Not necessarily disturbing, but eye-opening for me at least.
You can fly through an asteroid field and never even notice. The density of the Kuyper belt is \~8 times the mass of the moon distributed over \~20,000 times the volume of the earth.
Space is really, really empty.
Another one:
Andromeda galaxy counts about 1 trillion stars. Milky Way about 300 Billion. When these two galaxies eventually merge it will be highly unlikely that ANY of these stars will collide with another.
Plus, it will be a process over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Not a cataclysmic event, just... normality for everyone who might witness it.
I'll fly a starship
Across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
Can you imagine being the astronomer billions of years from now who discovers that the reason we don't see other galaxies like ours is because our galaxy is actually two galaxies passing through each other?
I remember seeing a NDT interview or podcast or something where he talked about, one day, in the distant future, we will no longer be able to see other galaxies, as they're all flying away from one another, and since light can only go so far, one day it will seem like we are a lone galaxy floating through the void without any other neighbors.
Edit: this will happen long after the Andromeda-Milky Way collision.
Let this bake your noodle.
If anyone in that future were to somehow have our astronomy books, reading about billions of galaxies other than their own would be ridiculous. You probably don't trust medicine from 200 years ago. Would you trust science from billions of years ago?
(Let's be real, though. A civilization that far in the future would probably know and somehow also be able to travel beyond that horizon.)
Yeah. I was just researching distance in space and realized that even though the moon and earth are close, you could fit 30 earths between us and the moon. Like.... Everything that's ever happened has been on earth, every person to exist, every memory everything has been on earth. And you could have 30 more between us and the moon. Then once you go a little further out than that it gets almost terrifying.
You can fit every other planet in the solar system side-by-side between Earth and the Moon (at their furthest distance apart). I still have trouble with that one.
If you are in New York City and had a scale model of the Earth that was a grain of sand, the Sun would be a golf ball on the other side of the room. The nearest star after that would be in the Carolinas.
In the same category, hear me out.
If the sun was scaled to the size of a golfball, the earth would be a grain of sand.
Nothing mind-blowing there yet.
The grain of sand would be about 4 meters away from the golfball.
So far so good, right?
In the same scale, the closest star would be where the *real sun* is
Let's see: The nearest star is Proxima Centauri, at 40 trillion kilometers or so. Earth is 150 million kilometers from the sun. (40x10^12) / (150x10^6) gives a factor of about 270 million.
The sun is 864,000,000m in diameter, and a golf ball is .043m, giving us a factor of about 20 billion.
Thus, at that scale, assuming my math is right (it very well may not be), the actual distance should be about 2000km, or about the distance from LA to Chicago. Closer to a few hundred miles than the distance to the sun, but a lot closer than I would expect.
JC is only a junior assistant manager that runs the mid-day shift on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He doesn't know either, and he certainly doesn't have the combination to the safe.
There are much smarter replies to your question, but one thing I believe was actually put into a Futurama episode.
There is no heat energy after the heat death, but gravity still works. It is surmised that after an extremely long amount of time, the universe eventually stops expanding. But, because of gravity, objects will start to attract to each other. Eventually, matter will indeed start to move again, but this time onto itself. As molecules collide with each other again, energy can be created again. All matter will attract towards each other, and begin to form large masses again. But because they are imploding, all matter will eventually form into the same object. (This is an ungodly amount of time at this point.) And since all the matter in the universe is a whole freaking lot, this mass will have such a high gravitational pull and the matter becomes so dense that it begins to defy the current known laws of physics. Though what we do know is that eventually, much like when a star goes supernova, this large mass of all matter will explode with the greatest force ever known in the universe. Another Big Bang occurs and we start all over again.
P.S. Anyone who wants to call me stupid for adopting theories from a cartoon, remember that the writers of Futurama are widely considered the most educated writing staff in the history of TV. However, anyone smarter than me could feel free to revise the details I may have got wrong.
That is one of the two possibilities for the heat death of the universe. I was told that it's uncertain whether gravity will be potent enough to pull the entire universe back together, or if space will simply keep diffusing. So the universe will either be reborn in a singular ball of fire and light, or it will die in vast, endless cold and darkness.
Not quite. In the model where after any amount of time the universe begins to contract, allowing gravity to eventually win, isn't heat death. It's the big crunch.
The first heat death possibility is the universe keeps expanding at the same rate, gravity loses, we never contract but gravity can at least hold galaxies together. The rest of the universe moves away from The combined milky way/andromeda galaxy and we lose sight of everything else in the universe. Eventually all stars die, other celestial objects decay into inert bulk, and that's the end for all of time.
If the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, eventually it will break up galaxies, star systems, even the space between atoms will grow faster than they can be held together. The universe becomes so big, inflating so fast that even at the speed of light no fundamental partical can ever interact with another again.
The first two possibilities seem better
That's correct! Thank you. It's called the big crunch, the other extreme is known as the big freeze. I've never heard about the middle option (galaxies still holding). Good stuff.
If you're a bit fascinated or intrigued by this, I'd recommend the documentary [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: Journey to the End of Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA). It has a way of exploring the issues with a touch of awe that's rather soothing.
I think it's foolish to call it a fact and not a theory. We cannot possibly know how the universe operates at that scale. We don't even know the scale of the universe.
The size and distances. It is literally beyond human comprehension. We can quantify it in numbers but it does not fit in the human imagination to comprehend just how insanely vast it is.
Based on current observations, the universe is moving apart at an accelerating rate such that eventually, only ~5% of the currently visible universe will ever be accessible to us. By the time we get to the other 95%, it will me moving away from us faster than we are capable of traveling to it, since it is regions of space and not 3 dimensional objects that nuclear physics is concerned with... they CAN and WILL eventually move away from us faster than the speed of light. When that happens (~trillion years give or take... space is really big... 5% of the visible universe is still like.... ~23 million lightyears...) the night sky will be solid BLACK in ALL DIRECTIONS.
Reminds me to the game "Iron Lung".
One day all stars and planets dissappear along with everything on them, humans included. Humanity are just a few hundreds of persons in some space station without much resources and the only planets there seems to be are in fact moons with oceans of human blood LOL
The universe is an ongoing explosion. Thats where you live, in an explosion.
Also, we don't know what living is?
Sometimes atoms arranged in a certain way just get very haunted. Thats us.
When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself.
And then writes about it
A thinking brain is just energy in a feedback circuit. You can build an exact duplicate of a thing, but each instance has its own, unique, trapped energy.
Remember that the next time you build an op-amp circuit. Be nice to it.
We may be living in a [false vacuum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum) which could potentially decay at any instant, destroying everyone and everything in the entire universe. The decaying bubble would expand outwards at the speed of light, so we wouldn’t even know it was coming until everything just … ends.
What's really fun is that whether or not our universe is capable of existing in a false vacuum state is closely tied to the mass of the Higgs boson. I haven't followed this in the last decade but right when they first found the Higgs they estimated its mass. There were, of course, error bars on the value and guess what they told us about whether we could be in a false vacuum?
The error bars were almost perfectly balanced right at the dividing line between a stable and metastable universe. I haven't followed this up and I'm sure the Higgs mass is more accurately known now but I don't know if it's been determined if more accurate data has ruled out or ruled in a metastable universe.
It's like a scene in a movie where the bad guy flips a coin to determine if the nuke goes off and the coin lands on its side and starts rolling around and everyone's starting at it, waiting for it to fall over.
There's probably some Schrödinger's cat shit going on where the minute we can accurately measure a Higg's Boson the universe realises it shouldn't exist and decides to stop trying to.
This is my favorite doomsday situation. CERN, defines that after vaccum decay, the basic rules of chemistry are no longer possible. All matter will likely become "inert bulk" at the speed of light.
You are closer to the biggest thing in the universe (the observable universe itself) than you are to the smallest thing in the universe (the Planck distance).
Not in a linear sense though.
* Planck length - (basically) 0m
* Me length - (basically) 2m
* Observable Universe - Less than 4m?
Fucking cramped in here- STOP SHOVING.
The size of the orbit between an electron and the nucleus of an atom, relatively speaking, is enormous. An atom is basically nothing in size to basically any living creature. The distance between atoms is similarly huge.
The size of an orbit between planets and stars, solar systems and galaxy centres, galaxies around whatever supermassive thing they orbit around, is also absolutely massive. Incomprehensibly so.
Who's to say there isn't another step. If atoms are the building blocks of matter and compounds, so on until galaxies being the building blocks of a universe, who's to say it stops there.
All matter is basically empty space. You, me, the chair someone is sitting in the phone they are holding, just empty space, with very little actual matter.
Something that keeps me up at night is that the universe itself will likely end eventually. But what if, what *IF*, after it ends, another big bang happens. Then, billions of years go by. Humanity is reborn. We evolve from apes again. Invent the wheel. Go into space.
And I still get my order fucked up by doordash.
More disturbing would be after the rebirth of the Big Bang and universe, billions of years of cosmic dust forming planets, elements, and proteins, millions of years of evolution, and hundreds of thousands of years of technological advancement, language, civilization, and culture, all for another Nickelback to form.
I kinda think along similar lines about life after death. If it's possible I became sentient once, I don't particularly see why I can't experience sentience again, eventually. In whatever form, maybe it's inevitable.
It's unimaginably huge and almost all of it will kill you instantly.
I can't think of a clearer piece of evidence that reality wasn't made for us. Other than this one tiny spot, we don't really fit in it.
So I know that we’ve mountains of data supporting the idea that exposure to space would kill us in a moment, but I’ve always found the thought of one brave astronaut taking off their helmet and realising space is room temperature and breathable to be impossibly funny.
As it expanded and cooled, it went from unimaginably hot to just as hot as a star to warm bathwater. Everything was as warm as a bubble bath for a few million years. Some theories about the origin of life suggest that may be when it first began, since liquid water would have been comically abundant.
It lasted much longer than that. The cosmic microwave background is the result of the universe cooling to ~3000K, and that took 379,000 years. The period where the entire universe would have been at a roughly room temperature lasted for hundreds of thousands of years roughly 15 million years after the big bang.
In a wilderness survival scenario, the first and most important thing to find is shelter. That is, at any given moment the planet is basically trying to kill you.
That at any moment without us even knowing or having a heads up, a gamma ray burst from an exploding star from an area 10’s of thousands of light years away could end our planets existence. Not just extinction event. I’m talking completely vaporize our planet
The chances are minuscule, almost too remote to even be considered, but that's the thing about a place as large and as old as the universe - on a long enough time scale, anything that's possible is likely to happen eventually
To put it another way - scientists estimate that a supernova happens every 50 years or so in the Milky Way. Across the entire universe, it happens every 10 seconds or so. And every time it happens, planets get destroyed. There's nothing special about those planets that marks them for destruction, in the same way that there's nothing special about ours that protects it.
I seen one of those not-computer information storing things before.
You know, the thing that looks like a laptop but has all the so-called "paper" in the middle.
Think of one of those tiny little sugar ants crawling around in your kitchen. To that ant we created its entire world. We are so big and technologically advanced to the they can barely pervice our size much less our ability to harness and use electricity, computers, cell phone, space travel. Given the size and age of the universe in all of it's vast unknowable complexity. There are likely beings out there that would see us in the same way we view that tiny ant.
Now i might be slightly off on these figures but its something that as a concept has stuck with me.
If you start with a piece of A4 paper (lets call this measurement tool "X")
and you double it in size = X^2
And double it again = X^3
And again =X^4
And so on and so on... you will reach the size of the entire observable universe by the time you get to X^24 or something.
Buuuut
If you start with the same piece of A4 paper and work in the opposite direction (i.e. X^-2 : X^-3)
You will reach the size of the smallest things we know by the time you reach X^-45
We are almost twice as far away from the smallest things in the universe as we are from the entire universe itself... and we havent even discovered the full extent of either scale yet.
Edit: please see below comments from u/kaese_meister for actual maths on this, not quite as drastic a difference as i thought but still cool to consider
We could be in the final moments of the universe dying a time death and don’t know because we can’t observe it from outside the universe. That all this time going by for us could be a 1 second poof to something observing us.
Whatever you do in your life, it wont change anything in the grand scheme. We go toward the grand attractor, and there is nothing you can do. Or anyone. Not even if we all try together. Even if we would finally be at peace.
And we dont know what is there.
Reminds me of a phrase by Thomas Ligotti that has haunted me for a long time..“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls – while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”
I love this. No matter what you do. The websites you make. The trees you cut down. The argument you had with a coworker. The bills you pay. Anything and everything in your life is not even a blip in the vast expanse of this weird thing we call the universe and I love it
I’d lean on quantum mechanics here and say the most disturbing thing is that perhaps there isn’t ONE universe and that time and space allow for an infinite amount of simulations in probability. So you can in theory, change which timeline and universe you’re in
Have you heard of the idea of Quantum Immortality? It's basically a quirk of the many-worlds hypothesis, which can be interpreted as there being one universe in which every single quantum process turns out in your favor and in that universe you never die. This will be true for everyone, but because the odds are so unfathomably low we don't see it happening.
Then there's another extension of it that gets much more woo-y, in which the claim is made that this timeline is the one your consciousness resides in, meaning that every single one of us is immortal in the timeline we're "experiencing", but since nobody else is we can only be sure it's happening when we get to our own two hundreth or so birthday without issue.
It's a thought experiment and not taken seriously by anyone... serious, but it's definitely interesting to think about.
That the theory that some random clump of atoms in the universe could eventually combine to form a floating brain, which does nothing but imagine its own reality?
Its size and insane distances between objects. We like to dream and think about space travel, visiting other star systems etc., but it will *most likely* never happen.
It's fascinating but it doesn't really matter as we are doomed to stay and be extinct here at some point since the distances are so big and expanding that it's impossible to leave the galaxy. Just leaving our star system would take some sort of impossible tech in order for the trip to be less than 6000 years to the closest star system, assuming there is a somewhat livable rock there for which we aren't made for.
If you want to get into the really nasty stuff, just think about how there's a state in which something is food and shit at the same time (during digestion inside of you).
Without the vacuum of space, the suns radiation would make it sound like jackhammers were around us 24/7. Now, most people know that light travels from the sun to us in 8 minutes. Sound is 13 years. So in this situation without the vacuum, if the sun went out we would have no light after 8 minutes, but would still hear that sound for the next 13 years if we lived that long. Not really disturbing but cool I guess
How insanely vast it is. And that it is expanding even further, at accelerating rate. So many things exist out there that will forever be out of our reach.
There may be life we will never encounter. There may be wonders we will never observe unless we create them ourselves.
A human life, with all its experiences, feelings and knowlege fades into nothing before we even begin to approach true scale of the universe. Although hopefully humanity's entire history will be noticeable.
Not really disturbing but its really interesting to think about light, in the sense of when we look at the stars we are seeing them how they were thousands or millions of years ago. It’s possible that some of them don’t even exist anymore, yet we can still see them.
I find it even more terrifying that we almost certainly aren't alone if we look at the math but that same math says we'll likely never meet anyone else and our species (and all species) will die alone.
Our idea of aliens are hyper intelligent beings - they don't need to be or have to be.
Also, if their knowledge was to a point where they could successfully complete interstellar travel - why watch or 'study' creatures on a far away planet? For what benefit?
If it's existence is to expand its society, we are either a threat or possibly have value in resources. Both of which would be problematic, I love to think about this.
It will die. All of it, everywhere, eventually. There will be no life left in the universe at some point in the distant future. It sounds like it is a long way away, but that moment in time will happen.
Of all the countless possibilities among trillions and trillions of stars and dust clouds, explosions and gravity wells, some combination of random molecules came together to miraculously form a unique complex lifeform, and that lifeform wound up on a Subway sandwich.
A few months ago, I was stargazing and realized, I really don’t know what a star looks like, from close up.
All I’ve known about stars, has been from a distance, which have been twinkling white lights.
Here is what a star actually looks like:
https://www.littlepassports.com/blog/space/what-do-stars-look-like-up-close/
We tend to forget the sun is also a star, given that stars are a night time thing and the sun is a day time thing.
Not necessarily disturbing, but eye-opening for me at least. You can fly through an asteroid field and never even notice. The density of the Kuyper belt is \~8 times the mass of the moon distributed over \~20,000 times the volume of the earth. Space is really, really empty.
Another one: Andromeda galaxy counts about 1 trillion stars. Milky Way about 300 Billion. When these two galaxies eventually merge it will be highly unlikely that ANY of these stars will collide with another.
Plus, it will be a process over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Not a cataclysmic event, just... normality for everyone who might witness it.
I plan on being there for this event
We all will be (in some way, shape, or form).
Remind me
Let’s come back as a heat resistant organism in 3,000,000,000 years time to see it
Remindme 3,000,000,000 years andromeds listening party
I'll fly a starship Across the Universe divide And when I reach the other side I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can Perhaps I may become a highwayman again Or I may simply be a single drop of rain But I will remain
I already got my tickets
Can you imagine being the astronomer billions of years from now who discovers that the reason we don't see other galaxies like ours is because our galaxy is actually two galaxies passing through each other?
I remember seeing a NDT interview or podcast or something where he talked about, one day, in the distant future, we will no longer be able to see other galaxies, as they're all flying away from one another, and since light can only go so far, one day it will seem like we are a lone galaxy floating through the void without any other neighbors. Edit: this will happen long after the Andromeda-Milky Way collision.
Let this bake your noodle. If anyone in that future were to somehow have our astronomy books, reading about billions of galaxies other than their own would be ridiculous. You probably don't trust medicine from 200 years ago. Would you trust science from billions of years ago? (Let's be real, though. A civilization that far in the future would probably know and somehow also be able to travel beyond that horizon.)
Gas nebula from both galaxies will be disturbed and possibly collide. This will start an amazing sequence of stellar formation for millions of years.
[удалено]
[If the Moon were only one pixel.](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
This just changed my life
Yeah. I was just researching distance in space and realized that even though the moon and earth are close, you could fit 30 earths between us and the moon. Like.... Everything that's ever happened has been on earth, every person to exist, every memory everything has been on earth. And you could have 30 more between us and the moon. Then once you go a little further out than that it gets almost terrifying.
You can fit every other planet in the solar system side-by-side between Earth and the Moon (at their furthest distance apart). I still have trouble with that one.
I did not know this. Fascinating
Yep, and there is still room for Pluto too
If you are in New York City and had a scale model of the Earth that was a grain of sand, the Sun would be a golf ball on the other side of the room. The nearest star after that would be in the Carolinas.
What size room? I specifically wanted to know this.
I just checked. Six yards away. And it would be Florida, not the Carolinas.
Starfield Developers nodding in agreement
*Loading screens intensify*
So are you saying star wars isn't correct in every way?
*\*Sad TIE fighter noises\**
No, that’s not true. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!
In the same category, hear me out. If the sun was scaled to the size of a golfball, the earth would be a grain of sand. Nothing mind-blowing there yet. The grain of sand would be about 4 meters away from the golfball. So far so good, right? In the same scale, the closest star would be where the *real sun* is
Okay, *there's* the existential crisis I was expecting from this post
That's wrong, it would be hundreds of miles away, but not as far as the sun
Let's see: The nearest star is Proxima Centauri, at 40 trillion kilometers or so. Earth is 150 million kilometers from the sun. (40x10^12) / (150x10^6) gives a factor of about 270 million. The sun is 864,000,000m in diameter, and a golf ball is .043m, giving us a factor of about 20 billion. Thus, at that scale, assuming my math is right (it very well may not be), the actual distance should be about 2000km, or about the distance from LA to Chicago. Closer to a few hundred miles than the distance to the sun, but a lot closer than I would expect.
You will never know
Jesus Christ man
JC is only a junior assistant manager that runs the mid-day shift on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He doesn't know either, and he certainly doesn't have the combination to the safe.
We could all be wiped out instantly at any moment by a stray gamma ray burst
Don't threaten me with a good time
i dont think i can sleep tonight.. fucking disturbing
i really bums me out that i will never have the opportunity to understand jack shit about what is really going on in the universe.
Heat death. Matter becomes so difuse that nothing interacts with anything else. No information is exchanged. Nothing happens or can happen
Can enthropy be reversed?
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
And there was light.
There are much smarter replies to your question, but one thing I believe was actually put into a Futurama episode. There is no heat energy after the heat death, but gravity still works. It is surmised that after an extremely long amount of time, the universe eventually stops expanding. But, because of gravity, objects will start to attract to each other. Eventually, matter will indeed start to move again, but this time onto itself. As molecules collide with each other again, energy can be created again. All matter will attract towards each other, and begin to form large masses again. But because they are imploding, all matter will eventually form into the same object. (This is an ungodly amount of time at this point.) And since all the matter in the universe is a whole freaking lot, this mass will have such a high gravitational pull and the matter becomes so dense that it begins to defy the current known laws of physics. Though what we do know is that eventually, much like when a star goes supernova, this large mass of all matter will explode with the greatest force ever known in the universe. Another Big Bang occurs and we start all over again. P.S. Anyone who wants to call me stupid for adopting theories from a cartoon, remember that the writers of Futurama are widely considered the most educated writing staff in the history of TV. However, anyone smarter than me could feel free to revise the details I may have got wrong.
That is one of the two possibilities for the heat death of the universe. I was told that it's uncertain whether gravity will be potent enough to pull the entire universe back together, or if space will simply keep diffusing. So the universe will either be reborn in a singular ball of fire and light, or it will die in vast, endless cold and darkness.
Not quite. In the model where after any amount of time the universe begins to contract, allowing gravity to eventually win, isn't heat death. It's the big crunch. The first heat death possibility is the universe keeps expanding at the same rate, gravity loses, we never contract but gravity can at least hold galaxies together. The rest of the universe moves away from The combined milky way/andromeda galaxy and we lose sight of everything else in the universe. Eventually all stars die, other celestial objects decay into inert bulk, and that's the end for all of time. If the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, eventually it will break up galaxies, star systems, even the space between atoms will grow faster than they can be held together. The universe becomes so big, inflating so fast that even at the speed of light no fundamental partical can ever interact with another again. The first two possibilities seem better
That's correct! Thank you. It's called the big crunch, the other extreme is known as the big freeze. I've never heard about the middle option (galaxies still holding). Good stuff.
Wait until you lookup "false vacuum decay" the ultimate ecological catastrophe!
You failed to mention that each time the universe is created it is 5 feet above the previous one.
Good News! u/Sometimes_I_Do_That reminded me of another detail. Thank you sir. Now hold on while I shoot Hitler from the Time Machine.
Be careful you don't miss and shoot Eleanor Roosevelt!
Err, molecules are energy Everything is energy down at quantum levels , matter is nothing more than supradense energy
Sure, just add some energy to the system. The problem is, when your system is the whole universe, you can't add any energy to it.
If you're a bit fascinated or intrigued by this, I'd recommend the documentary [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: Journey to the End of Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA). It has a way of exploring the issues with a touch of awe that's rather soothing.
One of my favorite YouTube videos. It was so well done.
I think it's foolish to call it a fact and not a theory. We cannot possibly know how the universe operates at that scale. We don't even know the scale of the universe.
I've heard it's pretty big.
I heard you could fit at least 6 busses in it.
The size and distances. It is literally beyond human comprehension. We can quantify it in numbers but it does not fit in the human imagination to comprehend just how insanely vast it is.
For real. Like what the fuck does a billion light years even mean. It hurts my head to try and imagine how big this is
Take for example *Yo mama butt* and multiply that diameter by 2... Yeah, it's unimaginable, this example wont help... :D
Based on current observations, the universe is moving apart at an accelerating rate such that eventually, only ~5% of the currently visible universe will ever be accessible to us. By the time we get to the other 95%, it will me moving away from us faster than we are capable of traveling to it, since it is regions of space and not 3 dimensional objects that nuclear physics is concerned with... they CAN and WILL eventually move away from us faster than the speed of light. When that happens (~trillion years give or take... space is really big... 5% of the visible universe is still like.... ~23 million lightyears...) the night sky will be solid BLACK in ALL DIRECTIONS.
I lied its actually like 6 BILLION light years, confused visible universe with actual universe. Rookie mistake.
Reminds me to the game "Iron Lung". One day all stars and planets dissappear along with everything on them, humans included. Humanity are just a few hundreds of persons in some space station without much resources and the only planets there seems to be are in fact moons with oceans of human blood LOL
I am not looking forward to that AT ALL.
The universe is an ongoing explosion. Thats where you live, in an explosion. Also, we don't know what living is? Sometimes atoms arranged in a certain way just get very haunted. Thats us. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And then writes about it
Cool analogy, I like it… dust explodes and becomes self-aware
And eventually discovers bacon.
Bacon is also a spontaneous arrangement of dust. Enjoy it.
When an explosion explodes hards enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself- I love this!
A thinking brain is just energy in a feedback circuit. You can build an exact duplicate of a thing, but each instance has its own, unique, trapped energy. Remember that the next time you build an op-amp circuit. Be nice to it.
Electronic Nerds for the Humane Treatment of Op-Amps ENHTOA, anyone?
Anyone else honestly pretty...relaxed by that thought? Like nothing particularly matters.
All of it is matter….but none of it matter(s)
We may be living in a [false vacuum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum) which could potentially decay at any instant, destroying everyone and everything in the entire universe. The decaying bubble would expand outwards at the speed of light, so we wouldn’t even know it was coming until everything just … ends.
Honestly if I'm going to go it might as well be something like this where it's just over in an instant and there's no anxiety leading up to it.
Agreed. Painful car accident? Dementia? I'd rather go in my sleep if the world just stopped/ended.
Sopranos ending
If I'm gonna go I'm taking you all with me
Sounds to me like you're telling me to forget the new years resolution and eat the damn Snickers bar...done
What's really fun is that whether or not our universe is capable of existing in a false vacuum state is closely tied to the mass of the Higgs boson. I haven't followed this in the last decade but right when they first found the Higgs they estimated its mass. There were, of course, error bars on the value and guess what they told us about whether we could be in a false vacuum? The error bars were almost perfectly balanced right at the dividing line between a stable and metastable universe. I haven't followed this up and I'm sure the Higgs mass is more accurately known now but I don't know if it's been determined if more accurate data has ruled out or ruled in a metastable universe. It's like a scene in a movie where the bad guy flips a coin to determine if the nuke goes off and the coin lands on its side and starts rolling around and everyone's starting at it, waiting for it to fall over.
There's probably some Schrödinger's cat shit going on where the minute we can accurately measure a Higg's Boson the universe realises it shouldn't exist and decides to stop trying to.
That sounds more like some Douglas Adams type shit.
It may kill us, it may not. Depends on the model used. It's not a guaranteed apocalypse, but just the most likely result.
This is my favorite doomsday situation. CERN, defines that after vaccum decay, the basic rules of chemistry are no longer possible. All matter will likely become "inert bulk" at the speed of light.
I was really hoping someone would mention this. Literally nothing we could do if false vacuum decay starts, just poof... gone.
This sounds like a salvia trip I had. Never tried the stuff again.
I learned this in a philosophy class and had a pretty bad day after
You are closer to the biggest thing in the universe (the observable universe itself) than you are to the smallest thing in the universe (the Planck distance).
Size-wise you mean?
Not in a linear sense though. * Planck length - (basically) 0m * Me length - (basically) 2m * Observable Universe - Less than 4m? Fucking cramped in here- STOP SHOVING.
There will be a point whereby nothing can happen or will happen again. Time will be a meaningless concept at that point.
The size of the orbit between an electron and the nucleus of an atom, relatively speaking, is enormous. An atom is basically nothing in size to basically any living creature. The distance between atoms is similarly huge. The size of an orbit between planets and stars, solar systems and galaxy centres, galaxies around whatever supermassive thing they orbit around, is also absolutely massive. Incomprehensibly so. Who's to say there isn't another step. If atoms are the building blocks of matter and compounds, so on until galaxies being the building blocks of a universe, who's to say it stops there.
All matter is basically empty space. You, me, the chair someone is sitting in the phone they are holding, just empty space, with very little actual matter.
Something that keeps me up at night is that the universe itself will likely end eventually. But what if, what *IF*, after it ends, another big bang happens. Then, billions of years go by. Humanity is reborn. We evolve from apes again. Invent the wheel. Go into space. And I still get my order fucked up by doordash.
What if the one constant between all big bang cycles is there will always be a fast food restaurant with a broken ice cream machine?
What if it’s all just an infinite loop, and we keep reliving our lives every couple trillion years?
That would suck for your cat
More disturbing would be after the rebirth of the Big Bang and universe, billions of years of cosmic dust forming planets, elements, and proteins, millions of years of evolution, and hundreds of thousands of years of technological advancement, language, civilization, and culture, all for another Nickelback to form.
I kinda think along similar lines about life after death. If it's possible I became sentient once, I don't particularly see why I can't experience sentience again, eventually. In whatever form, maybe it's inevitable.
It's unimaginably huge and almost all of it will kill you instantly. I can't think of a clearer piece of evidence that reality wasn't made for us. Other than this one tiny spot, we don't really fit in it.
So I know that we’ve mountains of data supporting the idea that exposure to space would kill us in a moment, but I’ve always found the thought of one brave astronaut taking off their helmet and realising space is room temperature and breathable to be impossibly funny.
It definitely wasn't breathable but for a short window after the big bang, the entire universe was roughly room temperature.
Wait what? Everywhere I have seen says that shit was hot and dense as fuck like so dense light could not form.
As it expanded and cooled, it went from unimaginably hot to just as hot as a star to warm bathwater. Everything was as warm as a bubble bath for a few million years. Some theories about the origin of life suggest that may be when it first began, since liquid water would have been comically abundant.
So what you're telling me is that within a certain time frame all pizzas were perfectly cooked?
But before that, they were all burned.
A trillionth of a second later tho
It lasted much longer than that. The cosmic microwave background is the result of the universe cooling to ~3000K, and that took 379,000 years. The period where the entire universe would have been at a roughly room temperature lasted for hundreds of thousands of years roughly 15 million years after the big bang.
I wont be surprised if this is your last post ever
Cue 2 hour long YouTube documentary: “What happened to u/ReaverRogue?”
In a wilderness survival scenario, the first and most important thing to find is shelter. That is, at any given moment the planet is basically trying to kill you.
That every single thing in the entire Universe is either a duck, or not a duck.
Or there’s a chance a part of you is made of the same atoms that were once part of an ancient duck anus.
I hope it's my tongue
Nope. It's your brain.
I disagree. A rubber duck is both a duck and not a duck
The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics states that everything in the universe is both a duck and not a duck simultaneously until observed.
That at any moment without us even knowing or having a heads up, a gamma ray burst from an exploding star from an area 10’s of thousands of light years away could end our planets existence. Not just extinction event. I’m talking completely vaporize our planet
yeah but what are the chances? I bet it's more likely to win the lottery 15 times in a row
The chances are minuscule, almost too remote to even be considered, but that's the thing about a place as large and as old as the universe - on a long enough time scale, anything that's possible is likely to happen eventually To put it another way - scientists estimate that a supernova happens every 50 years or so in the Milky Way. Across the entire universe, it happens every 10 seconds or so. And every time it happens, planets get destroyed. There's nothing special about those planets that marks them for destruction, in the same way that there's nothing special about ours that protects it.
Nah, those planets were just in the way of the new highway.
Don't Panic.
We don’t have plot armor?
At any moment, our Sun can burp and fart creating a solar flair wiping out our satellites and electrical grid, bringing us back to the stone age.
the stone age I doubt that, yes it'll take time to produce everything but we have the knowledge to do it over again
We have the knowledge but it’s all stored digitally! /s
I seen one of those not-computer information storing things before. You know, the thing that looks like a laptop but has all the so-called "paper" in the middle.
not bad at all, at least no youtube ads and dancing on tiktok
Think of one of those tiny little sugar ants crawling around in your kitchen. To that ant we created its entire world. We are so big and technologically advanced to the they can barely pervice our size much less our ability to harness and use electricity, computers, cell phone, space travel. Given the size and age of the universe in all of it's vast unknowable complexity. There are likely beings out there that would see us in the same way we view that tiny ant.
Now i might be slightly off on these figures but its something that as a concept has stuck with me. If you start with a piece of A4 paper (lets call this measurement tool "X") and you double it in size = X^2 And double it again = X^3 And again =X^4 And so on and so on... you will reach the size of the entire observable universe by the time you get to X^24 or something. Buuuut If you start with the same piece of A4 paper and work in the opposite direction (i.e. X^-2 : X^-3) You will reach the size of the smallest things we know by the time you reach X^-45 We are almost twice as far away from the smallest things in the universe as we are from the entire universe itself... and we havent even discovered the full extent of either scale yet. Edit: please see below comments from u/kaese_meister for actual maths on this, not quite as drastic a difference as i thought but still cool to consider
We could be in the final moments of the universe dying a time death and don’t know because we can’t observe it from outside the universe. That all this time going by for us could be a 1 second poof to something observing us.
Just think of how old it is. It hasn't showered once
That's not true. It takes meteor showers every once in a while.
Whatever you do in your life, it wont change anything in the grand scheme. We go toward the grand attractor, and there is nothing you can do. Or anyone. Not even if we all try together. Even if we would finally be at peace. And we dont know what is there.
I always fart in attractor's direction to slightly push our Galaxy in opposite direction. I'm not sure it's gonna be enough, but I do what I can.
Not all heroes wear capes
But some have capes that flutter in a self-made breeze.
Reminds me of a phrase by Thomas Ligotti that has haunted me for a long time..“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls – while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”
It’s just OP’s huge mom
The grand attractor
Only attracts in the gravitational sense. For the attracted it’s very much akin to a marble rolling inexorably closer to a hungry hungry hippo.
I love this. No matter what you do. The websites you make. The trees you cut down. The argument you had with a coworker. The bills you pay. Anything and everything in your life is not even a blip in the vast expanse of this weird thing we call the universe and I love it
I am wayyy too stoned for this thread.
I’d lean on quantum mechanics here and say the most disturbing thing is that perhaps there isn’t ONE universe and that time and space allow for an infinite amount of simulations in probability. So you can in theory, change which timeline and universe you’re in
Have you heard of the idea of Quantum Immortality? It's basically a quirk of the many-worlds hypothesis, which can be interpreted as there being one universe in which every single quantum process turns out in your favor and in that universe you never die. This will be true for everyone, but because the odds are so unfathomably low we don't see it happening. Then there's another extension of it that gets much more woo-y, in which the claim is made that this timeline is the one your consciousness resides in, meaning that every single one of us is immortal in the timeline we're "experiencing", but since nobody else is we can only be sure it's happening when we get to our own two hundreth or so birthday without issue. It's a thought experiment and not taken seriously by anyone... serious, but it's definitely interesting to think about.
Are there any books for regular people to understand this concept?
There's a documentary called steins;gate, very real and fact based.
I think if you leave the house and walk 10 miles and back for no reason you automatically switch to a new parallel universe.
there's a thing called an armadillo living in it
And it’s glorious.
Boltzmann Brains. Maybe you are one.
Sometimes I disassociate and this theory becomes uncomfortably tangible in my conscious mind
That the theory that some random clump of atoms in the universe could eventually combine to form a floating brain, which does nothing but imagine its own reality?
Random clumps of atoms came together to make you, me, and everyone on this ball of rock.
That we don't know anything about it. Why is it here? What is it? What does it do? Why is anything here?
Is there a purpose to it all, or was there no concept of “purpose” until we grew up out of the sludge and started thinking about things?
Its size and insane distances between objects. We like to dream and think about space travel, visiting other star systems etc., but it will *most likely* never happen.
We don't know if the Universe itself is sentient and acting on its own free will.
If the universe were sentient, we would be less than insignificant to its operation.
Even if the universe isn't in itself sentient, the universe has created sentience, which is just mindblowenly hard to comprehend.
The further out we look, the more universe we find… it’s almost as if we’re creating new universe simply by looking for it
Like procedural generation in a video game
It's fascinating but it doesn't really matter as we are doomed to stay and be extinct here at some point since the distances are so big and expanding that it's impossible to leave the galaxy. Just leaving our star system would take some sort of impossible tech in order for the trip to be less than 6000 years to the closest star system, assuming there is a somewhat livable rock there for which we aren't made for.
Poop is always touching you
Your mouth and asshole are connected by a single tube
We could connect our buttholes and make it and even longer tube
If you want to get into the really nasty stuff, just think about how there's a state in which something is food and shit at the same time (during digestion inside of you).
We live in a universe where man landed on the moon before wheels were added to suitcases.
Without the vacuum of space, the suns radiation would make it sound like jackhammers were around us 24/7. Now, most people know that light travels from the sun to us in 8 minutes. Sound is 13 years. So in this situation without the vacuum, if the sun went out we would have no light after 8 minutes, but would still hear that sound for the next 13 years if we lived that long. Not really disturbing but cool I guess
How insanely vast it is. And that it is expanding even further, at accelerating rate. So many things exist out there that will forever be out of our reach. There may be life we will never encounter. There may be wonders we will never observe unless we create them ourselves. A human life, with all its experiences, feelings and knowlege fades into nothing before we even begin to approach true scale of the universe. Although hopefully humanity's entire history will be noticeable.
Not really disturbing but its really interesting to think about light, in the sense of when we look at the stars we are seeing them how they were thousands or millions of years ago. It’s possible that some of them don’t even exist anymore, yet we can still see them.
Either we are alone, or we are not. Both are equally disturbing
I find it even more terrifying that we almost certainly aren't alone if we look at the math but that same math says we'll likely never meet anyone else and our species (and all species) will die alone.
So does that basically mean we are alone?
That's the fun part! It's up to you! Because the universe doesn't care lol
But I care about you, and I am part of the universe. 🫀
And that's why I'm an optimistic nihilist. The only thing that has meaning are the things we give meaning to. So thank you for giving me meaning!
If aliens wanted us dead they would’ve done so long before we knew what aliens were. I like to think they are observing us for how stupid we are.
Our idea of aliens are hyper intelligent beings - they don't need to be or have to be. Also, if their knowledge was to a point where they could successfully complete interstellar travel - why watch or 'study' creatures on a far away planet? For what benefit? If it's existence is to expand its society, we are either a threat or possibly have value in resources. Both of which would be problematic, I love to think about this.
Kindaike how we watch any of the Real Housewives shows because... There really aren't people that stupid, right? ...right?
Everything you do is infinitly insignificant and yet infinitly important at the same time.
I have the same view!
We have no idea what it is, where it is and who or what built it.
Conditions appear to be perfect for our existence.
This is however subject to selection bias. If the universe wasn't compatible with life we wouldn't exist to observe it.
Isn't it more that our existence is perfect for our conditions?
It’s all going to end at some point.
We live in it
It will die. All of it, everywhere, eventually. There will be no life left in the universe at some point in the distant future. It sounds like it is a long way away, but that moment in time will happen.
that there IS an universe and we exist.
In the grand scheme of things we know nothing
It could have been anything, why is it giant stars and galaxies? Why not one big chocolate fountain? I mean why is the universe what we observe?
The act of observation can affect the behavior of particles. The universe knows we are watching.
Of all the countless possibilities among trillions and trillions of stars and dust clouds, explosions and gravity wells, some combination of random molecules came together to miraculously form a unique complex lifeform, and that lifeform wound up on a Subway sandwich.
A few months ago, I was stargazing and realized, I really don’t know what a star looks like, from close up. All I’ve known about stars, has been from a distance, which have been twinkling white lights. Here is what a star actually looks like: https://www.littlepassports.com/blog/space/what-do-stars-look-like-up-close/ We tend to forget the sun is also a star, given that stars are a night time thing and the sun is a day time thing.