Speaker 1: Do me a favor. Just stop whatever you're doing for
a second. If you're driving, obviously, you know, keep your
eyes on the road, but just become aware of your
hands on the wheel. Or if you're at home, just
look at your hand. Hold it up.
Speaker 2: I'm looking at my hand now.
Speaker 1: Look around the room, the walls, the computer, the window,
Listen to the hum of the fridge, or I don't know,
the traffic outside. It all feels solid, right it does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels good, continuous, like it's all connected.
Speaker 1: Like it's the result of thirteen point eight billion years
of history leading right up to this.
Speaker 2: Exact moment exactly.
Speaker 1: Okay, So here's the question, and this is the question
that kept me up until about three in the morning
last night reading through this packet. How do you know,
I mean, mathematically statistically, that any of this existed five
seconds ago?
Speaker 2: You don't see.
Speaker 1: I hate that answer, I really do I know.
Speaker 2: But if we're being brutally honest, you could just popped
in new existence. Yeah, right now, this microsecond, fully formed,
fully formed, Yeah, through a head full of memories of
a breakfast you never ate, a childhood you never lived,
and a co host, well, co host, you've never actually
met before this very instant.
Speaker 1: And the worst part is, before I can even process
how completely insane that sounds, I might just dissolve back
into the void.
Speaker 2: Gone. It sounds like a paranoid delusion, I know, or
maybe a bad colleged philosophy paper. Right, but we have
a stack of scientific papers right here that suggests, mathematically speaking,
that very scenario might actually be well more likely than
the reality we think we're living in.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. I'm your host, and today we
are absolutely not looking at the wonder of the cosmos.
We are not talking about beautiful nebulas or the inspiring
spirit of exploration.
Speaker 2: No, today we're looking at the silence, the traps, the
mathematical dead ends.
Speaker 1: We've got a compilation here of what are essentially the
ten scariest space theories ever conceived we're pulling from. I mean,
it's everything quantum mechanics, spermodynamics, game theory.
Speaker 2: And the common thread running through all these documvinsays it's
terrifyingly simple.
Speaker 1: The universe is not a safe harbor, not at all.
Speaker 2: It's strictly indifferent to us, and in some of these
scenarios it might even be actively hostile.
Speaker 1: The old line from Nietzsche. Right, if you gaze long
into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you, and.
Speaker 2: The abyss is definitely staring back.
Speaker 1: But here's the kicker. And this is what makes this
so much more chilling than just telling ghost stories. These
are all valid scientific hypotheses, right.
Speaker 2: These aren't just you know, scary stories from the internet.
These theories are derived from the very same math we
use to build bridges to launch GPS satellites to power
our world.
Speaker 1: But when you apply that same math to the nature
of existence itself, you get.
Speaker 2: Some very very unsettling results.
Speaker 1: I've got to be honest, reading through these transcripts, it
felt like the more I understood, the less I wanted
to know. It's like keeling back the wallpaper of the
universe and just finding mold.
Speaker 2: That's a visceral image, yeah, but it's an accurate one.
The math doesn't care if we sleep well at night.
It just calculates.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this nightmare. We're going to walk through
ten theories that suggest the universe is a trap, or
a graveyard, or maybe a computer that's about to crash.
Speaker 2: Oh, we have to start with the most personal one,
the one that deals with the self.
Speaker 1: The nightmare of the self. This brings us straight to
the idea of Boltzmann brains, and I really want to
spend some time here because to get this you have
to understand something we all talk about but rarely define properly.
Speaker 2: Entropy exactly. This all goes back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an
Austrian physicist from the late eighteen hundreds. He was a
pioneer in what's called statistical mechanics. Okay, and to understand
why you might just be a brief, horrifying hallucination, you
have to understand the second law of thermodynamics, which.
Speaker 1: Is the one that says things always get messier.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: My bedroom is a perfect example.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, the universe tends towards disorder, towards high entropy.
The classic example is a coffee cup. There is only
one state where the cup is whole in sitting on
your table. That's a state of high order, low entropy.
But there are billions, trillions of possible states where that
cup is shattered in pieces on the floor.
Speaker 1: So it's just a matter of probability.
Speaker 2: Precisely, if you just shake up the universe you're gonna
get broken cups, not whole ones. Nature moves from order
to disorder. That is the arrow of time.
Speaker 1: The universe prefers the messy room. Got it?
Speaker 2: Okay, now here's where Boltzman's work gets scary. If the
universe is infinite, or if it lasts for an almost
infinite amount of time, eventually you get random fluctuations.
Speaker 1: A fluctuation explain what that means in this context, because
I'm thinking of like the stock market.
Speaker 2: Imagine a huge box filled with gas particles all bouncing
around randomly. They're usually spread out evenly. That's a high
entropy disorder, right, But if you wait long enough, and
I mean an unfathomable amount of time, just by pure
random chance, all those particles might happen to bounce into
one tiny corner of the box at the exact.
Speaker 1: Same time, eating a little pocket of order out of
all that chaos.
Speaker 2: Exactly a momentary, accidental structure. It's like the old saying
about a million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually writing Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm with you so far.
Speaker 2: But here is the catch that breaks reality. Writing Hamlet
is incredibly difficult. Writing a single word like they the
is easy, right. Complex arrangements of matter are statistically much, much,
much rare than simple ones. A whole universe like ours,
with billions of galaxies, consistent laws of physics, fossils in
the ground, and billions of human brains all interacting, that
is an incredibly high order state.
Speaker 1: It's statistically expensive.
Speaker 2: Astronomically, so the odds of an entire universe just fluctuating
into existence are practically zero. But what about the odds
of just.
Speaker 1: A brain forming a single brain.
Speaker 2: Just one brain floating in the void, complete with neurons
firing away.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see where you're going with this. A single
brain is It's a much simpler arrangement of matter than
an entire.
Speaker 2: Cosmo, drastically simpler. It requires far far less luck or
fluctuation to assemble a few pounds of gray matter than
it does to assemble thirteen point eight billion years of
coherent history.
Speaker 1: So if we're just playing the odds in an infinite universe.
Speaker 2: There should be way more Loan brains floating around on
the void than there are actual functioning universes with people.
Speaker 1: In them, Billions upon billions more. The Boltzmann brains should
vastly outnumber real humans.
Speaker 2: By an almost infinite margin.
Speaker 1: But wait a minute, I'm not a brain and a void.
I'm sitting in this chair. I have a body. I
have memories. I remember driving to the studio this morning.
I remember my tenth birthday party. A random brain wouldn't
have that history. Why not, because while because it just
popped into existence, it didn't live those things.
Speaker 2: But what are memories. They're just physical arrangements of neurons, right,
They're data encoded in wetwear. I guess if a random
fluctuation of particles can come together to form a brain,
it's just as easy for those particles to randomly arrange
themselves into the pattern of a brain that holds those memories. WHOA, Okay,
it's like a computer hard drive. You could have a
glitch that writes a whole bunch of junk data onto it.
This spontaneous brain comes preloaded, preloaded. It remembers being a child,
it remembers falling in love, it remembers driving to the studio.
But none of it ever happened. It is just a
random configuration of atoms that feels like a history.
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate form of gaslighting. So you're telling
me that statistically, it is more probable that I am
a piece of meat that appeared one second ago hallucinating
this entire conversation. Yeah, then it is that I am
a real person who lived a real life if we.
Speaker 2: Strictly follow the math of entropy in an internal universe. Yes, yes,
it's more problem. This is what physicists called the cognitive
instability problem.
Speaker 1: Cognitive instability, I like that term. It sounds better than
I might be crazy.
Speaker 2: It means we can't trust our own observations. If you're
a Boltzmann brain, you're looking at a universe that doesn't
actually exist. You see stars, it's a hallucination. You see
your hands, hallucination.
Speaker 1: A really tragic part of this theory, looking at the
notes here, is how long it lasts.
Speaker 2: Right, this arrangement is unbelievably unstable. The thermal noise of
the universe, the chaos, would take over almost instantly.
Speaker 1: So this brain, it exists just long enough to have
a single coherent thought like wait, what is this, and
then it just dissolves.
Speaker 2: Back into the void, a flicker of consciousness in an
eternity of chaos.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about a universe that could be filled
with these fleeting, lonely ghosts thinking their people just blinking
in and out of existence forever.
Speaker 2: And the really scary question is, why do you think
you're not one of them?
Speaker 1: Because I'm still here. I've been here for ten minutes now,
we've been having this conversation.
Speaker 2: But a Boltzmann brain would have the memory of the
last ten minutes planted in it at the moment of
its creation. You can't prove you haven't just arrived. There's
no test you can run.
Speaker 1: I hate this, I really really hate this theory. It
makes every single moment feel suspicious.
Speaker 2: Logical dead end. And physicists, by the way, they hate
it too. They are desperately trying to find reasons why
the math must be wrong, because if it's right, science
itself becomes impossible.
Speaker 1: How can you study a universe that's just a dream?
Speaker 2: You can't. Okay, I need to anchor myself. Let's for
the sake of my own sanity. Let's just assume that
I am real, that I have a body, and time
is moving forward.
Speaker 1: In a straight line, a safe assumption for the purposes
of this show.
Speaker 2: Let's move to the opposite problem. Then, the Boltzman brain
is about existing for just a microsecond. This next theory
is about existing for well, for way too long.
Speaker 1: Ah. Yes, quantum immortality.
Speaker 2: On the surface, it sounds like a superpower, right, quantum immortality,
who wouldn't want to live forever? But after reading the
source material here, this sounds like a curse, a literal hell.
Speaker 1: It is definitely not the kind of immortality you see
in movies with vampires or elves. This comes from the
many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was proposed by
a physicist named Hugh Everett back in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2: Right, many worlds. We've talked about this before, the idea
that reality is constantly branching off exactly.
Speaker 1: The basic idea is that every time a quantum event
has more than one possible outcome, like a particle spinning
up or spinning down, all of the outcomes actually have
The universe splits.
Speaker 2: Reality splits in one timeline the particle spins up. In
another parallel timeline it spins down.
Speaker 1: And since we're made of quantum particles, that supplies to
us in one timeline, I turn left, in another, I
turn right. Billions of branches every second.
Speaker 2: You got it. Now, let's raise the stakes. Let's introduce
a lethal event. The classic thought experiment is called quantum suicide.
But let's just use a simple traffic accident.
Speaker 1: Okay, I step off the curb and there's a bus
coming straight for me.
Speaker 2: In one branch reality, let's say it's a fifty to
fifty chance you react in time, You jump back, your
heart is pounding, but you're alive.
Speaker 1: And then the other fifty percent.
Speaker 2: You don't. You get hit, you die.
Speaker 1: So in half the possible worlds, I'm debt.
Speaker 2: To everyone else. Yes, your family in those worlds is
mourning you. They are planning your funeral. But here's the
absolute crux of this theory. What do you experience?
Speaker 1: Well, if I die, I experience nothing. It's just lights out,
game over exactly.
Speaker 2: You cannot experience your own non existence. Consciousness, by its
very definition, implies existence, So from your subjective point of view,
you will never ever see the game over screen.
Speaker 1: My awareness will always continue in the branch where I survived.
Speaker 2: Always, it has to ye, because that's the only branch
where there is a you left to do the observing.
Speaker 1: So I step off the curb, I see the bus
inches from my face. I hear the screech of the tires.
But then I will always find myself stumbling back onto
the sidewalk, heart racing, thinking wow, that.
Speaker 2: Was close exactly. You'd have no idea that in a
billion other universes you were just flattened. You just think
you got lucky.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I survived the bus, But eventually something else
has to get me, you know, old age, a heart attack, pneumonia,
And that's.
Speaker 2: Where it gets truly horrifying. The theory implies that, no
matter how improbable survival is, your consciousness must experience the
outcome where you live.
Speaker 1: Even if the chance of survival is like zero point
zero zero zero zero zero one percent.
Speaker 2: Even then, imagine you're playing Russian Roulette. You pull the trigger, Click,
you survive. In another universe, you don't, but your awareness continues, Click,
you survive again. In the many world's interpretation, there is
always a branch, no matter how unlikely, where the gun
jams or the bullet was a dud, where the firing
pin broke at that exact moment, and.
Speaker 1: I am forced by the laws of physics into that
improbable branch.
Speaker 2: You are statistically funneled into what's called the survivor timeline,
but you have to think about the cost of that cost.
You aren't living forever in a healthy twenty five year
old body. You are just not dying.
Speaker 1: Oh no.
Speaker 2: The source material we have calls this the survivor's prison.
Think about biological aging. In most timelines, your heart gives
out at each eighty five. But in the one timeline
where you simply can't cease to exist, what happens?
Speaker 1: I just keep aging.
Speaker 2: You might suffer a stroke that should be fatal, but
instead it just leaves you locked in. You might get
a cancer that should be terminal, but you just linger.
You become more and more decrepit, more damaged, but the
probability of death never quite hits one hundred percent. So
you are dragged forward in time against your will.
Speaker 1: So I become this ancient, withered thing, and you are
completely alone because everyone else I know they died.
Speaker 2: Everyone your parents, your partner, your children, your friends. They
don't have your subjective protection in your timeline to you.
They are subject to normal probability. They will get old,
they will get sick, they will die.
Speaker 1: So I'm just watching everyone I've ever loved perish one
by one while I'm stuck in the statistical anomaly of
a life.
Speaker 2: You would be the sole survivor of your generation, then
your century, than your millennium. And think about the world
you'd be living in. For you to survive something huge
like a global nuclear war or a massive asteroid.
Speaker 1: Impact, I'd have to be in the one freak timeline
where the bomb was a dud or the asteroid just
barely miss right.
Speaker 2: So the longer you live, the stranger and more improbable
your reality becomes. You'd be living in a world that
is essentially a statistical outlier, a weird, broken version of
Earth that just happens to be capable of sustaining your single,
agonizing life.
Speaker 1: It redefines survivor's guilt. It's not guilt, it's a punishment.
You're trapped in life.
Speaker 2: Death isn't inn escape under this framework, for the observer,
it is a mathematical impossibility. You just keep going.
Speaker 1: That is profoundly isolating. It almost makes me want to
be a Boltzmann brain again. At least that way I
get to dissolve.
Speaker 2: It's a real pick your poison situation. Yeah, instant dissolution
or eternal decay.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's enough about my internal existential crisis. I need
to look outward for a minute, because if we are
stuck here alive, surely there are neighbors. We look up
at the sky, we see billions of stars in our
galaxy alone. There has to be someone else out there
sharing this cosmic nightmare with us.
Speaker 2: And yet when we point our telescopes and our radio
dishes to the sky, we get nothing, just silence.
Speaker 1: The Fermi paradox. Where is everybody? We've got two theories
from our source material that try to answer this, and honestly,
both of them make me want to go lock my
front door and never come out.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the more cinematic one.
Speaker 1: The dark forest hypothesis.
Speaker 2: This is one of my favorites. It's absolutely terrifying, but
it's so elegant. It was popularized by the science fiction
author lu Sixon in his Three Body Problem series, but
the roots of it are in basic game theory.
Speaker 1: It completely reframes how we think about the universe. We
usually think of the cosmos as this big, empty ocean
full of islands to explore, and.
Speaker 2: This theory says, no, that's wrong. The universe is a
dark forest at night.
Speaker 1: And every civilization is a hunter, a silent hunter creeping
through the trees.
Speaker 2: The theory works on a few simple axioms. First, survival
is the primary need of any civilization.
Speaker 1: Makes sense.
Speaker 2: Second, civilizations constantly grow and expand, but the total amount
of resources in the universe is finite.
Speaker 1: Okay, sounds like basic evolution survival of the fittest on
a cosmic scale.
Speaker 2: But then you have to add two more variables, the
chain of suspicion and technological explosion.
Speaker 1: The chain of suspicion, that's the game theory part, right.
Speaker 2: If you're a hunter and you see another hunter in
the dark forest, sure you cannot know their true intentions.
You can't read their mind. They might be friendly, they
might be hostile. You just don't know.
Speaker 1: And the vast distances of space make it worse. Even
if they send a message saying we come in peace.
By the time I get it and reply, hundreds or
thousands of years could have.
Speaker 2: Passed, and in that time their entire culture could have changed.
They might be peaceful now, but what about in a
thousand years or maybe they're lying. It creates an unbreakable
chain of suspicion.
Speaker 1: So what's the only safe move?
Speaker 2: The only safe move is to assume the worst. If
you assume that they're friendly and you're wrong, your civilization
is exterminated. If you assume their hostle and you shoot first,
you survive.
Speaker 1: So the math says, shoot first.
Speaker 2: It's not even about malice or hate. It's just a
preemptive strike based on cold, hard logic. You eliminate any
potential threat before it has a chance to eliminate you.
You clean the board.
Speaker 1: So the reason the universe is silent isn't because there's
no life out there.
Speaker 2: It's because everyone is hiding the smart ones.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Silence is survival. Making any noise is suicide.
Speaker 2: Every civilization that makes it to a certain level of
technology eventually realizes that the universe is a dark forest
full of armed hunters. So they shut up. They turn
off their broadcasts, They try to be invisible, because if
you snap a twig, if you light a.
Speaker 1: Fire, that the predators come.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The silence isn't empty. It's a choice, a terrified choice.
Speaker 1: And then there's us, humanity. What have we been doing
for the last seventy eighty years.
Speaker 2: We've been screaming at the top of our lungs, radio signals,
TV broadcasts and military radar sent the au Recibo message
a literal map to our solar system out into deep space.
We put diagrams of ourselves and our location on the
voyager probes.
Speaker 1: We're like a toddler who's wandered into a forest full
of wolves, shouting here I am, while banging pots and
pans together.
Speaker 2: It's a chilling image, isn't it. The thought that the
silence isn't empty. It's it's expectant. They're out there and
they're listening.
Speaker 1: So why haven't we been wiped out yet?
Speaker 2: The source material suggests two terrifying possibilities. One, our signals
simply haven't reached a hunter yet. Or two, the bullet
is already on its way. The bullet a relativistic kill vehicle,
a weapon moving it, say ninety nine point nine percent
the speed of light. We would have absolutely no warning.
We would never see it coming until the moment it
hits us. We might have rung the dinner bell fifty
years ago and the predators just closing the distance now, which.
Speaker 1: Brings us to the other main explanation for the silence.
Maybe there aren't any hunters. Maybe everyone is just dead.
Speaker 2: This is the great filter, right.
Speaker 1: This goes back to Enrico Fermi's original question. If the
universe is ancient and vast, it should be teeming with
alien civilizations. Since we don't see any, something must be
stopping them.
Speaker 2: The filter, some kind of insurmountable barrier or hurdle that
prevents life from reaching a starfaring stage.
Speaker 1: The really scary question here, the one that this all
hinges on, is where is the filter? Is it behind
us in our past or is it still ahead of
us in our future?
Speaker 2: This is the absolute crucial distinction. If the filter is
behind us, that is fantastic news.
Speaker 1: Explain why that's good news.
Speaker 2: It would mean that the hard part was something we've
already accomplished. Maybe the initial jump from non life to
life is incredibly vanishingly rare. Maybe the evolution from a
single celled organism to a complex, multi celled creature is
a one in a trillion shot.
Speaker 1: So if the filter is behind us, it means we
are special. We're the first ones. We won the cosmic
lottery exactly.
Speaker 2: The universe is an empty open frontier just waiting for us.
Speaker 1: The source material we've been looking at says that's pretty unlikely.
Speaker 2: It does. The evidence points against it. Life on Earth
appeared almost as soon as the planet had cooled down
enough to support it. Evolution once it got going seems
relatively robust. We cleared all those early hurdles multicellular life
intelligence technology very very quickly.
Speaker 1: In cosmic term, we strongly implies.
Speaker 2: That those steps probably aren't the filter.
Speaker 1: Which means the filter is ahead of us.
Speaker 2: And that is the absolute nightmare scenario. It means there's
some challenge that awaits every single technological civilization at roughly
our stage of development, something that stops them every single
time from becoming a multiplanetary species.
Speaker 1: And given that we see zero aliens, the survival rate
for this filter must be practically zero.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It implies that every civilization that reaches our level
splitting the atom, building global communication networks, developing AI inevitably
destroys itself shortly thereafter.
Speaker 1: It's like we're walking down a long, dark hallway and
up ahead we see a closed door. Right in front
of that door is a massive pile of skeletons from
everyone who tried to open it.
Speaker 2: Before, And we were walking right towards that door, whistling
a tune.
Speaker 1: What could it even be? What is the great filter.
Speaker 2: Take your pick. Nuclear war became terrifyingly close to that
runaway climate change. We're currently running that experiment, an artificial
superintelligence that decides logically that humans are obsolete or a threat.
Speaker 1: Or something we can't even conceive of yet, a gray
goo nanotechnology disaster.
Speaker 2: The silence of the universe under this theory isn't a
mystery to be solved. It's a warning. It's a graveyard.
We are walking past the wreckage of a billion other
civilizations that all asked where is everybody right before they
went extinct.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, let's pivot for a second. Let's imagine we
do have neighbors, but they're not hiding, and they're not dead.
Maybe they're just completely incomprehensible to us. This brings us
to time crystal civilizations.
Speaker 2: Now we're getting into the really weird physics. This is
fascinating stuff. The concept was proposed by Frank Wilcheck and
Nobel Laureate back in twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: I can picture a normal crystal. It's a structure that
repeats in space, like a diamond's lattice or a salt crystal,
but repeating in time. What does that even mean?
Speaker 2: Think of it like a clock that ticks forever without
needing any energy input. It's a state of matter that
has a repeating pattern in the fourth dimension time, just
like a diamond has a repeating pattern in the three
dimensions of space. And the crazy thing is we actually
prove they can exist in a lab in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: So we know these forty time crystals are real. The
theory suggests that an advanced alien race might upload their
consciousness into them.
Speaker 2: If you're a civilization that's billions of years old, you'd
want to survive the heat death of the universe. You'd
want to maximize your efficiency. You might transcend fragile biology
entirely and encode your entire civilization's consciousness into the structure
of a time crystal.
Speaker 1: What would their experience of reality be like.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't experience time the way we do, as a
linear progression from moment to moment. They would exis across
time all at once.
Speaker 1: Give me an analogy for that.
Speaker 2: Okay, think of a movie on a DVD. The entire film,
the beginning, the middle, and the end exists simultaneously on
that plastic disc. We as humans are like someone watching
the movie. So we get surprised by the plot twists
and we don't know how it ends.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the time Crystal Civilization.
Speaker 2: They're the ones holding the DVD in their hands. They
can see the whole thing at once. The past, the present,
and our future are to them a single static object,
like looking at a completed tapestry.
Speaker 1: So they could be watching us right now.
Speaker 2: They could be, But here's the horror of it. To
a being that perceives all of time as a single block,
our history is already finished. They can see our beginning
and they can see our extinction all at the same time.
Speaker 1: So they don't intervene in our struggles, because why would.
Speaker 2: You intervene in a movie that's already been filmed and edited.
They know exactly how our story ends. To them, we're
just a transient, little blip in the grand cosmic story.
They might view us the way we gave you bacteria
in a petrie.
Speaker 1: Dish, or like animals in a zoo, or worse.
Speaker 2: The source material we read mentions the possibility that they
could be farming consciousness, using our entire history for data
or for some resource we can't possibly understand because we
lack the forty perspective to even see the bars of
our own cage.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate feeling of helplessness. We're down here struggling
to survive, thinking our choices matter, and they're just watching
the reruns, knowing exactly when the screen goes black.
Speaker 2: For us, it makes our free will feel like a
complete illusion. If they can see the future, is that
future already written in stone?
Speaker 1: Speaking of the future being written or maybe unwritten in
a flash, Let's talk about the fragility of reality itself.
We tend to think of the laws of physics as this,
this solid bedrock, unchanging, permanent.
Speaker 2: And that is a very dangerous assumption to make.
Speaker 1: This next theory false. Vacuum decay basically says that the
bedrock of our universe might actually be made of dynamite.
Speaker 2: This one centers on the Higgs field. We discovered the
Higgs boson particle at CERN back in twenty twelve. The
Higgs field is what permeates the entire universe and gives
all other particles their mass. The stability of everything we
know depends on the energy level of this field.
Speaker 1: The analogy is a ball sitting in a valley, right.
The ball is our universe. If it's at the absolute
bottom of the valley, it's stable. It can't roll anywhere lower.
Speaker 2: Correct, that's what physicists call a true vacuum. But the
measurements from the Large Hadron Collider suggest that our universe
might be in what's called a false vacuum.
Speaker 1: Meaning the ball isn't at the real bottom.
Speaker 2: No, it's stuck in a little dip halfway up the
side of the hill. Yeah, it looks stable, it feels stable.
We've managed to build atoms and stars and podcasts in
this little dip. But there's a much deeper, much more
stable valley far below us, a true ground state of
lower energy.
Speaker 1: And what happens if our little ball gets nudged out
of its dip and starts rolling down.
Speaker 2: All it would take is a single quantum fluctuation anywhere
in the universe, a tiny cosmic dice roll. If one
single point in space gets bumped into that lower energy state,
it would trigger a catastrophic chain reaction. A bubble of
true vacuum would.
Speaker 1: Form, and inside that bubble what happens.
Speaker 2: The laws of physics as we know them are completely rewritten.
The fundamental constants of nature change, Atoms can no longer
hold together, chemistry becomes impossible.
Speaker 1: And this bubble, it expands at the speed of light.
This is the part that really gets me. Because it
moves at the speed of light.
Speaker 2: You can never ever see it coming. Information can only
travel at the speed of light. The wall of death
is traveling at the speed of light. They arrive at
your location at the exact same time.
Speaker 1: So one moment you were here listening to this, the
next moment, instant deletion from existence.
Speaker 2: No pain, no warning, no time to even realize you're dying.
You're just off. The universe is overwritten like a bad
file on a hard drive.
Speaker 1: And this could be happening right now.
Speaker 2: It could have started a billion light years away, a
billion years ago, and the wall of deletion is hitting
us in the next five minutes, or it could spontane
happened in this room right now.
Speaker 1: So the entire universe is just balancing on a cosmic
tightrope and we don't have a safety net.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate sword of Damicles. It tells us
that the very structure of our reality is provisional. We
exist entirely by the permission of the Higgs field, and
that permission could be revoked instantly without notice.
Speaker 1: Well, if that's the instant death scenario, the next one
is the torture is slow, drawn out death scenario. The
big rip.
Speaker 2: This one comes from the discovery of dark energy. Back
in nineteen ninety eight. We found out that the universe
isn't just expanding. The expansion is accelerating, getting faster and faster.
Speaker 1: And we have no idea what dark energy actually is
not a clue.
Speaker 2: We know it makes up about sixty eight percent of
the universe, but its fundamental nature is a complete mystery.
This theory posits that it might be a particularly nasty
form called phantom energy, a type of energy that actually
grows stronger over time.
Speaker 1: So normally, gravity is the force that holds things together.
My body stays in one pi, the Earth stays together,
our galaxy stays together.
Speaker 2: Right, But if this phantom energy keeps growing in strength,
eventually it will become stronger than gravity, and when it does,
it starts ripping things apart in a very specific, horrifying order.
Speaker 1: Walk us through that timeline.
Speaker 2: First billions of years from now, it will become strong
enough to push the other galaxies away from us faster
than the speed of light. The night sky will go
completely dark. We will be utterly alone in the void.
Speaker 1: And what's next.
Speaker 2: Then it will overcome the gravity holding our own galaxy together.
The Milky Way will dissolve. All the stars will drift
away into the darkness. We lose our cosmic at home.
Speaker 1: And our solar system.
Speaker 2: Yes, in the final months before the end, the expansion
force will become so strong it rips the Earth away
from the Sun. The planet will freeze solid and drift
alone into the blackness.
Speaker 1: It rips the Moon away from the Earth.
Speaker 2: Then the Earth itself will explode, but it doesn't stop.
It then gets strong enough to overcome the electromagnetic forces
holding objects together.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is where it gets really visceral. This is
happening to us, to our bodies.
Speaker 2: In the final minutes, it would rip your house apart.
Then your body would be torn apart. Then, in the
final fraction of a second, the expansion force becomes stronger
than the strong nuclear force that holds your atoms together.
Speaker 1: So my atoms are literally shredded.
Speaker 2: Even the subatomic particles themselves, the protons, the neutrons, are
torn apart. Reality becomes nothing but a diffuse cloud of
fundamental debris. With every single particle moving away from every
other particle faster than the speed of light, no interaction
is ever possible.
Speaker 1: Again, it's the definition of total isolation, not just being lonely,
but being physically disconnected from every other particle in existence
for all eternity.
Speaker 2: And some cosmological model suggests that we might already be
past the point of no return. We're just living in
the quiet period before the acceleration really ramps up.
Speaker 1: All right, I need to pivot. I need to move
away from physics destroying us and talk about technology destroying us,
or maybe just owning us. Let's get into the simulation theory.
Speaker 2: Nick Bostrom's famous two thousand and three paper the simulation
Argument or the trilemma right.
Speaker 1: It basically says one of three things has to be true. One,
civilizations like ours always go extinct before they develop the
technology to run realistic simulations of reality.
Speaker 2: Two, they get the technology, but for some ethical or
practical reason they decide not to run any simulations.
Speaker 1: Or Three, we're almost certainly living inside a computer simulation.
Speaker 2: And if you just play the odds, number three is
the most likely. If a civilization can run these simulations,
they won't just run one, they'll run millions or billions
of them. Yeah, So for every one base reality, there
would be millions of simulated ones.
Speaker 1: So statistically, you're much more likely to be in one
of the fake ones exactly. But the source material we
looked at brings up a very specific and I think
much scarier angle on this, called simulation decay. And this
hits very close to home for anyone who's ever owned
a computer.
Speaker 2: It does. We tend to think of the simulators, is
these perfect godlike beings. But what if they're just you know,
grad students in a university lab somewhere or.
Speaker 1: A corporation working on a tight budget.
Speaker 2: Computer's rot code degrades over time, hard drives fail, servers crash.
If we're living in a simulation, our entire existence is
dependent on the hardware of the host civilization.
Speaker 1: The real horror here is our complete dependency. We exist
entirely at the whim of the user.
Speaker 2: They could just pull the plug because they ran out
of grant money. They could hit delete on our universe
to free up hard drive space for a new video game,
or the hardware could just be old and failing.
Speaker 1: And then we'd start seeing glitches in the matrix.
Speaker 2: Some physicists have actually pointed to things like the speed
of light limit or quantum uncertainty as possible rendering tricks.
You know, like in a video game, the computer only
renders what you're actively looking at to save on processing power.
Speaker 1: But what happens when the computer really starts to crash.
Speaker 2: We might start seeing dead pixels in the sky. Laws
of physics that start to flux wait randomly. The DK
theory suggests our reality might just start to rot at
the seams, rounding errors in the code, causing stars to
disappear or history to subtly rewrite itself.
Speaker 1: It makes our entire history feel so cheap. We aren't
part of some grand saga. We're just a temporary file,
a dot TMP file, a.
Speaker 2: Temporary file that can be dragged into the trash bin
at any second.
Speaker 1: But there's a flip side to this technological nightmare. What
if the computer doesn't delete us? What if it refuses
to let us go? This is the Omega point and
force resurrection.
Speaker 2: This one is truly deeply disturbing. It combines the physics
of the Big Crunch, the idea that the universe might
one day stop expanding and collapse back in on itself
with computer theory. It was proposed by thinkers like Frank Tipler.
Speaker 1: The idea is that at the very end of time,
as the entire universe collapses into a single point, the
computational power of that point would approach infinity.
Speaker 2: The Omega point a godlike supercomputer formed from the collapsing
fabric of the universe itself. It would have infinite processing
power and access to all the data that ever.
Speaker 1: Existed, and it could simulate everything that ever was.
Speaker 2: It could perfectly reconstruct the exact quantum state of every
conscious being that ever lived, including you.
Speaker 1: This is starting to sound almost religious. You know, we
will all be raised from the.
Speaker 2: Dead, but without the benevolence. The horror here is the
complete lack of consent. The Omega Point resurrects you not
because it loves you or wants to reward you, but
because it can, or because it wants to study you.
You're a data point.
Speaker 1: You wake up at the end of time inside a computer, and.
Speaker 2: You can never die again. You're just code. Now, this
godlike entity could run your life over and over again.
It could tweak the variables to see what happens what
if you had married someone else? What if you were
tortured for a thousand subjective years.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate black mirror nightmare. You become a plaything
for a bored god.
Speaker 2: It's eternal recurrence. But it's not a philosophical concept anymore.
It's a technological print. You could be forced to live
your best day or your worst day a trillion times over,
or live through hellish scenarios you can't even imagine forever.
Speaker 1: Death is supposed to be the final rest. This theory says, sorry,
we have a backup of your file. You're coming back online,
whether you like it or not.
Speaker 2: It treats consciousness as a raw material to be exploited.
You aren't a person anymore. You're just a data set
to be analyzed.
Speaker 1: We have one section left in this one. This one
takes the idea of cosmic bad luck to a whole
new level. We've been talking about the potential horrors of
our universe, but what about the multiverse?
Speaker 2: Right? This connects directly to the anthropic principle. We look
around our universe and we see that the fundamental constants
of nature seem perfectly fine tuned for life. Gravity is
just the right strength, the electromagnetic force is just right.
Speaker 1: The Goldilocks universe not too hot, not too cold, just right.
Speaker 2: And for a long time we said, Wow, we must
be incredibly lucky. But the multiverse theory offers a different explanation.
It says there are infinite other universes, each with different
physical laws, and of course we find ourselves in one
that can support life because we couldn't exist in the
others to observe them.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense. But if there are infinite variations,
that implies there must also be near miss universes.
Speaker 2: And this is the dark implication of the anthropic principle.
For every one perfect Goldilocks universe like ours, there must
be billions upon billions of universes where the settings are
almost right for life.
Speaker 1: Almost is a very scary word in this context.
Speaker 2: Imagine a universe where the laws of physics are just
complex enough to allow consciousness to arise, so you can
think and feel and perceive, but the laws of chemistry
don't allow for biological stability.
Speaker 1: So you're describing universes of pure, unending.
Speaker 2: Pain, universes where your body is constantly desilving and violently reforming.
Universe is where the very active existing is agony because
the electromagnetic force is slightly too strong, constantly pulling your
no nerves apart at the seams.
Speaker 1: And because it's a multiverse with infinite possibilities.
Speaker 2: These outcomes aren't just possible, they are mathematically inevitable. Somewhere
right now, in another reality, there are versions of life
that are trapped in a state of perpetual biological chaos.
They can't die, they can't live properly, They just suffer endlessly.
Speaker 1: And statistically, these hell universes might vastly outnumber the stable,
comfortable ones like ours.
Speaker 2: It's extremely likely order is rare, chaos is the default
state of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the multiverse might be mostly a roiling sea of screaming,
dysfunctional realities, and we are living on one of the
few tiny, quiet islands of stability.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, I need to take a breath after that one.
Speaker 2: Deep breasts are good. They remind you that you are,
for the moment, in a stable vacuum state where chemistry works.
Speaker 1: We've covered Boltzmann brains trapped in a momentary hallucination. We've
covered the hunter in the dark forest. We've covered being
ripped apart atom by atom, by phantom energy, or just
being deleted by a board simulation admin.
Speaker 2: It is. It is a lot to process, I'll admit.
Speaker 1: So what's the point of this? Why do we do
this to ourselves? Why study these theories? If they just
induce existential panic?
Speaker 2: I think it's because they strip away our cosmic arrogance.
We go through our days worrying about taxes or traffic
or what people are saying on social media. These theories
remind us that our very existence is an absurdly fragile
and precious thing.
Speaker 1: That's the silver lining, isn't it. If the universe is
a dark forest full of traps and horrifying possibilities, then
the simple fact that we are sitting here, drinking coffee
and having a conversation is kind of miraculous. It's defying
the odds exactly.
Speaker 2: Even if I am a Boltzmann brain, The hallucination of
this conversation is a pretty interesting one. Even for in
a simulation, the simulation feels real enough to matter. The
now is all we really have.
Speaker 1: The math doesn't care about your feelings, you said at
the start. But maybe maybe our feelings, our subjective experience,
is the only thing that actually matters in the face
of all that cold, uncaring math.
Speaker 2: Very human conclusion. I like it.
Speaker 1: Before we sign off, I want to turn this over
to you listening to this. We have just laid out
ten completely different ways that your reality could be a
cosmic nightmare.
Speaker 2: So the question is which one is going to keep
you up tonight.
Speaker 1: Are you terrified by the thought that you're just a
simulation that's about to be turned off? Or are you
more scared of the quantum immortality idea that you're actually
trapped in an aging body, forever destined to watch the
entire world die around you?
Speaker 2: Or do you think that chilling silence the stars means
the hunters are already on their way.
Speaker 1: Leave us a comment. Let us know which existential crisis
you're choosing for the weekend. We genuinely want to read them.
Speaker 2: Try not to think about it too hard. You might
accidentally trigger a vacuum decay bubble.
Speaker 1: Don't even joke about that.
Speaker 2: This is kidding.
Speaker 1: Probably this has been thrilling Threads. Thanks for staring into
the abyss with us.
Speaker 2: Try to sleep well tonight.
Speaker 1: See next timeline. Maybe yeah,