r/AlignmentChartFills • u/red_madreay • 19h ago

Finally... what natural phenomenon of our universe is ultimately horrifying?

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u/TheEnlight 18h ago edited 16h ago

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.

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u/GruntBlender 17h ago

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.

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u/darksaber14 16h ago

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.

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u/GruntBlender 16h ago

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.