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tl;dr False Vacuum Decay
Maybe one day it will also tell us how worried we need to be about the Universe as we know it suddenly transforming into something else entirely.
I mean, really? we would never see it coming and, quite honestly, it sounds like a reasonable way to go - [poof; gone]. super cool science but as far as worry goes, there are many more painful and urgent issues to attend to in the here and now.
Hell, Republicans are doing a good job of that!
Duality of man
Do it, pussy
"In a 2005 paper published in Nature, as part of their investigation into global catastrophic risks, MIT physicist Max Tegmark and Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom calculate the natural risks of the destruction of the Earth at less than 1/109 per year from all natural (i.e. non-anthropogenic) events, including a transition to a lower vacuum state. They argue that due to observer selection effects, we might underestimate the chances of being destroyed by vacuum decay because any information about this event would reach us only at the instant when we too were destroyed."
Wouldn’t vacuum decay become permanently localized because it only travels at the speed of light?
The expansion of the universe happens everywhere all at once. So, once objects become far enough apart, the space between two objects can grow faster than the speed of light.
So, what’s to happen if a vacuum decay begins so far away that—even at the speed of light—it’ll never catch up to us?
torment nexus hours
I'm ready
I hope they stay at simulation
Maybe don't do that????
Won't happen to me. I use a real vacuum cleaner on my carpets.
By cleaning all the real vacuum away the ony thing that is left is false vacuum.
Do it
Pretty sure Greg Egan wrote a sci fi book about it.
This would be the ideal end TBH. No warning, no dread, no pain, no suffering, just one instant you're biology and the next instant you're physics.
It could be happening constantly at all times and we'll never know because consciousness only persists in the universes where it does not happen.
Its neat.
Its like pulling the plug on tge simulation