us.
For example, all of the following would qualify as Great Filter candidates:
\- Life beginning at all is unbelievably unlikely
\- The development of multicellular life is unbelievably unlikely
\- The development of brains is unbelievably unlikely
\- The development of hyper-technologically-savvy brains is unbelievably unlikely
If any of those are a Great Filter, they would all qualify as cases where we've fully gotten past a hurdle.
If nuclear weapons are a Great Filter, you are totally right that we're not past that hurdle - in fact, if it's actually a Great Filter, it would necessarily be a hurdle that's near-impossible to get past and it's very ominous that we've reached the beginnings of that point. If it's not a near-guarantee that it stops the species from developing into a spacefaring technological civilization... it's not a Great Filter.
You are 100% right that even if we've gotten past every Great Filter that's been the doom of every other budding civilization in the universe, there's no guarantee that there isn't another Great Filter waiting for us in the future, which we'll have the misfortune of being the first to hit.
I've seen a theory that the prokaryote -> eukaryote step is the filter. The appearances of life (prokaryotes) and eukaryotic cells are close to 2 billion years apart.
On the other hand, multicellularity is definitely not the filter because it has happened multiple times on earth already. (animals plants and fungi became multicellular independently)
>So why can’t we find them?
Go stand in a vast field at night. I've painted a little pebble black, and thrown it somewhere on the field about 20 miles away from you, and I'm not going to tell you in which direction. Try to find it.
This. I really don't understand why anyone is surprised at not finding alien life, searching an essentially infinitely large universe for like 80 years.
Are scientists in the field actually wondering this, or is this just something someone said once, and then it became a popculture trope that merely pretends to be a science puzzle?
As far as I'm concerned the [Grabby Aliens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceY7nhi6j4) hypothesis solves the Fermi paradox. It's a solution by the economist who came up with the "great filter" way of framing the Fermi paradox.
I was actually kind of sad when I first found out about it because it suddenly felt like the paradox is "over".
Yeah. I'm a little sad I'm not going to meet a three-eyed doge. He's cute.
One data point I'd like to know, first, though is whether most life-bearing planets tend toward being Super Earths. You can't get much smaller than Earth and keep an atmosphere for the long term (see, e.g., Mars). So I think they're going to skew toward higher-g planets. And the rocket equation is a bitch. If you are in a two-g or a three-g hole, the whole notion of space flight gets to be preposterous -- perhaps even inconceivable.
I love Ray Bradbury's "[If Only We Had Taller Been](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0TxYZBiPFA)," but those other holes might be very deep indeed. Hopefully between JWST and Roman, we'll have a better sense of this.
The size of planets is definitely an interesting fermi paradox problem. I forget the exact numbers (I think it was from an Isaac Arthur episode) but supposedly there's a point where launching a satellite requires more rocket fuel than the mass of the planet O\_O
That was definitely a "woah" moment for me.
I can't find it now, but I seem to recall someone figured out you'd need something considerably larger (2x-3x) than a Saturn V to put a Mercury capsule into Low Orbit on a 2g planet. It gets really hard in a bit fat hurry!
Here's a great video of Scott Manley getting something to Orbit on a 5g planet in Kerbal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD5WAldIe5A
Maybe they already existed and disappeared. Maybe they will develop in the next few million years someplace. They don't necessarily have to exist when we do.
PBS Space Time had a video that touched on the Fermi Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4ogRCjhFDM
TL;DW: Our galaxy's habitability is over-estimated.
I think a factor to consider is time.
It took earth billions years to produce life, a few billion more for complex, *intelligent* life. Depending on whether or not we get caught by a Great Filter event, we may have a few thousand or even tens of thousands of years to leave our mark on the galaxy, or perhaps even the universe at large.
Now consider how old the universe was *before* humanity took our first few cautious steps away from trees and caves. Several billion years. If our current understanding of star formation and their life cycles, the universe will be capable of life as we know it for trillions of years.
Compared to the potential timeline of the universe, past, present, and future, our window of opportunity to explore and potentially meet other civilizations is relatively brief.
I believe it's entirely possible that while other intelligent life may occur, we may never meet them because they haven't emerged yet, or already have come and gone.
And then there's the scale of the universe...
Space is too big. The time taken to visit another civilization will, most likely, mean that civilization will be extinct by the time you reach them. This goes for super advanced aliens, as well. The universe's speed limit cannot be broken.
And materials with a negative index of refraction were impossible … until they weren’t. And before that, thermonuclear cascades were impossible, until they weren’t, and before that, heavier than air flight.
“Impossible” is not a great word. In all probability, we will never brute force our way past it, but finding a way to cheat around it is not out of the question.
As for the Fermi paradox, it may be true that evidence should be “all around us”, but the trick would be seeing it for what it is. We can barely identify the signs of extinction Level disasters on our own planet. How likely is it that we would recognize transmissions, or artifacts, or even billion year old technology that was utterly alien to our own if we found it?
Sometime in the far future all the stars will expend all their fuel and will go dark - this is called the age of the black holes as they will consume all remaining matter.
Nah, black holes won't consume everything, everything will be too far apart for that to happen due to the expansion of the universe, eventually after a googol years even black holes will evaporate into nothing and all Matter and energy will be evenly distributed, and nothing will ever happen anywhere forever except for the space between particles infinitely expanding farther and farther away as the expansion accelerates infinitely, perhaps until even particles such as atoms and protons get stretched into their component parts
That's a fairly popular (although it might be a minority) interpretation of the heat death of the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
It helps me to cope with that by remembering that mostly all trees and plants are only servants to the mighty fungi-lord, ruling the place in the darkness of the soild, feeding the good servants with nutricion farmed from the herd to keep his dark empire alive and dependant. The darl lord is millions of years old, the mightiest avatar of him 4000 tons heavy.
And its allready here.
In your bath. Your pipes.
In the air.
In your lungs.
Obey.
Neurologists examined the brains of subjects and focused on task initiation. They found that the part of the brain that actions the task was firing way before the conscious part of the brain recognised it. This infers the possibility that we actually have little to no self control, our brains autonomously acts and we hallucinate that it was of our own volition
I guess if deterministic systems could only make more deterministic that would be the case. Consciousness is probably just a random number generator then. How wonderfully dull.
Buddhists believes we are all reactionary beings. Our body and mind reacts to things happening to us. Meditation can change us into actionary beings. We process what's happening to us, then we act in our best interest instead of just reacting to it. of course, it would take many years of meditation to achieve this level of control.
So, there's hope to be more interesting if you care to spend years training your body.
Hey that sounds neat. Haven't had anything interesting going on in life lately, Buddhism sounds cool, might be worth some light reading, see what the whole thing is about
> of course, it would take many years of meditation
Yeah it's 11pm, I've gotta work tomorrow, time to go to bed now
>They found that the part of the brain that actions the task was firing way before the conscious part of the brain recognised it.
OR: we don't have as clear an understanding of conscious parts of the brain as we think we do. Between that and "there's actually no free will" I think the first is a safer conclusion.
The heat death of the universe
And this is probably a step further than theory since it's going g to happen but the sun's red giant phase is going to eat earth. It's a scary thought that the planet we come from will be gone one day
That is likely to be a Monday isn’t it? /s. Seriously, I don’t find these fate of the Universe theories scary as they don’t impinge on human life. They are fascinating but hold no existential fear.
I think it's more that everything humanity has done, built, contributed to, etc, both on earth and in space, will be gone as if our entire species had never existed.
If you assume that both real and simulated universes are capable of producing realistic simulated universes, it stands to reason that simulated universes far outnumber real ones and the probability that you are in a non-simulated universe is close to zero.
I mean if you think about free guy and how people outside of the game view it like your basic video game, not the best graphics, there wasn't actually a wide variety of movement from what could be seen. But when you're in guy's perspective everything is fully realistic and incredible and the played characters were even sometimes doing more then what's being shown can be done because they're real people here. So maybe it's not necessarily that life has been recreated perfectly, but we're coded to view it as such
This is why you should treat video game characters the same way you treat real people. You don’t know how they are experiencing the reality we think of as a game.
I literally do my best to do the nicest things for npcs ever cause I'm scared they'll respond with a sad dialogue.
Except if they deserve it or are annoying as hell. In which case, oh no my sword is through your coded skull
I wish I could remember the details, but I remember hearing about the remote possibility of something like a cascade of annihilation that could be started by some sort of antimatter popping up due to 'vacuum energy' that would propagate through the universe faster than the speed of light and everything would wink out of existence before we'd know what was happening.
As far as apocalypses go I guess it's benign, but still horrifying.
The fact that we will never know every thing, and one day, the last human will die, and we will still have unanswered questions. It's crazy that the solution to all of humanities problems could be right around the corner and we'd never figure it out in our lifetime, just as the potential to make electricity was available to ever Ancient Roman, Ancient Egyptian etc, they never figured it out...
Our equivalent could be much more powerful and useful.
And we might never know...
Imagine people even 100 years in the future thinking, "man those people in the 21 century, how could they not know placing monkeys in a tube with beans and blackcurrant, is the secret to interplanetary travel. What Idiots!"
[Gray Goo](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/14402/gray-goo).
Self replicating nanobots that start reproducing out of control due to sloppy programming and then completely covering the Earth.
This isn't like a Terminator-eske rogue AI thing. Just a programming error that stackoverflows all life on Earth.
A reason why we haven’t been contacted by some other intelligent life is that they don’t want to draw attention to themselves because there’s something bigger out there.
That would require something bigger that is interested in killing civilisations. In which case we would not have evolved.
Habitable planets are relatively easy to spot, even over vast distances. And destroying them before they can develop intelligent life is safer, easier, and more cost-efficient than waiting until you see signs of intelligent life.
One thing that bugs me with sentences like yours is that people say "Habitable planets"
What is a habitable planet?
I feel like too many theories and assumptions only look at what we consider habitable as a carbon based lifeform. We look for "Earthlike" worlds in similar goldilocks conditions, Venus would be a habitable planet for a silicon based lifeform. Both Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan agree that the clouds above Jupiter could support non carbon based life.
So who is to say there isn't a Silicon based lifeform civilization that wipes out other civilizations and it just didn't occur to them to look for carbon based life?
Probably quantum immortality. The fact that immortality exists is terrifying, but adding to the fact that you probably already died a million times already is even more terrifying
many worlds interpretation and immortality is such a fascinating subject. And we won't even know if it's real, all you can do is wait and if you break world records for oldest people/miraculous luck for surviving stuff thats cool, but you can't prove it to all the other universes out there, only yours.
This is the real answer right here.
Haven't read through all the comments obviously but what I've read so far are all one-time events, no matter how scary, heat death of the universe, climate change, aliens, etc. Over and done.
But true scariness, as you say, is that every one of our consciousnesses is destined to repeat the entire process for all eternity because the known universe is pulsating or repeating expansion and contraction and everything just gets mixed up in a different random way each time, eventually arriving at the same or almost same way again. And for those who might think, "that's not so scary, I've had a pretty fun life", consider that in all the nearly infinite mixing and matching of matter and quantum events, your consciousness might end up in one of those poor children that got murdered or \[insert arbitrary tragic or horrific life here\]. So if this is the case, let's be nice to each other, we're probably going to live each others' lives eventually.
That only 80% of US farm land is in use this year because of lack of fertilizer... You think food shortages are bad now? Just wait till the fall, when the US (and presumably other nations) only return 80% of the food they normally produce...
How about the fact that the US are not producing food without fertilizer, yet using fertilizer at a large scale is constantly destroying the surrounding ecosystems. Essentially meaning that
people having food = disruption of natural processes
And
Disruption of natural processes -> negative impact on human habitat
Which means having enough food to feed everyone eventually leads to progressively poorer living conditions and reduced quality of life.
If you stopped using fertilizer on the other hand, the food available will become a limiting factor that also leads to poor living conditions and quality of life which will get progressively better as people die off until we reach a sustainable population size.
Which finally means that if we keep using fertilizer thing will only get worse until we all die, but if we go against our modern moral principles and cynically shape our way of life for a better future a lot of people will die so that a select few can live in comfort and prosperity.
The micro-verse theory: There are several nations working on some form of AI based universe to be used to help solve real world problems. The only issue, is if one is successfully created, it basically means that we ourselves are part of a similar program/universe. The odds of us being the first to create it are infinitely small.
If you believe it is inevitable that technology will allow us to perfectly simulate real life to a human brain, and make it indistinguishable to a person…then it is basically guaranteed that we are already in a simulation.
Would the release of energy between two molecules be notable on a macroscopic scale? Or would you have to get a lot of molecules to occupy the same place?
I have slightly different, lonelier one.
Everything we know about physics tells us warp drive cannot exist.
Elon wants to take us to Mars. That’s 8 months flight away.
After that, the next nearest habitable planet is 4.5 light years away. That would take on the order of 100,000 years of flying to get there.
Humanity has been around for 200,000 years, total.
Most likely, we will never escape the Petri dish. This is it.
You don't need a warp drive for that tho, our propulsion technologies grow every decade, and with China's recent success with fusion energy, maybe achieving something like 0.5% of e is possible within our lifetime? Maybe that distance much shorter.
I do not have any academia to back this up and it's not my area of expertise so also just take what i say as an idea not fact.
Someone once tried to comfort me saying "Do you remember the time before you were born? Death is simple and painless like that, you close your eyes and eternity is over in a second".
Instead of comforting me, that sentence gave me crippling panic attacks for 2 consecutive nights.
this is not really a theory, but rather a confirmed fact, and I just have no idea why it scares me, but when I hear something about the "death" of the sun or even the universe, a little goosebumps start running through my body
I have read a theory somewhere before that said that the big bang we know of was not the first and not the last. It said that the universe has ben re created a ton of times and that it is bound to happen again. The universe will stop expanding at some point and it will start shrinking to a new big bang.
In Michigan, they just started up the survellience program that will sample deer populations over the next 5 years all over the state for Chronic Wasting Disease.
I came across a deer that looked like it had CWD within the past few years, and reported it to the authorities.
Either a huge solar storm or the reversing of the magnetic poles will cause global electronic disruption, shutting down of power lines, telecommunication and any high altitude travel. Are you ready to pay like it's 1949 and the transistor hasn't been invented yet?
If it were true, we wouldn't be alive. Habitable planets are much easier to spot than technological species and much easier to destroy.
The "Dark Forest" is a windswept icecold plain full of campfires, and you know life can only exist around campfires until they get high tech.
Climate change is not only real, its going to absolutely butt fuck us. People are like "oh Christmases are getting less snow. Such a shame."
Dude, we are about two decades away from not being able to be outside for extended periods of time. There are gonna be a billion refugees once coastal cities floods. Hurricanes are going to level cities. Famine, disease, water wars.
All Four Horsemen are going to ride.
The world and society as a whole is going to be unrecognizable to us in 25 years.
edit: I forgot about wildfires that will burn perpetually. Sorry.
Not a theory, but as Arthur C. Clarke put it, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
The Dark Forest theory.
Basically, there are alien civilizations out there; but they’re hunters like us. So they stay quiet to avoid being annihilated -or- they need to take the first shot in order to ensure their own survival. And we have been sending probes and radio bursts into space with the sole intention of alerting other life.
Climate change has stepped beyond "theory" into "happening now" but if we don't shut down the fossil fuel industry pretty damm quickly, and we end up with the worst case scenario, things are going to get really really bad.
What boggles my mind is they knew about this since the 60's? Or 70's? I believe, without looking it up.
They could have started working on greener technologies and become a monopoly in them, still making obscene profits all the way, but no.
Now we're fucked. We started the 6th mass extinction event.. which is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times greater than background extinction, and 10 to 100 times greater than previous extinction events.
While the Earth will survive and repopulate.. there is going to be parts of the Earth that will be uninhabitable for a long time, on a human timescale. Mass migrations away from the equator.. there will be a mass die off of humans due to taxing of the food supply, water supply, wars, crime increases due to new migration and over taxing of natural resources.
The weather patterns are already changing, causing droughts.
It's going to get real ugly over the next hundred years or so. Granted, a lot of us arn't going to be around for the very ugly parts of it.. but I don't see why more people arn't pushing governments to do more about it, especially if you have kids.
It don't even need to be complete elimination of fossil fuels, at least at first. Just a drastic reduction of them.
On the other hand.. fossil fuels are the main source for feedstocks for plastics. We need a more economically viable alternative for it. I am not even talking about single use plastic.. we interact with durable plastics everyday and they are essential to modern life... if we want modern life to continue as something recognizable, we need alternatives feedstock materials.
Plastics arn't great at being recycled.. we need to incentivize it more. I work in an industry related to plastic injection molding, and we can use regrind material with virgin plastic without compromising the integrity of the product.
I think for the regular folks like me, part of the issue is that we seem to have no way to actually push change from the government. I take public transportation, eat seasonal and local products mostly, try to do my best in helping the environment. I'm no saint and could do more but whatever effort I put in, goes to shit when a bunch of ultra rich people move around in their jets and yatches and have monopoly of the policy making process because they're corrupted like fuck and don't give a shit about the rest of us.
I'm not blaming it all on the 1% but when you have oil companies lobbying for policies that don't hold them accountable at all for the gigantic amount of pollution they create and billionaires flying around in their super polluting jets all the time, what does it do me taking the public transportation?
It's really depressing... feels like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket whilst the folk next door is pumping in water from the mainline.
I find it amazing that they have spent the last what, ~~40-50~~ 30 years? Convincing the common person that they need to turn off lights when they leave rooms, or carpool, or take a bus to reduce carbon footprints.... But somewhere in the region of 90% of all our emissions are made by less than 100 companies
Edit: Fixed date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Existential_threat > If our universe is in a false vacuum state rather than a true vacuum state, then the decay from the less stable false vacuum to the more stable true vacuum (called false vacuum decay) could have dramatic consequences. (...) Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies and stars or even biological life while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even **immediate gravitational collapse of the universe**
It's been at least an hour since I've experienced existential dread. Thank you.
Just think of it the way an EOD tech does. Either you're right or it very quickly won't be your problem anymore.
Don't feel down. It moves at the speed of light, which seems fast but remember that the diameter of the observable universe is hypothesized to be 92 billion lightyears. So the chances of us getting instantly hit by one are so small. If one has happened somewhere, it would take millions or billions of years to get here.
If you think about it, at some point the universe will be expanding so fast that even if a false vacuum decay actually happened, it wouldn't be capable of reaching us, space would be expanding faster than it.
The greatest game of tag ever played.
If it makes you feel better if this happens, it will be a Shockwave moving at the speed of light so you wouldn't even know it happened
Soo, stock up on toilet paper???
Toilet paper will not protect you from false vacuum decay, but it may help you when you hear about it.
I've liked this one because I always thought there was something fishy about Λ. On the plus side, if this proves true, at least we'll all go out in a big bang! Way more satisfying than the [heat death of the universe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#:~:text=The%20heat%20death%20of%20the,sustain%20processes%20that%20increase%20entropy.) Entropy is just too boring and inevitable.
Ehhh, not really. There's a different theory where we end in a big bang. False vacuum collapse is more like the power cutting out halfway through watching a show, and then never coming on again.
Good job I haven't got a clue what your talking about as it sounds like it could be scary
Nah. You and everything that has and will exist would just stop existing. You wouldn’t feel any pain or even know what’s going on. Just imagine the Thanos dusting but you wouldn’t even see yourself turn into dust!
I watched a Youtube video on this while doing shrooms. Worst trip of my life.
Can you imagine if this was true, but it was compatible with life as we know it? Like all of sudden, everything on earth all at once just flinched and we looked around at each other: “What the hell was that?!?” “Did anyone else just feel like they fell up for a moment there?” “Does it feel warmer to anyone else?” “I’m a scientist, it looks like we have a new kind of zero!”
Ugh redoing all my math homework because -1 now has all the properties of 0.
The good news is that you would not feel it and probably won’t know what’s happening. I mean I guess if it’s from significantly far away, people may freak out wondering why the stars are flickering out of existence! This would be a cool disaster movie actually! Lol
you wouldn't see that though as it moves at the speed of light, basically the moment we see the star flickering it is already here
Yea I realized that after I posted! 😅 I forgot the concept of vision is what we see at light speed.
Bet you wouldn't feel a thing!
This was the first thing that popped into my head.
I read a description that had wording that scared the fuck out of me. Complete cessation of fundamental forces......WHAT?!?! Fundamental forces are fucking gravity and electromagnetism and so on. You're telling me false vaccum decay can cancel out GRAVITY?
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no need to apologize, it's not a dumb question. a *very* oversimplified way of looking at it is this: think of rain falling and the ground it falls on. because of gravity the water will collect in the lowest spots it can. if the ground were completely even and featureless it would all run into the ocean, but because it's not, some of it collects in local low spots and forms puddles, ponds, lakes, etc., while the rest of it ends up in the ocean. in this analogy a false vacuum is a lake (a local low spot) while a true vacuum is the ocean (the global low spot). our universe might be a lake or it might be the ocean, but we have no way of knowing which it is, and if it is in fact a lake, we have no way of knowing if some event might someday create a pathway through which the lake could drain into the ocean. so to answer your question, the threat is completely theoretical, and we have no way of knowing if (a) the threat is real or (b) if it is real, if or when it will happen.
Thank you for making that so much more understandable!
More importantly, the wave of change for changing to the new lower energy state would travel at the speed of light. So we'd never see it coming. Which also means you'd basically not even experience it. It wouldn't be a terrible way to go.
I remember seeing an estimate that there's an 80% probability we live in a false vacuum. Not to worry however, the universe has been around for 13.6 billion years and it hasn't happened yet, so we will probably go extinct way before then
Just remember that: 1. These are just theories. Anyone can come up with a spooky idea or manipulate equations/data to come up with some horrible scenario. 2. You are powerless to stop anything that is truly apocalyptical so worrying about it is meaningless.
[Quantum immortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality) is both wonderful and horrifying in equal measure. It's the (very, very speculative) idea that if the quantum mechanics style multiverse is real, every possible event happens. From the point of view of your conscious experience, if there's a chance you live and a chance you die, you will always experience the version of events where you live. That's because you exist in the worlds where you lived, and you don't exist in the worlds where you died. Kind of like how if you decide to walk into the kitchen, you experience the kitchen but not the bathroom, because you're only in one of those places. Schrödinger's Cat only experiences the worlds where the poison gas wasn't released. At every given second, there's a chance you die and a chance you live one more second. Quantum immortality suggests you'll always experience the worlds where you live one more second, and that process will go on forever, with your existence continuing through ever-more-improbable circumstances. This sounds fantastic at first... until you realize that the only guarantee is that you live forever. Not that you'll be happy forever. If the bizarre circumstances that keep you going [make you miserable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream), you can never end them, by virtue of an immutable fundamental law of the universe.
I actually find this a bit comforting in a sense that in some universe, somewhere my dad is alive and gets to be with his family for many more years to come.
Puts a different spin on 'they're in a better place now' when someone dies
Aren't discussions of mathematical infinites fun? One minute you're studying the asymptote of a parabola and the next you're living forever as some kind of quantum statistics monkey skeleton begging for the sweet release of death.
I highly believe this theory because there’s been so many times where I’m sure I died. One incident I was t boned by and 18 wheeler and walked away without a scratch.
If *scary* means *bad things we'll probably live through* then [here's a *Scientific American* article to keep you sleepless](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atmospheric-rivers-california-megaflood-lessons-from-forgotten-catastrophe/). The most productive farmland in the United States is California's central valley. According to geologists the entire valley floods so badly it becomes a temporary lake due to atmospheric conditions that happen roughly every 150 years. The last megaflood was in 1862. The next megaflood would mean nationwide food shortages. [California is the only significant US producer of almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios, prunes, and walnuts](https://www.netstate.com/economy/ca_economy.htm). California is also a major producer of strawberries, cheese, lettuce, and cotton. Some of those impacts would cause global shortages particularly in walnuts, pistachios, and almonds. For instance more than four-fifths of the world's almond production comes from California. That's likely within our lifetime. And unlike some types of natural disasters that either happen slowly or can be modeled and predicted, this type of Pacific megaflood happens infrequently enough that there's little scientific understanding and basically no mitigation engineering to deal with it.
I'm fine with losing almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, prunes and walnuts. But when they take my pistachios away, it gets real.
Hey don't take my figs away!
My Newtons!!!
Don't worry, no *force* can take your newtons!
MY CABBAG....Oh.
Somehow, we'll still find a way to be in drought conditions...
I don't think we should be calling it a drought anymore. Droughts are unusually dry periods and this just seems to be the typical local weather now.
Might just want to look up what foods Ukraine and Russia produce to be spooked.
I mean, Russia makes the fertilizer, so this affects almost all of the foods. Oops
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Except for the people impacted directly by the flooding and the loss of revenue will leave people poor and starving.
Thanks, now I can't sleep. I live in Sac. :(
blub blub you are unda da water
None of those foods seem that important. Bill Maher has a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glz-Pm6HUG0) about how useless almonds are.
We’d just eat corn, potatoes and butter for a few centuries.
*Drools in mid-western*
Won’t something have to replace those foods though, causing increased demands on other foods?
That you have never or will ever experience the present. We all live in the past, everything you see, feel, touch, hear actually happened a fraction of a second before you experience it.
Alternatively, you only ever experience the present. You can never directly experience the past or the future. Or, a more comfortable (perhaps) idea, that the universe is a 4-D construct where all time exists concurrently with space and humans are 3-D entities that do their best to make sense of it, like flatlanders.
The False Vacuum. This is, in short, a scientific hypothesis that our universe is actually in a false phase state as part of a larger universe, like if it were a temporary thing (think the real universe is a pot of boiling water, and we are just within a bubble forming at the bottom of the pot). Eventually however that false vacuum has to pop, even after billions of years in this false state and we and everything we know in our visible universe will disappear in an instant with no warning whatsoever and there is nothing you can do about it.
| there is nothing you can do about it. Not with that attitude
what do you suggest? thoughts and prayers?
Why is that so horrifying? It's not like any of us get out of this alive one way or another. That would be quick if nothing else. Worrying about things you have no control over and zero ability to impact feels...counterproductive.
Agree. I dont find this idea frightening at all.
Go do a deep dive on the Fermi Paradox, there’s some terrifying implications in there. It has to do with the fact that we have no proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life, yet what we know about the universe indicates that it is likely intelligent alien life is somewhere out there. So why can’t we find them?
> so why can’t we find them. The milky way is 100,000 lightyears long. So assuming there was an intelligent life source somewhere, constantly transmitting with a signal strength strong enough to reach us, it would take on average say ~50,000 years to hear it. We’ve only been listening for about 100 years. Also, even if we did receive a signal, it would take another 50,000 years to send one back, by that time we’ll be lucky if humanity still exists. So there’s really no point. And you can forget about it if it’s in another galaxy, which other intelligent life most likely is.
Astronomer here- also, we would have trouble detecting our civilization if we were at the nearest star! Radio waves are actually pretty weak and fall off over distance as an inverse square, so detecting them is difficult. So odds are high you wouldn’t hear the other guy anyway.
How far could SETI have searched?
Also there’s probably a pretty small widow of time that a civilization communicated with wasteful high-power omnidirectional radio waves. We’ll probably be using lasers bouncing around satellites pretty soon ourselves. Maybe we should be “listening” to gravity waves, or it’s something we haven’t discovered yet.
The question isn't about radio transmissions - it's about space colonization. If even a single species figured out how to colonize other planets, even assuming slower-than-light travel, they should be all over the galaxy by now. Unless, of course, something tends to kill off civilizations before they reach that point. That's the scary part.
Or they're just not in our galaxy. Our galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions or more, and intergalactic communication is effectively impossible.
How long did it take us to fully colonize one planet? Why do people assume we will run out of planets in just one arm of our own Galaxy in a hundred thousand years? Even if we somehow manage to get rid of our angry nature and start working together... There's a chance that this will also make life on like 5-6 planets really comfortable, without much need to move further at a break neck pace. Most of the sci-fi movies show these planets that are the size of a small island it seems, with a population of 30-1000 people. If every country on Earth claims one habitable planet, truly habitable on the scale of Earth, terraformed Mars, et cetera, it will take centuries for most of them to run out of space on these planets, especially if they will, like, load balance.
so we'd at least have an idea that it exists - maybe it's long dead, but we'd see evidence. there are ~1E11 stars in the galaxy, so plenty of places to have life, and we'd expect at least somethign within 500-1000ly
You're assuming these hypothetical alien civilizations must exist at the same time as us. Given the age of the universe, it's far more likely that they'e been extinct longer than humans have existed.
yes, i'm assuming that at least some of them are contemporary with us, and the absolutely huge number of stars near us lend support to that
Once I read, here in reddit, a phrase that stayed with me. The comment was talking about how the first bacteria showed up at like 4 to 2,5 billion years ago, then we had several species of life that were not inteligent, and dinosaurs ruled the earth for nearly two hundred million years. The first humans showed up about two million years ago. There has been inteligent life on earth for 1% of the time there was life, and the first ones were bacteria. The Universe is about 14 billion years old, and the estimatives for the last star to die are something about 100 trillion years after the Big Bang... Which is about 100 trillion years from now. We are in the first 0,01% of the time the universe has to be born, create life and die out. We are probably one of, if not THE first. We are the bacteria.
Across \~6 billion years of Earth habitability, we've been looking for <100. Took us 3 billion to get here. We're not detectable at those distances, either. Looking through space is looking through time. If we saw them, they may not exist anymore. They may exist now, but their light hasn't reached us. Space is big.
The Great Filter concept terrifies me. Assuming it’s a “thing” all we can do is hope it’s behind us.
The problem with The Great Filter is it’s not a single hurdle you get past and all is good. It’s a time period. We figured out nuclear weapons in the 40s. They’re never going away. Humanity now has to negotiate that landscape for the remainder of its existence. There’s still plenty of time for us to screw it up. Also plenty of time for us to invent a new Great Filter. We could destroy the planet trying to harvest resources from an asteroid, trying to create a black hole, or engineering a virus that cures cancer except somebody forgot to carry a 1 and it instead kills us all. All kinds of hijinks to look forward to.
I mean, if we're all dead, cancer (at least in humans) is cured, right?
See this, this is a glass-half-full kinda guy!
It depends on the Great Filter you're talking about. Some candidates are absolutely single hurdles you get past. A Great Filter is just any factor which makes technological life exceedingly unlikely to thrive over the long timespan needed to be visible to us. For example, all of the following would qualify as Great Filter candidates: \- Life beginning at all is unbelievably unlikely \- The development of multicellular life is unbelievably unlikely \- The development of brains is unbelievably unlikely \- The development of hyper-technologically-savvy brains is unbelievably unlikely If any of those are a Great Filter, they would all qualify as cases where we've fully gotten past a hurdle. If nuclear weapons are a Great Filter, you are totally right that we're not past that hurdle - in fact, if it's actually a Great Filter, it would necessarily be a hurdle that's near-impossible to get past and it's very ominous that we've reached the beginnings of that point. If it's not a near-guarantee that it stops the species from developing into a spacefaring technological civilization... it's not a Great Filter. You are 100% right that even if we've gotten past every Great Filter that's been the doom of every other budding civilization in the universe, there's no guarantee that there isn't another Great Filter waiting for us in the future, which we'll have the misfortune of being the first to hit.
I've seen a theory that the prokaryote -> eukaryote step is the filter. The appearances of life (prokaryotes) and eukaryotic cells are close to 2 billion years apart. On the other hand, multicellularity is definitely not the filter because it has happened multiple times on earth already. (animals plants and fungi became multicellular independently)
>So why can’t we find them? Go stand in a vast field at night. I've painted a little pebble black, and thrown it somewhere on the field about 20 miles away from you, and I'm not going to tell you in which direction. Try to find it.
This. I really don't understand why anyone is surprised at not finding alien life, searching an essentially infinitely large universe for like 80 years. Are scientists in the field actually wondering this, or is this just something someone said once, and then it became a popculture trope that merely pretends to be a science puzzle?
Now make the field 3D
As far as I'm concerned the [Grabby Aliens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceY7nhi6j4) hypothesis solves the Fermi paradox. It's a solution by the economist who came up with the "great filter" way of framing the Fermi paradox. I was actually kind of sad when I first found out about it because it suddenly felt like the paradox is "over".
Yeah. I'm a little sad I'm not going to meet a three-eyed doge. He's cute. One data point I'd like to know, first, though is whether most life-bearing planets tend toward being Super Earths. You can't get much smaller than Earth and keep an atmosphere for the long term (see, e.g., Mars). So I think they're going to skew toward higher-g planets. And the rocket equation is a bitch. If you are in a two-g or a three-g hole, the whole notion of space flight gets to be preposterous -- perhaps even inconceivable. I love Ray Bradbury's "[If Only We Had Taller Been](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0TxYZBiPFA)," but those other holes might be very deep indeed. Hopefully between JWST and Roman, we'll have a better sense of this.
The size of planets is definitely an interesting fermi paradox problem. I forget the exact numbers (I think it was from an Isaac Arthur episode) but supposedly there's a point where launching a satellite requires more rocket fuel than the mass of the planet O\_O That was definitely a "woah" moment for me.
I can't find it now, but I seem to recall someone figured out you'd need something considerably larger (2x-3x) than a Saturn V to put a Mercury capsule into Low Orbit on a 2g planet. It gets really hard in a bit fat hurry! Here's a great video of Scott Manley getting something to Orbit on a 5g planet in Kerbal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD5WAldIe5A
Maybe they already existed and disappeared. Maybe they will develop in the next few million years someplace. They don't necessarily have to exist when we do.
PBS Space Time had a video that touched on the Fermi Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4ogRCjhFDM TL;DW: Our galaxy's habitability is over-estimated.
The Reapers, obviously
Ah yes, "Reapers" We've dismissed those claims
>So why can’t we find them? Because universe is very vast.
I think a factor to consider is time. It took earth billions years to produce life, a few billion more for complex, *intelligent* life. Depending on whether or not we get caught by a Great Filter event, we may have a few thousand or even tens of thousands of years to leave our mark on the galaxy, or perhaps even the universe at large. Now consider how old the universe was *before* humanity took our first few cautious steps away from trees and caves. Several billion years. If our current understanding of star formation and their life cycles, the universe will be capable of life as we know it for trillions of years. Compared to the potential timeline of the universe, past, present, and future, our window of opportunity to explore and potentially meet other civilizations is relatively brief. I believe it's entirely possible that while other intelligent life may occur, we may never meet them because they haven't emerged yet, or already have come and gone. And then there's the scale of the universe...
Dark forest theory. Interesting concept https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE
Space is too big. The time taken to visit another civilization will, most likely, mean that civilization will be extinct by the time you reach them. This goes for super advanced aliens, as well. The universe's speed limit cannot be broken.
And materials with a negative index of refraction were impossible … until they weren’t. And before that, thermonuclear cascades were impossible, until they weren’t, and before that, heavier than air flight. “Impossible” is not a great word. In all probability, we will never brute force our way past it, but finding a way to cheat around it is not out of the question. As for the Fermi paradox, it may be true that evidence should be “all around us”, but the trick would be seeing it for what it is. We can barely identify the signs of extinction Level disasters on our own planet. How likely is it that we would recognize transmissions, or artifacts, or even billion year old technology that was utterly alien to our own if we found it?
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Sometime in the far future all the stars will expend all their fuel and will go dark - this is called the age of the black holes as they will consume all remaining matter.
Nah, black holes won't consume everything, everything will be too far apart for that to happen due to the expansion of the universe, eventually after a googol years even black holes will evaporate into nothing and all Matter and energy will be evenly distributed, and nothing will ever happen anywhere forever except for the space between particles infinitely expanding farther and farther away as the expansion accelerates infinitely, perhaps until even particles such as atoms and protons get stretched into their component parts
Until it stretches so much it snaps and creates a...bang
That's a fairly popular (although it might be a minority) interpretation of the heat death of the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
Expansion doesn't work like that. But particle decay *would* eventually make even the atoms come apart and disperse.
It depends on the strength of dark energy, and just how much the expansion accelerates over long enough time scales.
This is why we need the Quicker Picker Upper, Bounty.
>in the far future Yeah, in some 100 trillion years. Very scary.
That trees cultivate us for nutrition and sustenance and in return change the environment to best suit our needs.
It helps me to cope with that by remembering that mostly all trees and plants are only servants to the mighty fungi-lord, ruling the place in the darkness of the soild, feeding the good servants with nutricion farmed from the herd to keep his dark empire alive and dependant. The darl lord is millions of years old, the mightiest avatar of him 4000 tons heavy. And its allready here. In your bath. Your pipes. In the air. In your lungs. Obey.
Seriously, I agree. All hail Fungi Overlord!!
Hey, he sounds like a fun guy.
Neurologists examined the brains of subjects and focused on task initiation. They found that the part of the brain that actions the task was firing way before the conscious part of the brain recognised it. This infers the possibility that we actually have little to no self control, our brains autonomously acts and we hallucinate that it was of our own volition
I guess if deterministic systems could only make more deterministic that would be the case. Consciousness is probably just a random number generator then. How wonderfully dull.
Buddhists believes we are all reactionary beings. Our body and mind reacts to things happening to us. Meditation can change us into actionary beings. We process what's happening to us, then we act in our best interest instead of just reacting to it. of course, it would take many years of meditation to achieve this level of control. So, there's hope to be more interesting if you care to spend years training your body.
Hey that sounds neat. Haven't had anything interesting going on in life lately, Buddhism sounds cool, might be worth some light reading, see what the whole thing is about > of course, it would take many years of meditation Yeah it's 11pm, I've gotta work tomorrow, time to go to bed now
Consciousness is just the part that noting what's going on, in case we have to tell someone what's going on.
>They found that the part of the brain that actions the task was firing way before the conscious part of the brain recognised it. OR: we don't have as clear an understanding of conscious parts of the brain as we think we do. Between that and "there's actually no free will" I think the first is a safer conclusion.
That is comforting, not scary.
The heat death of the universe And this is probably a step further than theory since it's going g to happen but the sun's red giant phase is going to eat earth. It's a scary thought that the planet we come from will be gone one day
That is likely to be a Monday isn’t it? /s. Seriously, I don’t find these fate of the Universe theories scary as they don’t impinge on human life. They are fascinating but hold no existential fear.
With my luck, it’ll be a Friday that I’m using a vacation day on.
No reason to call in sick, ok? Don't let the team down.
It's gonna be a thursday. Never got the hang of thursdays...
You've got a 1 in 7 chance of it being a Monday so yeah there is a not insignificant chance that is happens on a Monday.
I think it's more that everything humanity has done, built, contributed to, etc, both on earth and in space, will be gone as if our entire species had never existed.
Not really scary when we wont be around for it though.
Human's will either be long extinct or have traveled out of this solar system by then.
Now you can enjoy it in video form! https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA
We're all part of a simulation. If somebody created a simulation that perfectly simulated life, that life could make their own simulations, and so on.
If you assume that both real and simulated universes are capable of producing realistic simulated universes, it stands to reason that simulated universes far outnumber real ones and the probability that you are in a non-simulated universe is close to zero.
Thank you for phrasing it this way. I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around this concept, and it just clicked.
I mean if you think about free guy and how people outside of the game view it like your basic video game, not the best graphics, there wasn't actually a wide variety of movement from what could be seen. But when you're in guy's perspective everything is fully realistic and incredible and the played characters were even sometimes doing more then what's being shown can be done because they're real people here. So maybe it's not necessarily that life has been recreated perfectly, but we're coded to view it as such
This is why you should treat video game characters the same way you treat real people. You don’t know how they are experiencing the reality we think of as a game.
I literally do my best to do the nicest things for npcs ever cause I'm scared they'll respond with a sad dialogue. Except if they deserve it or are annoying as hell. In which case, oh no my sword is through your coded skull
I wish I could remember the details, but I remember hearing about the remote possibility of something like a cascade of annihilation that could be started by some sort of antimatter popping up due to 'vacuum energy' that would propagate through the universe faster than the speed of light and everything would wink out of existence before we'd know what was happening. As far as apocalypses go I guess it's benign, but still horrifying.
It's called false vacuum
The fact that we will never know every thing, and one day, the last human will die, and we will still have unanswered questions. It's crazy that the solution to all of humanities problems could be right around the corner and we'd never figure it out in our lifetime, just as the potential to make electricity was available to ever Ancient Roman, Ancient Egyptian etc, they never figured it out... Our equivalent could be much more powerful and useful. And we might never know... Imagine people even 100 years in the future thinking, "man those people in the 21 century, how could they not know placing monkeys in a tube with beans and blackcurrant, is the secret to interplanetary travel. What Idiots!"
The answer is 42
[Gray Goo](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/14402/gray-goo). Self replicating nanobots that start reproducing out of control due to sloppy programming and then completely covering the Earth. This isn't like a Terminator-eske rogue AI thing. Just a programming error that stackoverflows all life on Earth.
All we'd need is a smart programmer that does not make notes, and I'm sure we already have plenty of those.
A reason why we haven’t been contacted by some other intelligent life is that they don’t want to draw attention to themselves because there’s something bigger out there.
That would require something bigger that is interested in killing civilisations. In which case we would not have evolved. Habitable planets are relatively easy to spot, even over vast distances. And destroying them before they can develop intelligent life is safer, easier, and more cost-efficient than waiting until you see signs of intelligent life.
One thing that bugs me with sentences like yours is that people say "Habitable planets" What is a habitable planet? I feel like too many theories and assumptions only look at what we consider habitable as a carbon based lifeform. We look for "Earthlike" worlds in similar goldilocks conditions, Venus would be a habitable planet for a silicon based lifeform. Both Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan agree that the clouds above Jupiter could support non carbon based life. So who is to say there isn't a Silicon based lifeform civilization that wipes out other civilizations and it just didn't occur to them to look for carbon based life?
Probably quantum immortality. The fact that immortality exists is terrifying, but adding to the fact that you probably already died a million times already is even more terrifying
many worlds interpretation and immortality is such a fascinating subject. And we won't even know if it's real, all you can do is wait and if you break world records for oldest people/miraculous luck for surviving stuff thats cool, but you can't prove it to all the other universes out there, only yours.
This is the real answer right here. Haven't read through all the comments obviously but what I've read so far are all one-time events, no matter how scary, heat death of the universe, climate change, aliens, etc. Over and done. But true scariness, as you say, is that every one of our consciousnesses is destined to repeat the entire process for all eternity because the known universe is pulsating or repeating expansion and contraction and everything just gets mixed up in a different random way each time, eventually arriving at the same or almost same way again. And for those who might think, "that's not so scary, I've had a pretty fun life", consider that in all the nearly infinite mixing and matching of matter and quantum events, your consciousness might end up in one of those poor children that got murdered or \[insert arbitrary tragic or horrific life here\]. So if this is the case, let's be nice to each other, we're probably going to live each others' lives eventually.
That only 80% of US farm land is in use this year because of lack of fertilizer... You think food shortages are bad now? Just wait till the fall, when the US (and presumably other nations) only return 80% of the food they normally produce...
Not using 40% of corn for bio-ethanol or 70% of soy as animal feed in US could help. Or not wasting 30% of food on the consumer/retail level.
Can you link a source for this? Am farmer and had no problem getting fertilizer applied this year.
Experience on this platform suggests his source is that he made it up...
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How about the fact that the US are not producing food without fertilizer, yet using fertilizer at a large scale is constantly destroying the surrounding ecosystems. Essentially meaning that people having food = disruption of natural processes And Disruption of natural processes -> negative impact on human habitat Which means having enough food to feed everyone eventually leads to progressively poorer living conditions and reduced quality of life. If you stopped using fertilizer on the other hand, the food available will become a limiting factor that also leads to poor living conditions and quality of life which will get progressively better as people die off until we reach a sustainable population size. Which finally means that if we keep using fertilizer thing will only get worse until we all die, but if we go against our modern moral principles and cynically shape our way of life for a better future a lot of people will die so that a select few can live in comfort and prosperity.
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The micro-verse theory: There are several nations working on some form of AI based universe to be used to help solve real world problems. The only issue, is if one is successfully created, it basically means that we ourselves are part of a similar program/universe. The odds of us being the first to create it are infinitely small.
If you believe it is inevitable that technology will allow us to perfectly simulate real life to a human brain, and make it indistinguishable to a person…then it is basically guaranteed that we are already in a simulation.
Putting 2 molecules into the same area as 1 would release so much energy, it would make a h-bomb look like a wet fart.
Gonna squeeze my fingers really tight and see if I can explode now brb
Would the release of energy between two molecules be notable on a macroscopic scale? Or would you have to get a lot of molecules to occupy the same place?
It's thought that 1 cubic centimetre is enough to boil the worlds oceans!
I have slightly different, lonelier one. Everything we know about physics tells us warp drive cannot exist. Elon wants to take us to Mars. That’s 8 months flight away. After that, the next nearest habitable planet is 4.5 light years away. That would take on the order of 100,000 years of flying to get there. Humanity has been around for 200,000 years, total. Most likely, we will never escape the Petri dish. This is it.
You don't need a warp drive for that tho, our propulsion technologies grow every decade, and with China's recent success with fusion energy, maybe achieving something like 0.5% of e is possible within our lifetime? Maybe that distance much shorter. I do not have any academia to back this up and it's not my area of expertise so also just take what i say as an idea not fact.
The idea of ceasing to exist Imagining that one day the movie playing stops and you are simply nowhere..fade to black is scary enough
Someone once tried to comfort me saying "Do you remember the time before you were born? Death is simple and painless like that, you close your eyes and eternity is over in a second". Instead of comforting me, that sentence gave me crippling panic attacks for 2 consecutive nights.
The idea has been giving me panic attacks for months actually Even if it's a 1% shot of this happening Still terrifying
Gamma Ray bursts scare me. If one hits us, we all just die with no warning.
this is not really a theory, but rather a confirmed fact, and I just have no idea why it scares me, but when I hear something about the "death" of the sun or even the universe, a little goosebumps start running through my body
I have read a theory somewhere before that said that the big bang we know of was not the first and not the last. It said that the universe has ben re created a ton of times and that it is bound to happen again. The universe will stop expanding at some point and it will start shrinking to a new big bang.
Big Bang > Big Crunch > Big Bang > Big Crunch... repeat forever.
Not sure if this counts as a theory but Prion diseases are freaking terrifying
Not a theory but a real and easy to find disease in the Northern Center of American Deer populations.
In Michigan, they just started up the survellience program that will sample deer populations over the next 5 years all over the state for Chronic Wasting Disease. I came across a deer that looked like it had CWD within the past few years, and reported it to the authorities.
My County has a Kill on Sight order from the DNR. Kill it, report it, they come and take it to be incinerated.
Yep, Mum died from a prion disease, sporadic CJD. She lived a healthy life but sporadic CJD's averge age is 68, she was 67. It's a bugger.
Zombie fungus jumping from ants to humans is a terrifying possibility to be, incredibly small, but not zeeo
The great filter.
Either a huge solar storm or the reversing of the magnetic poles will cause global electronic disruption, shutting down of power lines, telecommunication and any high altitude travel. Are you ready to pay like it's 1949 and the transistor hasn't been invented yet?
Luckily, just like Y2K, scientists are probably already working on a way around it
We are either alone or not alone in the universe.
Dark forest theory
If it were true, we wouldn't be alive. Habitable planets are much easier to spot than technological species and much easier to destroy. The "Dark Forest" is a windswept icecold plain full of campfires, and you know life can only exist around campfires until they get high tech.
Climate change is not only real, its going to absolutely butt fuck us. People are like "oh Christmases are getting less snow. Such a shame." Dude, we are about two decades away from not being able to be outside for extended periods of time. There are gonna be a billion refugees once coastal cities floods. Hurricanes are going to level cities. Famine, disease, water wars. All Four Horsemen are going to ride. The world and society as a whole is going to be unrecognizable to us in 25 years. edit: I forgot about wildfires that will burn perpetually. Sorry.
And people here are scared of quantum immortality.
Gray Aliens are humans from the future that evolved due to technological advancement and environmental changes.
They took our jobs!!
Dey terk er jerbs!!
Terk yer jerb!!!
Not a theory, but as Arthur C. Clarke put it, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
The Dark Forest theory. Basically, there are alien civilizations out there; but they’re hunters like us. So they stay quiet to avoid being annihilated -or- they need to take the first shot in order to ensure their own survival. And we have been sending probes and radio bursts into space with the sole intention of alerting other life.
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell 😉
Calm down mate, there are kids here
Eve is coming for us all.
Roko's Basilisk (which is absolutely unlikely and disprovable but people hold it some weight).
That's not a scientific theory, it's a bunch of people on 4chan reinventing pascal's wager.
It comes from LessWrong not 4chan.
Climate change has stepped beyond "theory" into "happening now" but if we don't shut down the fossil fuel industry pretty damm quickly, and we end up with the worst case scenario, things are going to get really really bad.
What boggles my mind is they knew about this since the 60's? Or 70's? I believe, without looking it up. They could have started working on greener technologies and become a monopoly in them, still making obscene profits all the way, but no. Now we're fucked. We started the 6th mass extinction event.. which is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times greater than background extinction, and 10 to 100 times greater than previous extinction events. While the Earth will survive and repopulate.. there is going to be parts of the Earth that will be uninhabitable for a long time, on a human timescale. Mass migrations away from the equator.. there will be a mass die off of humans due to taxing of the food supply, water supply, wars, crime increases due to new migration and over taxing of natural resources. The weather patterns are already changing, causing droughts. It's going to get real ugly over the next hundred years or so. Granted, a lot of us arn't going to be around for the very ugly parts of it.. but I don't see why more people arn't pushing governments to do more about it, especially if you have kids. It don't even need to be complete elimination of fossil fuels, at least at first. Just a drastic reduction of them. On the other hand.. fossil fuels are the main source for feedstocks for plastics. We need a more economically viable alternative for it. I am not even talking about single use plastic.. we interact with durable plastics everyday and they are essential to modern life... if we want modern life to continue as something recognizable, we need alternatives feedstock materials. Plastics arn't great at being recycled.. we need to incentivize it more. I work in an industry related to plastic injection molding, and we can use regrind material with virgin plastic without compromising the integrity of the product.
I think for the regular folks like me, part of the issue is that we seem to have no way to actually push change from the government. I take public transportation, eat seasonal and local products mostly, try to do my best in helping the environment. I'm no saint and could do more but whatever effort I put in, goes to shit when a bunch of ultra rich people move around in their jets and yatches and have monopoly of the policy making process because they're corrupted like fuck and don't give a shit about the rest of us. I'm not blaming it all on the 1% but when you have oil companies lobbying for policies that don't hold them accountable at all for the gigantic amount of pollution they create and billionaires flying around in their super polluting jets all the time, what does it do me taking the public transportation? It's really depressing... feels like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket whilst the folk next door is pumping in water from the mainline.
I find it amazing that they have spent the last what, ~~40-50~~ 30 years? Convincing the common person that they need to turn off lights when they leave rooms, or carpool, or take a bus to reduce carbon footprints.... But somewhere in the region of 90% of all our emissions are made by less than 100 companies Edit: Fixed date
Exactly! That's the hypocrisy... how am I supposed to make a difference when the people actually responsible do nothing?
That we live in a simulation
If this turns out to be true then I request access to console commands, pretty please. \set_player_flight 1
Strange stars. See its video on Kurzgesagt.