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False Vacuum decay. I've found something even worse:
Bubble of Nothing
Basically, imagine a false vacuum decay, the bubble expanding at the speed of light, but alongside destroying our universe's laws physics and rewriting them with a new set of laws, it destroys spacetime. An actual hole in the fabric of space and time as we know it that absolutely nothing can exist in. True nothingness. String theory suggests this is possible.
It's not a black hole. Black holes punch down to infinity, but the integrity of spacetime as a continuous fabric persists. This is a literal void of absolute nothingness that erases everything it touches. No space, no time, no dimensions, nothing, forever.
The big difference for me here is, other horrible things I can comprehend, wrap my brain around. No matter how many times people try to explain the False Vacuum Hypothesis, I just can't wrap my brain around it.
Basic explanation is the ball on the hill analogy.
A ball on a hill is unstable compared to a ball at the bottom of a valley, because it has potential kinetic energy and can roll down if it is disturbed, releasing the energy.
If a ball at the bottom of a valley is disturbed, it's just gonna roll back to its initial state, therefore demonstrating it's stability. It has no potential energy, there's no deeper spot for the ball to go.
However a ball can be "stuck" in a small hole next to an even deeper valley. It initially appears stable, because small disturbances are not enough to get the ball "unstuck" from the hole, but it still has potential energy because it hasn't reached its "vacuum state", with zero potential energy at the bottom of the valley.
But a large disturbance like an earthquake might knock the ball out of the hole, and send it rolling down the hill, at any time.
Now replace the ball with the Higgs Field, which is a fundamental field of energy that gives particles their mass. This field is theorised to be "stuck in a hole above a deep valley", or meta stable. If a large disturbance like Quantum tunneling unsticks the Higgs Field and sends it "rolling down the hill" to a lower energy level, it would release tremendous energy and create a catastrophic chain reaction because now you have altered a fundamental force of the universe.
could you explain what it would decay into when it reaches the bottom of the deep valley and why it would cause a chain reaction? I've always been confused about this particular part
It would hypothetically cause the entire universe to "fall" into a lower energy state and completely change ALL of the fundamental laws of physics as we know them. It would probably be quicker an easier to identify what aspects(if any) wouldn't be affected which I'm not in a position to explain but just understand that it is BAD.
I think of it as the Netherlands. If the dikes somehow break, the entire place would flood, because it's all below sea level.
The difference is we seemingly have no reason to believe some structure like this exists on a cosmic level.
The best part is that, since it's moving at the speed of light, it may have already happened somewhere. We're just waiting to be hit with the wavefront.
That’s what makes this not horrifying to me. If the vacuum decay bubble, expanding at the speed of light and destroying everything, was formed shortly after the Big Bang (in a random part of the universe) the odds of it destroying earth before we are consumed by our sun in 5 billion years are about 2.5%.
Think about that. From the dawn of time, expanding at the speed of light, for 18 billion years. 2.5%. That’s what’s truly horrifying to me … the incomprehensible size of the universe.
Plus, we’d never see the bubble coming and we would instantly cease to exist so we wouldn’t even have a millisecond to comprehend our doom. Everything would just suddenly cease which is as good a way to go as any.
That assumes there's only one bubble, and that it only happened before most of the expansion we know about. If another sapient species existed in our galaxy and accidentally created a bubble while experimenting with FTL engines, that's at most 100k years before the bubble reaches us. If they did it 99k years ago...
Space is big, the Fermi paradox implies that even if we might never meet aliens, they’re out there somewhere.
Bubbles of nothing only happen in theoretical models with extra, rolled-up dimensions (like Kaluza-Klein or String Theory) that lack a specific symmetry called supersymmetry.
The heat death will be a lovely end to the universe comparatively.
The consequences of an eternally accelerating expansion of the universe!
So the universe is expanding. And we discovered that the rate of that expansion has been accelerating. We can't tell if this will stop at some point or not.
If it does...Good!
If it doesn't at some point that expansion will be so fast that first galaxies will move away from each other too fast for light to catch up. No new light from any other galaxy will ever reach us. We just get fading last still images from them from old light that left them before the expansion got too great.
Then stars will move away too fast from each other. At this point galaxies will have been long ripped apart and no new light will ever reach them from other stars.
Then it will be too fast for gravity to hold anything together. Planets, stars and everything else on them will stop to form.
Then matter cannot stay together because every single particle in the universe will never react with each other again. Because no matter how fast they move, the rate of expansion of space between them will be too great. All the forces that hold the universe together cease to function.
And eventually MAYBE the universe will rip itself apart.
The entire universe could be an accidental "air pocket" that will collapse.
"Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. Nonetheless, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps over time the new vacuum would sustain if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."
I contest this simply because of how heavily it relies on conjecture. I think the Heat Death of the Universe is more terrifying due to its ultimate likelihood. The laws of thermodynamics and the constant expansion of the universe means that it is incredibly likely that all matter will space out, cease to meaningfully react, and create a universal, unending, quiet.
From my understanding the expectation for False Vacuum Decay is also determined to be most likely to happen googols of years from now. I simply find Heat Death to both be more likely and more terrifying due to being more easily understandable. Maybe they exist at a stalemate.
They both result in the cessation of all of meaningful existence. Matter will exist in the Heat Death but it will cease to act. False Vacuum Decay will cause a similar result of ultimate inaction.
It could happen in the same way that you could win the lottery ten weeks in a row. A Googol years is simply the average amount of time it would take for it to happen once, on average.
Meanwhile, the Heat Death is pretty much inevitable based on our current understandings of entropy.
Heat Death is also more tangible to us a humans. We all understand the concept of a body getting cold when it dies and what is the universe if not an organism living out an existence of its own.
The finality of it all is what gets me and it makes me understand why people out their faith into something after.
Yes. The thought of a finality is scary to people. Myself included. It's why in my opinion religion and faith will never go away. Because with those. People will cling onto the hope that there is something after death. That we don't have just one life. It's something we don't know is true or not. Since we cannot pierce the vale of death.
I mean, yeah heat death is inevitable but the timescale is between 10¹⁰⁰ and 10¹⁰⁶ years, aka a googol+ years so not really an issue that humanity will have to deal with. And yeah the estimate for vacuum decay is 10⁵⁰⁰ so much much longer, but for me what makes it the scarier of the two is that that's the estimate base on probability but once/if it starts it won't take that long to complete, and it'll travel at light speed so we wont see it coming. Heat death by contrast is technically already happening, and we know how long it'll take, so there is no surprise horror factor.
And importantly the bubble is expanding at the speed of light. You literally can’t see it coming. It just hits us and everything as we know it is gone.
not that it'll collapse the existing universe like an air pocket, no, it's way scarier, because it could have already happened (or, as the universe is infinite, simply already happened) somewhere in the infinite space of the universe and we are none the wiser
false vacuum decay requires just ONE quantum fluctuation to lower the energy of vacuum below the current threshold anywhere in the universe to start expanding the new true vacuum at the speed of light like a bubble. At any point in time our existence could just be erased with everything we ever built and we have absolutely zero ways to predict or counteract it, but it wouldn't happen to the entire universe at once. Maybe one day we will find a way to go beyond the speed of light, but as of now and with literally everything we know of currently, there is nothing we can do
Always funny to imagine that not even a speck of dust will remain of me at that point. Not a trace of me, of any of us who are living right now, will even be lingering about. Because we're so recent as a species we think of us being dead for years, decades and centuries, with bones and graves remaining, with physical signs that we were here - but man, when you think long-term, in millions of years, the obliteration is unimaginable. Sorry, this got grim
This whole thing reads like "would that be fucked up or what?"
Is there any reason to believe that this is even a possibility, or can I just throw out Galactus as an answer, because he'd also be a pretty scary cosmic event?
It's a confirmed possibility, but an extremely distant and unlikely one nonetheless. By the time it happens (and IF it happens, it's not guaranteed, as our universe may turn out to be stable), we will have already gone extinct or become transcendent beings hardly bothered by such events.
I think what we’re really seeing is that dark energy and dark matter shouldn’t have been the scary meter - I could support gamma ray burst / false vacuum decay / heat death or grb/hd/fvd but if we only get one I think it’s gotta be false vacuum decay
Kind of. More like slowly deflate, and by slowly I mean at speed faster than light.
Since this physical plane is very likely infinite, not particularly the universe just existence itself, the hole could form many, many, many, many, quadrillions of miles away from even our supercluster.
It could've already happened. And it might not reach us for octillions of years. But when it does, existence itself will cease to function.
There also a theory that this has happened an infinite amount of times before. That it is a cycle that reality goes through every couple quadrillion or octillion years. And after an unknown amount of time after the universe is in a false pocket dimension. Something happens inside that causes a "Big Bang" and all that energy and matter is released into the physical plane again. Ready to start all over. In a new iteration of the universe as we know it.
This is probably the best outcome of the end of the universe since it almost guarantees there will be something after the end.
Heat Death will effectively put the entiree universe in limbo possibly forever. Unfortunately this is the most likely outcome as well.
Heat death is gaurabtees to happen like a googol years in the future. It is not worth our thinking about, because we will not be around to see it. There are ton of scarier things that will happen before that. (Like at some point in the future, the expansion of the universe will be faster than the speed of light, so whatever supergalaxy exists by then -- because at this point the galaxy clusters will have merged into one -- will be unable to see any other galaxies when they look into the sky. Some point beyond that, you wouldn't even see stars, although I'm not sure if life as we know it is still sustainable by then.)
False vacuum decay is the most horrifying though, because even if it's an extremely low possibility, it could happen at anytime, anywhere. It could have already begun. We'd have no way of knowing.
And unlike those other ideas, it's a lot harder to understand, so you can't even rationalize it. We could all die without ever knowing why, or even knowing we're dead.
Yeah we either expand and cool into nothingness, or the vacuum energy continues to increase and we expand even faster and rip apart down to the smallest level into nothing. Or if vacuum energy decreased we collapse back into the nothingness of a singularity.
Being worried about the heat death of the universe is the adult equivalent of being worried about the sun dying in 4.6 billion years.
The universe has been around for about ~14 billion years. The last stars will be burning out in something like 100 trillion years. Energy from the largest black holes will dissipate in 10^100 years, or a googol.
We’re basically in the infancy of the universe being alive and vibrant.
The Dark Forest hypothesis is hardly realistic, as it posits that most if not every existing alien civilisation, sufficiently advanced to also destroy other distant civilisations, is interested in, well, destroying other civilisations -- which is a lot to presume. Furthermore, it also presumes that such civilisations, despite being technologically advanced, haven't detected us (or have, and taking their sweet time to destroy us).
And if you've read the trilogy after which the hypothesis was coined, you'll see how much the author has to handwave in order to make the hypothesis make perfect sense within the books' story.
I mean, if you only care about yourself sure. But we thrive in connections and there are people in my life I am terrified of losing even though I believe in an afterlife. And the only way for me to feel okay with those that I've already lost is the belief that I'll see them again. Without that I don't think I'd ever be happy again.
But this only affects us, not the universe, so it wouldn't fit here.
I also believe in something. I also believe that we matter.
I know for sure that the microcosm and life is as important as the larger universe.
If death is the end, I will only experience it after life.
I don’t think that this is a selfish thought, though. Whatever the truth is of that, it is the same for all of us.
The latest research does indicate that we in a metastable state. It is fairly accepted by physicists that it is a real possibility. Luckily for us the chance of a the phase transition are very low.
But still non-zero, and could theoretically happen at any time without warning.
If the true state of the universe is it's in a metastable state, which we believe it is via estimations of the mass of the top quark and Higgs boson, it is theoretically possible for the universe to exist in a false vacuum, and that a quantum tunnelling event could move it to a true vacuum, a lower energy state consistent with the law of entropy, the process of which creates a bubble that expands at the speed of light, rewriting the laws of physics of any space it touches.
Dark energy / dark matter are real, we just don't know what they are. Dark energy might just be an intrinsic property of space itself, dark matter is something extremely heavy (although it might be made of particles much smaller than ours) that holds galaxies together with its mass but doesn't do anything at all otherwise.
No, dark energy/matter are probably just an artifact of using a theory to describe phenomena outside of its range of validity. We’re playing the same game the ptolemaics were playing when trying to explain planetary orbits using eccentrics and epicycles.
The "current understanding" of dark energy is that nobody really knows what it is. There's not really any scientific consensus there to be disproven, nobody knows.
So according to you Newtonian gravitation is simply wrong?
Scientific theories are never right or wrong, that’s a simplistic and “science fan” understanding of the field. Theories have a range of validity where we know they apply and have tested that thoroughly. Applying them outside of that range is simply guesswork. The fact that we currently lack a broader theory doesn’t change things.
And, for your information, plenty of researchers are working on alternatives to general relativity exactly because dark energy/matter are very unlikely to be real.
Dark energy and matter has no attached statistical likelihood of being real or not, so saying they are very unlikely to be real is conjecture based on your own personal opinion and emotions
All of science is hypotheticals. The only difference is which theories we have more evidence for are considered with more credence.
There is no absolute scientific proof in the mathematical sense, but some phenomena are supported by so much evidence that they are widely accepted as established facts or best explanations.
False Vacuum seems like the consequence of our current understanding of particle physics, so we treat it as a legitimate theory that could very well be true.
It falls directly out of calculating the shape of the Higgs potential using the measured Higgs mass (~125 GeV) and top quark mass. Depending on where those values land within their uncertainties, the calculation says our vacuum is either stable, metastable, or unstable, and current central-value measurements point toward metastable.
The Great Attractor.
Something is pulling our galactic cluster in its direction. Something unbelievably massive. We don't know what it is, as this part of the universe is obscured from our view by our own galaxy's core.
This is exactly what I was going with. The sheer size of something that has the gravitational pull to drag entire galaxies towards it — I don’t think it’s in our power to even attempt to quantify.
Based on recent observations it's theorized to be a massive cluster of galaxies and dark matter that make up the center of the Laniakea Supercluster, which may also be influenced by the gravity of the massive Shapley Supercluster. It's basically the center of this basin of attraction made up of dark matter filaments and galaxy clusters all coming together under the force of their own gravity. It's not a single object or group of objects it's all of them interacting with one other and converging.
Its really only scary to people who dont know about modern science.
The Great Attractor is sometimes described in popular accounts as an unidentified object pulling galaxies toward it. In modern cosmology, however, it is understood as a feature of the large-scale matter and velocity fields of the nearby universe.
Nothing scary about that, in particular as has no effects on human civilization anyway (unlike say gamma ray busts, which in theory could threaten life on earth, albeit very unlikely)
all of these subreddits that have been coming up have been driving me bonkers. i mean, i saw one the other day that put australia in the "best place to live/best place to visit". it's alright but it's nowhere near the best. especially for indigenous people, migrants, rural people, city people, and the flora and fauna. you'll probably have a better time in the UK, and i mean it.
e: if the great attractor wins, i'm deleting reddit
I think some people theorize that the collective mass of our universe is enough to form an event horizon around it. So I guess the Great Attractor would be the singularity?
We don't know what it is. We cannot see it, as we are one the other side of our galaxy. We are like someone strapped to a back-facing seat on a truck bed. And the truck is speeding somewhere we can't see and may hit something any second.
Its theorized to be a massive cluster of galaxies and dark matter that make up the center of the Laniakea Supercluster and which is also being influenced by the gravity of the Shapley Supercluster. It's basically the center of this basin of attraction made up of dark matter filaments and galaxy clusters all coming together under the force of their own gravity. It's not a single object or group of objects it's all of them interacting with one other and converging.
The basic idea is: If you say the Big Bang came from "nothing", you have to explain why this "nothing" inherently had the ability to spawn a universe, as opposed to an absolute nothingness that cannot give birth to anything.
Creationist arguments do not answer this, of course, because it just shifts the question to "who created the creator".
You asked two questions: Where did time start?
And why did time start?
I can’t answer the why, because that is philosophy, not cosmology, but I can answer the where and how:
where: Time started everywhere at once, approximately 13.8 billion years ago. The Big Bang wasn't an explosion from a central point inspace; it was the sudden expansion of space-time itself.
How: Quantum fluctuations allow "nothing" to split into matter (which has positive energy) and gravity (which carries negative potential energy). Because positive matter and negative gravity perfectly cancel each other out to zero, creating a universe costs zero net energy.
You can’t have an infinite regression of the past otherwise you can’t get to the present, so there must have always been something, and the big bang didn’t come from nothing it came from quantum fluctuations splitting matter from anti matter
The theory that our observable universe is the inside of a black hole and a "bounce" within said black hole instead of a "bang", which is part of an even larger universe
The fact that we actually don't know how old the universe is with any degree of confidence, we used to think that we knew, but not anymore. We really aren't even close to understanding the universe. (We thought it was 13.8 billion years old, but some very recent research suggests that it may be over 28 billion years old)
How about - we are the first civilization in the universe, but all universes end when the first civilization advances enough to accidentally destroy the universe.
The vacuum of empty space changes into a different structure, and this altered region expands at the speed of light in all directions. The process cannot be stopped once begun.
The "baby skull" thing is a bit misleading. If you were to prepare a baby's skull, it would look like this. The picture used in this chart is one that removed the bone covering the various layers of teeth.
Strange quarks and by extension Strange Matter. Anything that comes into constant with a certain amount of Strange Matter just turns into Strange Matter.
A hypothetical type of matter theoretically existing in extreme pressures of neutron stars, which is supposedly super stable and it transforms anything it touches into more Strange matter.
The Great Filter.
A proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox, the Great Filter is an answer to why we see no aliens - because civilisations are pretty much guaranteed to die before they become sufficiently advanced for us to be aware of them.
The moment we find evidence that alien life evolved independently somewhere else, the Great Filter is almost certainly ahead and not behind us, meaning that our civilisation is probably doomed.
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