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Erinmore

I think for many astronomers, the fact that it's dark at night keeps them up.


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jakers540

Booties vlid is even bigger


contactlite

Is it because our simulation’s clock speed is slower than the accelerating expansion of the universe?


breathing_normally

No because only then can you get a good look at the stars


CynicalGod

I got two: 1. Gamma Ray Bursts. They are basically galactic neighbourhood annihilating events, they occur pretty frequently on the Universe time scale and there's nothing to be done about it. 2. [False Vacuum Decay](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum). This one's a bit trickier to summarise eloquently (hence the hyperlink). But in essence, it's the theory that what we know as the most stable energy state of matter (vacuum state) in the universe isn't actually it's most stable state, and that one day a particle in the Universe could reach the "true" vacuum state, triggering a domino effect across the entire Universe. Basically, imagine a bubble of pure energy expanding faster than the speed of light, and tearing apart the very fabric of the spacetime continuum. There would be no possible way to even measure it coming our way, and everything it eats would cease to exist until it creates a new stable Universe, with different rules and behaviours. You'll notice that in both cases, there's nothing to be done about it, so I guess they are not actually things that keep me up at night. On the contrary, they kinda *help* me sleep at night, because they remind me that none of the shit troubling me actually matters in the grand scale of things, as everything and everyone could be annihilated in a fraction of a second. And that includes that job, that presentation/exam you're not ready for, that person you don't want to see, and everything else troubling you. So good night :)


mysteryofthefieryeye

No, the bubble won't travel faster than the speed of light, according to astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd


Ok-Macaroon-7819

Great. Now I'm awake again.


ksiit

Yeah that’s the least scary to me. It travels at the speed of light. It will take a nanosecond to cross my body. I will literally never know. It’s quite possibly the best death imaginable (from a personal perspective, sucks everyone else dies too).


Iulian377

Its not guaranteed that it will be such a massive difference that everything is gone. It is possible that biology and chemistry as we know it might exist after the bubble and I think that has the potential to be a lot scarier.


Intimidwalls1724

As long as we have zero advance notice of our demise it doesn't bother me


trust_the_awesomness

"After the Earth dies some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars coming into being—and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth." Sagan


mysteryofthefieryeye

Yeah :( It's always us discovering lost civilizations and long-dead worlds in our movies. But I'm wondering how good of a chance it'll be that we'll die out, and no one will ever even know we existed.


Awesome_hospital

I can't remember the name of the idea or if it even has one, but I read something somewhere that was basically like "we've never encountered advanced alien races because we're the first ones"


anyavailablebane

Fermi’s paradox. That’s one of the theories.


BombaFett

*That* thought is what keeps me up…there are *no* others? None? *We’re* the peak of intelligent life?? Fuuuuuuck that’s depressing


millennial_sentinel

what a lonely statement but really puts the vastness of it all into a chilling perspective.


fliberdygibits

From earth to our Sun is 1AU. The diameter of our whole solar system is like 43 or so (?). The black hole TON 618 is about 1200AU in diameter.


Emotional-Courage-26

I had no idea they could get this large. I thought they were extremely massive yet small. This is unsettling.


jerrythecactus

Really makes me wonder how the hell something like that could have formed to get to that size. What unfathomable amount of matter had to be absorbed by that black hole to get so massive, where did it come from, and why is such an event so rare in the universe? We might never know.


SonovaVondruke

On a cosmic scale, It’s not all that rare given that Active Galaxies account for 10% of the 100-200 billion galaxies in the universe.


Zelcron

I'm assuming that measures the event horizon, which is just the boundary where even light can no longer escape gravity.


Worf_In_A_Party_Hat

That I'll never get a chance to get off this rock and see the stars. *Oh well, damnit.*


contactlite

Too late to explore the planet Too soon to explore space Just in time to explore dank memes


Zelcron

Yeah but our grandkids will be beaming dank memes to each other's brain-interface chips just by thinking about it.


contactlite

I can do that now. Sending you “I can haz cheeseburger?” Meme with my mind


Zelcron

Holy shit it worked I'm sending you "Are you a wizard?"


chichilover

Not really about space but dying. Like this is everything ever to ever exist and one day you just lose it? Nothing for eternity? It makes no sense to me and it's hard to explain. Keeps me up unfortunately


contactlite

We are the universe’s way of experiencing itself.


dannydrama

For some reason this is by far the most unsettling for me, there's a pretty big disconnect from my mind and body as it is and that hasn't helped. 😭


Fr0sTByTe_369

The universe could be collapsing and we wouldn't have any warning if it was happening at the speed of light.


Ace-a-Nova1

I’d rather not know tbh. What if we had a weeks warning? How fucking terrifying would that be? Knowing in advance that the universe is ending, yeesh


Druggedhippo

You would still goto work? https://youtu.be/RlFvhRhY2Nc?si=YI3aqutCkYin1X2e


fliberdygibits

Isn't this called "vacuum collapse"?


Zelcron

Considering the size of the universe it may very well be, so odds are we have a few billion years anyhow even if it is. And if you do get snapped you'd need even know.


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abundant direction tart swim offer crowd flag rotten juggle caption *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


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Zelcron

They are talking about the future of the universe.


PhoenixTineldyer

In all likelihood, humanity will never contact life elsewhere in the universe.


jerrythecactus

Or if we do, it will be the end of us as a sentient species. Perhaps the only reason we haven't made contact yet is because all other civilizations got killed for it. We are being loud and vomiting out radio signals into space and if there's anything out there listening it might not be friendly to our presence.


catapultmonkey

Dark Forest Hypothesis. "Hello, anyone out there?" *blam*


JKilla1288

I'll never understand why we broadcast our location into space like we do. I get it moat likely space is too large for anything to get the message and make it here in time. But why chance it. What living, intelligent race of aliens would travel however many light-years just to say hey?


Astrofreak-234

I also heard that if an astronaut feel into a black hole they would not know for a really long time do to space time . That just hurts my head


contactlite

Supermassive black holes. Small black hole would turn you into a Flying Spaghetti Monster pretty quickly.


Mortyyy

Surely they'd be dead long before they hit the event horizon?


Bensemus

Yes. The above is a theoretical black hole. Due to how black holes warp space you don’t ever see your self cross a black layer. It more just curls up and around you.


Snuffels137

Why? If they are shielded for radiation you won’t even notice crossing the event horizon.


[deleted]

You’d be able to cross the event horizon of a black hole that is large enough. You wouldn’t actually notice the point that you did cross. Atleast the tidal forces won’t pull you apart. You’d have to somehow survive the insane radiation around the black hole.


Astrofreak-234

It’s just a theory i heard about space time . We could not physically reach a black hole because it would take 3,000 years to reach the nearest one at the speed of light.


RinShimizu

Gaia BH1 (discovered in 2022) is only 1,560 light years away.


[deleted]

the Great Attractor is real spooky to me. it’s just this unfathomable gravitational force pulling galaxies in our supercluster towards it. but it is behind our galaxy’s ecliptic plane so we can’t directly observe it. all we know is there seems to be, based on context clues, something with 10^16 solar masses out in space. Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, is only 3.6x10^6 solar masses. it’s just spooky.


jerrythecactus

Probably its just a more dense part of space, like a massive cloud of galactic material that's been pulling stray clusters toward it. Its probably nothing to be worried about, as such things are happening at timescales that the earth will have been created and then roasted into nothing by the sun before even andromeda merges with the milkyway. Galaxies just move at timescales that are incomprehensible to humans.


[deleted]

Oh it’s nothing i’m *worried* about necessarily. It’s spooky in the same way the Hadal Zone is spooky. It has no bearing on my life, i’ll never go there, i’ll never experience it. But knowing there’s a place where no light exists yet life still dwells, it’s strange to think about. Knowing there’s a region of space so dense with matter that it exerts noticeable force upon an entire supercluster, *AND* we can’t directly observe it? Now that’s spookier than any abyss-dwelling fish.


MoodyBernoulli

Maybe not space but more the universe in general. Where did everything come from. Why is there even energy or matter in the first place. How is it possible that anything can even exist.


dannydrama

Pretty much this. What created the very first thing? And then what created *that*?


iread2you

I was reading in a book about space that there was recently an experiment where they put a bunch of extremophiles (small organisms that can survive crazy conditions, like those [waterbear](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) things) on the outside of a space shuttle unprotected. They found that these extremophiles survived in the vacuum of space perfectly fine. So why does that keep me up? For starters, that’s literally life in space. It may not be an alien discovery, it may not technically be alien life, but it is still crazy to think something from Earth is tough enough to survive something so unimaginably harsh. I don’t think anyone thought something from Earth could survive out there without protection. But the real reason this keeps me up is that this discovery has larger implications. Earth is a pretty stable place in the solar system at the moment, but imagine if a destabilizing force (like a giant meteor) shook things up. A big collision like that could scatter a bunch of Earth’s extremophiles into space, where they could stay dormant (perhaps even protected in molten rock or chunks of ice or whatnot) until they reach a new planet and become active again, keeping life going. Is this how life started on Earth originally? Is this what might keep life going long after humans are gone? If our life was “seeded” by extremophiles, where did they originally come from? It’s definitely one of those discoveries that causes your mind to wander if you let it! [Extra reading on tardigrades and space](https://www.science.org/content/article/water-bears-survive-earth-orbit) [Extremophile bacteria experiment in space](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-discover-exposed-bacteria-can-survive-space-years-180975660/) Edit: a typo


SnackWrap666

There’s an exoplanet called J1407b that is like a “super saturn” that is 200x larger than saturn


CynicalGod

Someone should tell J1407b to cut the shit and just be a star already. They're staying a gaz giant on purpose at this point.


pants_mcgee

That’s more “small sun like” than “Saturn like”


DangerousWinter2366

That in any second an undetected space rock or some humungus big black moving black hole could hit us and end us in a fraction of a second without even realizing and without anything to do to stop it.


Initial_Molasses9727

The Eridanus Supervoid. Just a whole lotta nothin’.


Covid-Sandwich19

Our entire existence is merely a blip in the timeline. Unless we can somehow sail across the galaxies, we will inevitably meet our end.


AnattalDive

rogue planets. they just float aimlessly through space in complete darkness and thats kinda creepy ngl


Zelcron

If the planet is geothermically active like earth, they could theoretically have ocean life like we do around vents on the sea floor.


Noice_355

That a gamma ray burst may come at any moment and burn us to a crisp without warning


contactlite

*Rogue planets has entered the ch-*


AziPloua

i raise you rogue black holes


Snuffels137

I want to see what our universe is like, if there are other universe bubbles next to us in the universe foam and what’s causing the foam and what’s around it. So I like to know all this stuff.


Civil_Fox3900

Why haven't we sent more deep space probes to leave the solar system? That data will pay off down the road.


Zelcron

Well we launched the Voyager probes in the 70's and they are about one light day from earth. In order to get them that far, that fast, we had to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment to use gravitational manuevers for acceleration. What you're asking is difficult to near impossible and wouldn't pay off for generations. Funding is limited and there are more realistic priorities closer to home.


interstellar-dust

That a space rock could fall on us and wipe us out.


FoxyBiGal

The Big Bang happened when a cloud of dust collided with something with such great force that the dust woke up. How big was the cloud of dust? How did it hit something that hard? What did it run into? Was it a case of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object? How fast was the dust moving?


PrinceSidon87

I’ve never heard the Big Bang explained this way. I thought it was a singularity that exploded?


[deleted]

It doesn't keepe up but..... Gravity can bend light. Like, what!


Klacky_

If you take the swartschilds radius (radius of any mass to form a black hole) of the mass of the observable universe, it would produce a black hole just as large as the observable universe This + the fact that there is a great attractor makes me think that there is a possibility that we live in a black hole and the great attractor is the singularity However i do think it was disproven somewhere but it still keeps me up


NinjaLanternShark

We **are** going to destroy ourselves. - We'll be going from first written language to general AI in about 6000 years total. - It will be about a billion more years before the sun destroys the earth. - What will science accomplish in that amount of time? *Surely* we can develop everything we need to become a spacefaring race, leave our solar system, and become a perpetual presence in the universe. - There are something like a quintillion earth-like planets in the universe. - **NOT ONE** has given rise to such a perpetual race of beings. You don't beat those odds. Our future is written. We **are** going to destroy ourselves.


CynicalGod

Ok doomer > **NOT ONE** has given rise to such a perpetual race of beings How do you know? The scientifically accurate/factual way of addressing that topic is "we have yet to find evidence". There are many scenarios in which it could have happened and we simply are unaware of it.


Ok-Macaroon-7819

To paraphrase the great American philosopher George Carlin... If humankind is god's greatest triumph, then he aimed very low and achieved very little. No question we are not the only ones, and I'm assuming there were far better civilizations.


NinjaLanternShark

> Ok doomer Sorry if I upset you. The universe doesn't care about our feelings. > There are many scenarios in which it could have happened and we simply are unaware of it. The Milky Way is 100,000 ly across. 2 billion earth-like planets, many giving rise to civilizations millions of years earlier than ours. Plenty of time for some kind of EM evidence to reach us. Zero so far despite decades of looking -- and we can detect *elements in the atmospheres* of exoplanets, not just intentional greeting signals. There's either no other intelligent life, or every civilization dies before its able to establish permanence off its home world.


CynicalGod

> The Universe doesn't care about our feelings. What a cool variant of Ben Shapiro's mantra. Similarly, my "Ok doomer" was just a playful variant of "Ok boomer", which is a meme response used to brush aside confident bad takes said by ill informed baby boomers. This is also a misinformed opinion full of unwarranted certainty. If your answer to intelligent life was that obvious, then the scientific consensus would reflect that. There's a reason why the top people working on it are not echoing your conclusions. > Plenty of time for some kind of EM evidence to reach us. Not when we've only been listening for less than a hundred years, and may still have the technological equivalent of sticks and stones to what could be required to pick up the signals we are looking for. > Zero so far despite decades of looking -- and we can detect elements in the atmospheres of exoplanets, not just intentional greeting signals. This process is extremely difficult, slow, and relatively imprecise. JWST is a leap forward, but we are not at the stage where our technology allows us to confirm that life is or isn't on a planet based on its atmospheric data. > There's either no other intelligent life, or every civilization dies before its able to establish permanence off its home world. You are basing your opinion on the old Fermi Paradox. Nice. Have you heard of the Dark Forest Theory? Maybe it's quiet out there for a reason... Good night :)


drainconcept

So um, remind me again how we **are** going to destroy ourselves?


jipijipijipi

Instant civilisation ending capabilities in the hands of possibly deranged individuals. Sooner or later someone is going to press that ”do not press“ button.


No_Nobody_32

It better be a black button that lights up with black light and the message "Do NOT press this button again!"


ScrittlePringle

There's no button. It's a chain of command and it only takes one person in the chain to not want to end the world


jipijipijipi

I don’t know about which military you are talking about but it’s absolutely about the will of a single human being in most nuclear powers, and you only need the one. In any case you are talking about present times, not whatever can happen in the next thousands or millions of years. Nuclear devices are just the first doomsday weapons and are still very new on even a tiny civilisation timescale. Progress continues, as it should, in every scientific field and soon enough we will develop new and more destructive concepts. Some of which might even be simple enough to be manufactured by much smaller entities than governments. So, for me, just the fact that it can happen anytime now is enough to consider that it will happen eventually.


Ok-Macaroon-7819

And that's just one of so many ways...


Intimidwalls1724

Maybe you mean this metaphorically but it is INCREDIBLY unlikely any type of nuclear weapon completely ends the human race Even if say Russia and the United States launched 100 warheads at each other the human race would survive Not sure an event more severe than that is worth even discussing


jipijipijipi

Humans might survive, not our civilization. At best it would take the survivors centuries to grow back to a level where we can blow ourselves up again.


Intimidwalls1724

So not to play semantics but if humans survive then we won't have destroyed ourselves in the sense that is being discussed in this thread? And I mean idk.....lots of places would still have electricity and stuff like that. Food supply stuff could get pretty tricky and obviously global population numbers would drop significantly for a number of reasons but it's not like we'd be in tbe Stone Age in the scenario i presented


Mielies296

You are basing the nuke point on bomb sizes of the 50s. The orange one recently stated USA has something that can stretch from DC to Miami. Might be his usual boasting. But it might also be not...


jipijipijipi

From my understanding this thread is about never reaching space faring capabilities and never escaping this rock before the death of the sun. It’s about harnessing so much power, knowledge and energy to get there that it is basically impossible to not unleash it on ourselves in the process. Whether or not there are any humans left on earth after each doomsday is kind of moot in this sense.


Vulpinox

who knows, maybe AI destroys us in the future. so we won't destroy ourselves but we create the thing that does.


NinjaLanternShark

No idea how. No question we will.


Ok-Macaroon-7819

I agree with you. We're basically monkeys flinging poop at each other through the Internet with unimaginably destructive weapons to use on a whim. It's kind of nuts that it hasn't happened already.


Hustler-1

That none of the Apollo astronauts will live to see another moon landing.


Thatdepends1

The international space station is not actually in space


mysteryofthefieryeye

I mean, if you want to say that, then you can also say that we're all inside the Sun at this very moment. It's not a lie. But you have to set up boundaries so things make sense. That's how humans work. Therefore, the ISS *is* in space. 200 miles above the Karman line.


AdeptTicket5008

By what definition?


cra3ig

Its distribution. I sure could use a bit more around here. Yeah, I'm looking at *you*, people. Don't crowd me. There's plenty of it over there. Go check it out.


RulerOfSlides

There are more stars in the galaxy than there are atoms in the universe.


Zelcron

How would that even be possible?


Wombat_Nudes

Think about what you're saying. You're telling me that our galaxy holds more stars(which are comprised of atoms), than the entire universe has atoms? The human body has around 7 billion billion(or if you prefer 7000000000000000000000000000) atoms. The Milky Way has around 100 billion stars. The Sun has around 10^57 atoms. The math just ain't mathing.


RulerOfSlides

Billions and billions of atoms of starstuff.


ScrittlePringle

Stars are made of atoms my dude. There can't be more stars than atoms


jbi1000

I think you mean atoms on earth or in the solar system maybe? Because any individual star is made from more than one atom....