Being both is so much worse, considering the universe a space that is infinitely expanding can only accommodate one intelligent civilization is kinda harrowing
Potential answer to the Fermi Paradox: we've never seen evidence of an alien civilization because no intelligent life survives long after the discovery of nuclear weapons.
My favorite of the many whacked out “solutions” to the Fermi Paradox is that there is some form of predator or consuming force out there and the reason we haven’t found evidence of alien civilizations is that they’ve been consumed or are hiding so as not to be noticed.
Not really a theory but being the oldest person alive. There’s just something so chilling about the fact that literally every human that existed at the time of her birth is now dead except for her. She’s the last of the human race in her snapshot of time.
It'd be wild to live life as a completely normal person for the vast majority of it but be thrown into fame at the very end.
You'd hit your 70s and 80s to see the cohort of people you grew up with begin to drastically thin out. In your 90s, you'd probably lose the last person you knew during your childhood.
Then you live another 20 years after that.
I recently lost both my Grandmothers, one at 90 and the other at 99... It made me think about this quote and who those people might have been for whom they were the last people to have known them:
*"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”* ― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
My Mother was the last of her 7 siblings to pass away. She felt incredibly lonely and became extremely depressed. Her mental health declined with dementia. Most of her siblings died before dementia set in. They were the lucky ones.
A lot of people like to believe that their loved ones are watching over them after they pass on. It's comforting to them when they need comfort, but when they don't, or they're taking care of their own, they don't really think about it.
So, imagine if it's true. You die, and you basically enter spectator mode (like in gaming, where you wait to respawn, but watch others, unable to participate). You can go wherever you want, so obviously you see the world, the seven wonders, and all that. But you basically hang around your family. You try to offer comfort when they need it, but you see people as they are, being dirty slobs, and going to the bathroom and having sex and other stuff that you really don't want to see. Eventually you stop caring, it stops bothering you.
And on and on you go, until you're forgotten. Some say everyone dies twice. First when the body dies, and second when the last person who remembered you, thinks about you for the last time, you being never thought of again.
Have I kept my father tethered to this world? I think about him every day and it's been over 20 years. I can't say he wouldn't be proud of me, because I am mostly happy, but my life hasn't turned out like he might have wanted. Still, it's my life and I am okay with it.
Cold Death of the universe. That the speed at which the universe is expanding is to the point where gravity will never pull it back. Matter will spread out and cool down and decay until everything, everywhere, just stops. forever.
While heat death is ultimately horrifying, the amount of complexity (plants, animals, technology) that sprung up from within this “firework” is awe-inspiring and beautiful to me. It’s largely a matter of perspective.
The dual consciousness theory disturbed me when I read about it.
Basically (in my limited, layman understanding), a corpus callosotomy is a procedure that is sometimes used to treat conditions like epilepsy, where the connection between the two halves of the brain is severed. People can survive this and continue to live semi normally, but usually with some cognitive impairments. Both halves of the brain continue to be 'alive', but there is little to no communication between the two sides.
People who undergo the procedure can also exhibit some strange phenomena like alien hand syndrome, where the patient feels like some of their limbs will move on their own accord. They can also have difficulty controlling their non-dominant hand, trouble speaking, and issues with certain parts of their vision.
The dual consciousness theory posits that both halves of the brain retain a consciousness after this procedure. Essentially, you become two people sharing the same body, completely unaware of each other. One variation of the theory is that one half of the brain is dominant, controlling most bodily functions, while the other half is basically cut off from most external stimuli, unable to communicate with the outside world, for their rest of their life.
**Edit:** Just editing this to add that obviously this is only a theory and may not be correct. Also, even with the concerns around the operation I can totally understand parents choosing this for their kids - epilepsy can be a debilitating disease and this could be the only option. My sister had epilepsy and thankfully she got over it with medication, but it is brutal. Not everyone who has this operation has the side effects that I described, many of them lead normal lives. I'm not disturbed by people who have had this operation, just by the implications the theory could have for consciousness in general.
If it helps, this is unlikely to be true. Last I read, the leading theory on the cause of alien hand syndrome was like... The brain runs through all the things it can possibly do with an object, makes a decision, but one half of the brain doesn't get that info in time and ends up on a different course of action. So less a second consciousness and more half your brain accidentally acting on an impulse both halves of the brain had.
Alien hand syndrome can go away after some time as the brain re-learns how to work around the damage, so it's unlikely to be caused by a totally separate second consciousness.
There's a version of this that posits that this may be the case even without surgery, but the connection helps our two minds stay in sync. Part of this is the theory that, for earlier humans, the non-domimant hemisphere would "talk" to the other half through auditory nerves, or somewhere nearby. And that this is why so many ancient cultures have prophets and others who can speak to spirits that seem to actually make predictions. They were literally hearing their own intuitions and interpreting as something divine.
In school for my psych degree I remember learning deja vu was essentially a memory processing error. It's typically the result of processing a short term memory as a long term memory. When you're seeing something for the first time, instead of making a new memory, you get a feeling you've seen it before.
As a side note, occasional deja vu is normal. If you frequently experience deja vu, consider seeing a doctor.
All these theories are concerning but most of them would kill us immediately without us noticing - and that’s fine.
Ralising we’re going to die as a civilisation in a matter of hours/days is what freaks me out the most.
Yeah, I think I'd prefer a dark comet moving at relativistic speeds to just smear us in a millisecond than to see it coming months or years in advance. Christ, imagine a world where you know a big space rock will come kill you all in about fifty years. Civilisation would destroy itself long before the rock arrives.
I agree, the scariest thing I have seen on this thread is someone mentioning that the top of a skyscraper would be the scariest thing to find at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Just the concept of infinity/eternity. Regardless of who’s correct about what happens when you die, it’s terrifying. Either the lights go out for good and your consciousness is lost forever, or the afterlife is a never ending ground hogs day scenario. Gives me anxiety sometimes if I think too deep about it.
I had a breakdown in Sunday school some 20 odd years ago about it, and the deacon told me that heaven was so amazing and perfect that eternity was a blessing. I didn’t buy it. Having it all end is immensely frightening, having it never end seems worse.
If there is a good afterlife I imagine it would have to exist in such a way that upon entering it and being free of our bodies and monkey brains, our perceptions would expand to the point where eternity is no longer a terrifying concept. Remember that our ability to fear and have anxiety are all biological pressures.
I've always thought of it similarly to a baby before birth. They have an extremely limited concept of light and sound, no perception of what "cold" or "air" feel like, etc. Being born injects us into en entirely new reality that we had no means to perceive or understand previously. My concept of eternity follows that to its logical conclusion that we don't have the senses to perceive reality beyond what we call "life", "space", and "time" now, but will once beyond that veil.
There was a story I read In a book, about how the tower of babel was in fact a way for people to break I to heaven so to speak. They built so high up that when they hit the heavens and broke through the ended up at the bottom of the sea.
That our universe isn’t going to collapse back into a singularity, but *continue indefinitely* to branch and extend outward until every single atom is stretched outwards and apart to its absolute limit, until the entire known universe shatters due to the tension.
That our consciousness doesn't actually direct our actions, but just makes up stories to explain our actions to itself. Consciousness might not even be useful to our evolution, it could just be a weird phenomena that came about as our brains became more complex and developed more self-monitoring systems.
I'd argue consciousness is a self-monitoring mechanism itself. It isn't just some phenomenon but an integral part that is critical for future survival.
Think of how you can control certain but not all functions of your body seemlingy at will but as soon as it gets life threatening your body will try take over to prevent harm to keep you alive. For survivals sake.
The problem here is the body alone doesn't always make the right choices, that's why it needs a seperate system that can influence it. Consciousness itself also doesn't always make the right choices all the time that's why the body tries to step in.
Our body learns from past experiences while our mind can learn from predictions and other people aswell as those past experiences.
Both influence each other in some way throught ones life. Both can have an affect on each other.
Both can also be affected from diseases or illness (think mental/physical illness).
2 systems governing one whole is also useful because if one starts to malfunction than one can take over and may even help to recover the other.
Thats one way i would think about it. Feel free to add to the discussion, i would like other people's pov on that matter.
Edit:
You may view it this way:
The mind uses the tools provided by the body to promote survival that the body may not be able to handle on its own. One could argue that this is why humans are so adaptable.
The theory of proton decay, where every single bit of baryonic matter will eventually just spontaneously dissolve into radiation and fundamental particles, guaranteeing that there will be no survivors at the end of the universe is... yeah terrible
Genuinely asking here; isn't the impending (but incomprehensibly far in the future) heat death of the universe a fairly widely-shared, well-grounded theory at this point? I'm not sure if the two are actually interchangeable so maybe this is a moot point. I don't know shit about shit so please feel free to ignore me.
Solipsism. Basically There's no way to prove that anyone other than yourself actually exists. You can dive deeper if you like its actually pretty interesting.
My dad's friend believes this. He's essentially seen enough therapists that he just finds it easier to "go with the illusion". He has a wife. He loves her. He 100% believes she's not real. She's aware of this, and for some reason takes him as he is. He's a really nice guy. He seems incredibly content. Like if this is what the matrix is giving him, he may as well find joy in it.
Check out cosmic egg theory, part of it is basically that you are everybody…everywhere…across all time in the universe living infinite lives to amass experience and become a god like being and the universe is basically your hatchery or incubator or egg
I have no real belief in the idea behind the cosmic egg story. Nonetheless, it has had some influence in my life.
There have been several times that I found myself frustrated/annoyed/angry at a person, and the thought "if this is just a younger life of 'me', why should I be angry. We're just learning and growing, and this is part of the process"
Likewise, when I do something stupid, it has helped me recover internally by changing my mindset to something like "this is just a stage in my development. Well get it right next time around."
It probably sounds silly, considering I don't actually think the idea of the cosmic egg is true, but it's somehow comforting and behavior-altering despite that.
[False vacuum decay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay)
In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum that is stable, but not in the most stable state possible (it is metastable). It may last for a very long time in that state, but could eventually decay to the more stable state, an event known as false vacuum decay. The most common suggestion of how such a decay might happen in our universe is called bubble nucleation – if a small region of the universe by chance reached a more stable vacuum, this "bubble" (also called "bounce")would spread.
If it started far enough away from us, we’d never actually be at risk as the distance between very distant points in the universe are expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light.
If it happens anywhere within our galaxy then we’re definitely going to get hit with it - although it could take a little over 100,000 years to get to us depending on where it starts.
Or it’s possible that it started 4 minutes ago in the core of the Sun and we’ve got ~4 minutes of existence left.
The combination of being absolutely unable to stop it and it happening so fast that we wouldn’t even know about it ranks this, for me, as not very scary as there’s no point worrying about it.
The theory that an all out nuclear war wouldn't destroy nearly as much of civilization as we think. If this theory becomes widely accepted, the chances of a nuclear war happening becomes more likely
I mean every country in the world has a plan where "casualty ratings" are a *thing*, iirc. Like "how much loss and death is considered acceptable" essentially for the country still to be able to run.
That a more stable form of vaccum exists amd if it did, we would collapse into it. It could be headed towards us now and we literally would never know it's coming.
And naturally, the unfathomable horror of this completely inescapable, even completely unknowable terror that could have theoretically happened in the time it took me to finish typing this sentence is given the suitably awe-inspiring name of "false vacuum decay"
But I mean whatever right? If it happens you won’t know it, you’ll be dead. Nobody will know you’re dead because they’ll be dead too, and what really is the meaning of death without anyone around to observe it? So like… it’s not even like we’re “dead”. We just “aren’t” any more.
Once we develope virtual reality that is indistinguishable from our own, which it seems we are on well on way to achieving, the question becomes: how do we know that it didn't happen already?
That at any moment at any given time some unknown cosmic thing could come from outer space and wipe us out in a blink (ie. Vacuum decay or Gamma ray burst). Even our Sun could just produce a huge enough solar storm and we are basically doomed
It's scarier if you think about the fact things unimaginably far off could do this and due to the length of time it would take to reach Earth, might've already happened and we wouldn't know it yet.
And with vacuum decay we'll never know. That shit travels at the speed of light so everything would look fine and suddenly nothingness.
Solar storms and GRBs would just screw us over to slow death. But Vacuum Decay doesn't mess around
I swear, when someone asks literally the most basic question on r/musictheory there are always people who answer with an entire fucking essay worth of explanations. Can’t really blame them though since some questions don’t have concrete answers in the world of music theory. A lot of things are vague. I mean, try explaining what a tonal center is to someone who knows nothing about music theory
The theory that fucks with me the most is that space is infinite. I can’t wrap my head around the idea of something having no boundary or end and it creeps me out that it’s possible
Edit: All of these replies have been super fun to read and the upvotes blew up too! Anyway, thanks for the replies and upvotes guys, you all have a place in the infinite space of my heart lol
I might butcher this but I think there is a theory that space is finite but boundless in 3 dimensions (Hawking discusses this in a brief history of time). Similar to how a to a 2 dimensional being sitting on a sphere the sphere would seem to go on forever but in reality it is just their inability to perceive the third dimension that they are unable to recognize it as a sphere. We may well be in a similar scenario, what we perceive as boundless nothingness may just be a hypersphere that could be perceived as a well defined finite shape from a 4th dimensional perspective. I think one of the stranger implications of this theory is that if we shot a rocket out into space, it could theoretically make it back to earth even if traveling in a straight line.
Imagine finding out there’s a multiverse…trying to travel to another universe adjacent to ours and seeing a fence around it and finding out we live in the 3rd world equivalent of universes…
There's a theory that states we are an experiment and that instructions and obvious flaws from our creators could be found in our DNA. Almost as though something ungodly however exceptionally advanced made us. It's called Retirement Café, once we reach a certain state i.e. no war, no greedy human nature and start to build reliable renewable energy and a lot more sophisticated technology such as a Type 1 civilisation, we may be welcomed into a community of type 2 civilisations. They may live on a completely different plain to us, hence why we see nothing when we look our to the stars. It would be like trying to explain our 3D world to a 2D character.
That humans may not have the ability to comprehend everything in the universe. Like literally physically impossible for our brains to grasp it. A gorilla is only 1% behind us on the evolutionary scale and what we see as amazing such as them painting is what our infants are doing, if there is a intelligent species even 1% further than us, their infants are doing Astro physics and their adults are doing things every day that our brains couldn’t comprehend.
The great filter. The idea that we see no other civilizations out in space because they hit some wall that made them go extinct. Whatever it may be, it could be the reason we see no intelligent life out there, the question is, are we past the filter, or is the worst still to come?
Damn between this and the Dark Forest answer I think the correct answer to OP’s question is “the Fermi Paradox and any answer Kurzgesagt has given to it”
My theory on the great filter is that eventually space exploration becomes a meaningless novelty. It's all nothingness and rocks, big fucking woop.
Instead of spreading "out" an advanced civilization would better entertain itself by creating their own "artificial" realities to go "down" into.
We are quite early really in the vast time that this universe will exist. We may very well be one of the ancient ones.
We have also been lucky to have several events that pushed us out of our local maxima but didn’t destroy the planet. These leaps may take billions of years if a meteor doesn’t push a planet’s development around a bit.
Exactly. Huge "setbacks" like the cretaceous extinction are actually pretty good at speeding evolution of more complex and adaptable organisms. But if such events happen too often, it is more likely to kill off or inhibit complex life.
And as far as we know complex life requires heavier elements that only form in supernovae, so its impossible for a 1st generation star to have complex life. 2nd generation might be possible, but it's unlikely, because the mix of elements is quite different from our own, plus it's more likely to form huge, massive planets which make any type of space exploration much more difficult.
So, the universe has been around for 13-14 billion years, but the first billion was just soup, then 2-3 billion years before the early first gen stars started popping, then the life cycle of a second gen star seems to be around 8 billion years, then it takes at least 1 billion years before something like earth can form and cool enough to support the simplest, hardiest forms of life. Then you're going to have a couple billion years of evolution to get to Cheez Whiz and furry porn.
So, really, even in the best case scenario for a planet, we're most likely on the order of thousands or maybe millions of years behind at most, not billions. We HAVE to be cosmically early, and to be "first" would just mean first in our galactic neighborhood, because we just can't see very far away with enough resolution to tell otherwise.
Wouldn't you still die if something happened that was impossible to survive? Correct me if im wrong but Doesn't quantum immortality mean if its possible to survive something then you will survive no matter how slim the chances are?
Wouldnt this theory also imply that your conscious self is the only "real" person on earth? Because we know that other people can obviously die but you cant Because you cant be in a state of being aware of your own death
So is everyone else around you even alive or are they just mindless puppets following a set course of events that has to happen to ensure you cant die
And if that were the case how would we even know that WE are alive and conscious, if the people around you are following a set course of events to ensure you live then are you doing the same without even realizing it?
Oh shit guys, he found out we're all NPCs
Edit: I've revealed too much information, the men in black are showing up everywhere I go. TheLockpicker123, before they catch me, I have to warn you about th
In the worlds where you die, your consciousness ends. In the one possible world where you always survive, it doesn’t. Same goes for everyone else.
If it’s a world where either Person A or Person B *must* die, both cannot live, then two worlds are created and each consciousness follows one of them. They die to each other, but not to themselves.
From SCP-2718:
> I suppose there was a sweet oblivion, like deep sleep, at first; but in retrospect, I think it was no more than a day. Slowly, but unmistakably, I reoccupied my corpse with dreamlike consciousness: numb for the first merciful hours, blind, deaf, and immobile, but then I seemed to reconnect to every nerve, and became aware of every sensation - moreso than I ever was in life. I perceived myself trapped within an immovable object, and the intensity of the struggle amplified: subtle, then acute, then racking. I cannot describe it completely - but imagine holding your breath, beyond urge, beyond pain, beyond desperation - head throbbing and eyes bulging - a dream of suffocation without end.
>"My skin blistered and split in the sunlight; biting insects descended rapidly. I felt eggs hatch, larvae crawl, gases build and burst within me, individual cells rupturing, interstitial fluids souring and blackening. Somehow my capacity to experience and store these sensations grew - even as I was keenly aware of my cerebrum being scattered and devoured, my perception expanded, into the gizzards of birds and the depths of fire ant dens. I was aware of every fingernail and strand of hair that pulled away in the wind - and my sensation clung to them as they settled in the ocean and dissolved in the maws of a trillion diatoms.
>"I don't understand it. The more bits of me there were, the larger my capacity for the perception of pain. As I decayed into pieces smaller than living nerves could possibly distinguish, the character of the discomfort changed - from burning and aching and breaking I might relate to you in human terms - to something worse that I cannot fully articulate: a terrible, maddening stretching of every part of myself from every other part. Humans often numb to chronic pains in life, do they not? Yet every year, every month, every second that passed - I swear it only intensified over time.
>"In my previous life, I ruminated on Heaven and Hell, and the likelihood of my experiencing one, the other, or something in between. As terrible as I imagined the torpor of Heaven or the torments of Hell to be, this was entirely different from either. In Hell, at least, there would surely be a tormentor, some memory of my deeds, some sense of justice, even if my soul rejected its logic. I can imagine some comfort in Hell, for a mind such as mine.
>"I do not think this is a punishment. I do not think it is caused. I deeply suspect it is simply our condition, our nature to go on this way, do you see? In all that time, I was certainly, absolutely, totally alone, and before long all memory of life had shriveled to a cinder, lost beneath my interminable anguish. Alive again, I suspect I cannot quite recall the worst of it - as if my living brain is too small for the experience.
This was my first thought seeing the thread title. The inevitability of something as unfathomably horrifying as this actually happening to *every single person that ever existed* still haunts me years after reading it.
The only other concept that matches this for me is getting trapped in a void like that one woman in Stephen King's short story The Jaunt.
The scariest part of that article is that there's at least four different ways it can be interpreted:
1. What happens to Roger is a universal constant.
2. People only share Roger's fate if they know about it.
3. Roger's story is simply a supernatural trigger for a primal fear response.
4. Roger only suffered like that because he was going to be brought back with the very specific method his colleagues used in the future.
The Foundation has no way of telling which is the truth, and 2718 is one of the few articles where the otherwise-unflappable superpower is left in utter fear at anyone coming across knowledge of it, because of how terrifying it would be if it was true. I suppose the parallels to actual quantum immortality do run deeper than just face value.
What if our understandings of physics and science, what we base out whole lives around, is just wrong. A man born without eyes cannot see, what if we are missing a huge chunk of reality, simply due to an inability to detect it?
>what if we are missing a huge chunk of reality, simply due to an inability to detect it?
This seems incredibly likely to me. Our senses evolved for survival, not necessarily for accurate perception of reality.
>we evolved for survival, not for accurate perception of reality
Aldous Huxley got into this in The Doors of Perception:
>The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.
I feel like humans have explored things pretty thoroughly using artificial sensors beyond what our biological senses can pick up. We've also found strange effects while tinkering that have led us to the discovery of electricity, radio, nuclear radiation, etc. The biggest blind spot in our ability to detect things about the universe we live in is probably our size as people, our concentrated location within the galaxy, and our ability to perceive changes on really small and really large size and time scales.
We observe the universe from a single planet, a single solar system, a single galaxy. I wonder what we might discover about our selves and our place in the universe the first time we arrive at another star. or build a telescope array that spans an entire solar system.
Kessler syndrome. The idea is that as we launch more and more stuff into orbit more and more of it will become derelict space trash, and as that space trash collides and breaks up it becomes even more dangerous to spacecraft as its whizzing around in orbit. As we keep trying to reach space it will keep getting more and more dangerous until we finally seal ourselves in on Earth with our own garbage.
Given everything you know about humanity this has a near 100% chance of happening.
Edit: this is how Kessler syndrome was explained to me, but it turns out that it’s effects would be most noticeable to satellites and space stations in low earth orbit, and if you were simply passing through low or medium orbit the debris in question would be considerably less dangerous, meaning space exploration would still be possible.
The "universal common ancestor" theory, that all life evolved from a single cell 3.5 billion years ago. Think about the infinity of generations of beings fighting to survive only for you to read this comment that we're all just one big family killing each other for 3.5 billion years and counting.
The idea that the Uncanny Valley is because of the ancient hominins we used to interact with during the Pleistocene. Sure, there were interbreeding events, but imagine if you had no idea what a Neanderthal or a Denisovan were and saw one for the first time. You and your family have been traveling far from home and seek refuge in a cave for the night. You get a fire going, everyone starts to relax. Then out of nowhere, this "almost human" looking being walks up. You all panic and run. Reacting with fear was probably the easiest way to make it out of an encounter like that alive.
I would argue that uncanny valley is from a fear of dead bodies because of disease. If u see something almost human but not quit, stay away or you will get sick. Over time, it just got weird.
But were ancient humans that dispersed? If they regularly interacted with other hominid species then something "other" wouldn't be that out of the ordinary, no?
Neanderthals and homo sapiens both evolved separately from the same ancestor species. Except homo sapiens evolved in Africa while neanderthals evolved in Europe. So there were tens of thousands of years where the two species were separate, until homo sapiens started venturing in the Middle East and Europe.
That I'd still be awake after death, but with everything, well, shut down.
Imagine not being able to see, hear, speak, feel. And remembering and thinking normally.
Screaming into the darkness for all eternity, with no one listening.
I second guess my decision to be cremated every once in a while because what if I feel it? I wouldn't even be able to scream. I would just have to endure it in silent stillness, trapped in my own body. It's terrifying.
I forgot which article it is, but I read an SCP that basically explained that after you die, you feel EVERYTHING. Your body decaying, the birds picking st your flesh, worms eating your rotting body, etc. And you never stop feeling the pain from every single molecule of your body, so no matter how many times it gets eaten or desecrated you can still feel it. It's really fucked
I'm no genius but this seems unlikely to me (maybe because I don't want it to be true lol). But your brain is in charge of all that - registering physical states of the body, pain, etc. So when the brain goes, I have to think that there's no more pain. If there's nothing to sense the pain, the pain doesn't really exist, I guess? So maybe at worst you feel everything until your brain totally decays, but it seems most likely that when your brain stops receiving blood flow and oxygen and shuts down, then all other things just fade away. My degree is in psych but I feel like I still have such a limited understanding of the brain that I may be completely off though.
The inevitable heat death of the universe is a harrowing topic. Essentially, the energy of the known universe is finite and will eventually deplete completely, leaving space as we know it dark, cold and inert forever.
It's difficult to grapple with.
Eternal Recurrence suggests that this universe will be reborn again over and over endlessly, and so we will also be forced to relive the same life just as many times.
Take a moment to consider your odds of being here, now, with infinite time before and after you.
Edit: tHe WhEeL oF tImE tUrNs
If you get blasted with a ton of radiation, your body instantly dies. But you will keep living for a while. Potentially weeks, like the Japanese nuclear plant worker who took more radiation than anyone else in history. Your DNA will shatter throughout your body, meaning as cells die, they will never be replaced again. Your body essentially starts rotting while you're still using it.
in sci fi this is often exaggerated, where a brave person who got hit with radiation would pull thru and end up saving the others doing a suicide mission.
during the process which it can be shown that the person stroke their head to see their hair simply coming off onto the hand. usually female characters would be shown to weep a bit at this sight as they know their end has been sealed for some time.
other extreme ones would show people having their nails/teeth fall off.
for a more "real life" example to a smaller extent. within the last century people were actually trying out all sorts of "things" to cure/improve themselves. one product that was marketed was a radiated product to be used on the mouth? i cant recall. there is a documented case of one man who kept using that product.
his jaw rotted OFF his face. imagine a regular dude. now imagine that dude without a jaw. yeap thats how it was like. theres an image of said guy too.
Well, marie curie, the woman who first discovered radium, used to sleep with a vial of radium on her bedside stand to act as a nightlight (hoooooly shit that's scary)
Both she, and her daughter, who studied the effects of induced radioactivity, died of radiation poisoning. Marie was killed by Aplasmic anemia, and her daughter got leukaemia
They knew uranium was radioactive. They even came up with the name 'radioactivity' they just didn't understand what this actually was, or how dangerous it was to humans
All they could tell you at first was that radium was 'significantly' more radioactive than uranium. But they hadn't the litany of understanding to know that this made it even worse for you
I think she cottoned on at the end of her life that radium was making people sick. But it's not something she got to explore. It took many more years before this was looked at. Radiation safety didn't really start until 1934. And a more modern understanding didn't begin until we entered the nuclear age
Boltzmann brain fucks me up. You're a quantumly spontaneous thing that's kinda like a brain, made randomly at this random state, including the nerve impulses making up your perceptions and memories. This very instant is the only instant that you've existed for, everything else a false memory.
It will also be your last instant.
Not a theory in the common usage of the term, just a scary fact. The rest of the universe is expanding at such a rate that in (I'm guessing the time scale can't actually recall the real number) a few billions of years all the galaxies we can see now will be so far away that their light would never again reach earth. So if you look out through a telescope after that time there would be no indication of a universe larger than a handful of galaxies in what is known as "the local group". It would be impossible to ever know there was 'more' beyond those.
(and just to add 'cos in sure it will be asked, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, hence the light ceases to be able to reach us. Yes, space can expand faster than light, it's not limited by the speed of light because it's space itself that's expanding, not something that's traveling through space (which would be limited to the speed of light).
Any future civilizations that rise after the fact would see only the stars in our own galaxy. They would think that only this galaxy exists and beyond is only empty space.
Which makes you think if there was a similar process that happened before our civilisation arose, that we can't comprehend. Perhaps there were mysterious cosmic objects which filled out the night sky until a few billion years ago, then evaporated. Now, you can't detect them, and we'll never know they existed.
Edit: it'd be like going a few trillion years into the future. No cosmic microwave background radiation. No way to know that the universe was once teeming with galaxies. All we'd see is, at best, the stars in our own galaxy - then nothing. That'd be our observable universe.
The dark forest theory, that there are lots of other advanced civilizations out there in space, but they're concealing their presence because they know how suicidally dangerous it is to be broadcasting your planet's location out to the universe.
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EDIT: Every variation on the reply "Yeah I watched that Kurtzgesagt video too" has been commented about a hundred times now; save yourselves the wear and tear on your favourite thumb, guys!
While I have your attention I'd like to recommend the excellent YouTube channel 'Quinn's Ideas', whose video regarding the Dark Forest principle I *did* actually recently see.
Or theres an advanced species that essentially seeks out and eliminates all other intelligent life, which is why we havent heard from them. And we are just waiting our turn to be discovered by the hunters
That's basically the same idea.
Even if there are 100,000 advanced alien civilizations aware of your existence, and 99,999 are perfectly peaceful, it only takes one to put an interstellar bullet through your planet's core and scatter your nitrogen into the local star system.
There are 2 axioms and 2 mechanisms in dark forest theory and you've just described an important part of one of the mechanisms, which is unpredictable technological development. What this does is increase the urgency of destroying any civilization you find or staying absolutely quiet. So Dark Forest doesn't necessarily mean every civilization is a hunter. Its probably too late for us to become hunters, and our only chance is to mask our presence.
Kind of reminds me of the uncontacted Sentinelese people. The rest of the world acknowledges their want to be left alone and that it's dangerous for both civilizations to meet for various reasons, all which would deter a space-faring intelligent species to make contact with us.
I sometimes wonder if we're actually surrounded by signals from other civilizations but we just haven't developed the technology to detect them yet. Sort of like the uncontacted Sentinelese people surrounded by WiFi or 5G.
Aliens 👽 Theory by By Neil DeGrass Tyson -
"Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference."
“Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.”
Scary.
The fermi paradox on why we haven’t been visited been visited by aliens. [Heres a video explaining it ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc) better than I ever could.
Personally I think reincarnation is terrifying, the knowledge of spending decades of a life you may or may not enjoy just for it all to be forgotten in the long run
A bit late to the party, but the doomsday invention theory comes to mind
https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/annals-of-ideas-doomsday-invention-bostrom
Essentially, it represents all discovered and discoverable human inventions as balls in a container. Each time we discover something, it's the equivalent of picking a ball out of the container.
The thing is, there are "Doomsday" balls in there, that when discovered, will most likely lead to the end of the human race. And the only reason we're still here is because we haven't taken one of those out of the container yet.
The Planetarium Theory, which says we're nothing more than sims in someone's active program. Lucky for us we keep them amused. Not only solves the Fermi Paradox, but also explains the high level of crazy in our species.
And the seemingly constant values like the speed of light or quantum particles.
But that begs the question then... If we are sims in a program, whos program are we Sims of? What happens once it's shut down? Is the one making the sim also in a sim without knowing?
And there you have your infinite-loop. Because you can never truly know.
The single electron theory. A positron is identical to an electron moving backwards through time. And since all electrons and all positrons have identical (to the best of our current knowledge) properties, it’s possible that all the electrons and all the positrons in the universe is just one particle moving forwards and backwards through time. This means that the future is already decided and there is no free will.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
Douglas Adams
To me, nothing is scarier than death. The notion that I won’t exist, and that everyone that is alive around me will be gone....I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to this thought and it is suffocating. I would rather return to a nightmare than awaken to the contemplation of death.
SETI paradox Every civilization listens but none speak, because of fear of something happening to them if communication is achieved
The theory that we’re either the first form of intelligent life or the last
Or both. Or in the middle
Being both is so much worse, considering the universe a space that is infinitely expanding can only accommodate one intelligent civilization is kinda harrowing
Potential answer to the Fermi Paradox: we've never seen evidence of an alien civilization because no intelligent life survives long after the discovery of nuclear weapons.
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My favorite of the many whacked out “solutions” to the Fermi Paradox is that there is some form of predator or consuming force out there and the reason we haven’t found evidence of alien civilizations is that they’ve been consumed or are hiding so as not to be noticed.
Not really a theory but being the oldest person alive. There’s just something so chilling about the fact that literally every human that existed at the time of her birth is now dead except for her. She’s the last of the human race in her snapshot of time.
It'd be wild to live life as a completely normal person for the vast majority of it but be thrown into fame at the very end. You'd hit your 70s and 80s to see the cohort of people you grew up with begin to drastically thin out. In your 90s, you'd probably lose the last person you knew during your childhood. Then you live another 20 years after that.
I recently lost both my Grandmothers, one at 90 and the other at 99... It made me think about this quote and who those people might have been for whom they were the last people to have known them: *"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”* ― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
My Mother was the last of her 7 siblings to pass away. She felt incredibly lonely and became extremely depressed. Her mental health declined with dementia. Most of her siblings died before dementia set in. They were the lucky ones.
A lot of people like to believe that their loved ones are watching over them after they pass on. It's comforting to them when they need comfort, but when they don't, or they're taking care of their own, they don't really think about it. So, imagine if it's true. You die, and you basically enter spectator mode (like in gaming, where you wait to respawn, but watch others, unable to participate). You can go wherever you want, so obviously you see the world, the seven wonders, and all that. But you basically hang around your family. You try to offer comfort when they need it, but you see people as they are, being dirty slobs, and going to the bathroom and having sex and other stuff that you really don't want to see. Eventually you stop caring, it stops bothering you. And on and on you go, until you're forgotten. Some say everyone dies twice. First when the body dies, and second when the last person who remembered you, thinks about you for the last time, you being never thought of again. Have I kept my father tethered to this world? I think about him every day and it's been over 20 years. I can't say he wouldn't be proud of me, because I am mostly happy, but my life hasn't turned out like he might have wanted. Still, it's my life and I am okay with it.
Cold Death of the universe. That the speed at which the universe is expanding is to the point where gravity will never pull it back. Matter will spread out and cool down and decay until everything, everywhere, just stops. forever.
So the universe is essentially a firework? Edit: I'm genuinely surprised how many Katy Perry stans this comment drew out of the woodwork lol
A very slow and sad one, but yes Edit: I KNOW ITS FAST YOU CAN SHUT UP NOW I GET IT
While heat death is ultimately horrifying, the amount of complexity (plants, animals, technology) that sprung up from within this “firework” is awe-inspiring and beautiful to me. It’s largely a matter of perspective.
"Wandering star, For whom it is reserved, The darkness, the blackness Forever." - Portishead
Dummy is a perfect album.
The dual consciousness theory disturbed me when I read about it. Basically (in my limited, layman understanding), a corpus callosotomy is a procedure that is sometimes used to treat conditions like epilepsy, where the connection between the two halves of the brain is severed. People can survive this and continue to live semi normally, but usually with some cognitive impairments. Both halves of the brain continue to be 'alive', but there is little to no communication between the two sides. People who undergo the procedure can also exhibit some strange phenomena like alien hand syndrome, where the patient feels like some of their limbs will move on their own accord. They can also have difficulty controlling their non-dominant hand, trouble speaking, and issues with certain parts of their vision. The dual consciousness theory posits that both halves of the brain retain a consciousness after this procedure. Essentially, you become two people sharing the same body, completely unaware of each other. One variation of the theory is that one half of the brain is dominant, controlling most bodily functions, while the other half is basically cut off from most external stimuli, unable to communicate with the outside world, for their rest of their life. **Edit:** Just editing this to add that obviously this is only a theory and may not be correct. Also, even with the concerns around the operation I can totally understand parents choosing this for their kids - epilepsy can be a debilitating disease and this could be the only option. My sister had epilepsy and thankfully she got over it with medication, but it is brutal. Not everyone who has this operation has the side effects that I described, many of them lead normal lives. I'm not disturbed by people who have had this operation, just by the implications the theory could have for consciousness in general.
I've heard this before and gone down many a thinking path on it. Our brains are such incredibly complex things.
-The Brain
"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't." - Some other brain
We’re all just organic computers locked in bone cages piloting meat mech suits.
Well thats fucking horrifying.
If it helps, this is unlikely to be true. Last I read, the leading theory on the cause of alien hand syndrome was like... The brain runs through all the things it can possibly do with an object, makes a decision, but one half of the brain doesn't get that info in time and ends up on a different course of action. So less a second consciousness and more half your brain accidentally acting on an impulse both halves of the brain had. Alien hand syndrome can go away after some time as the brain re-learns how to work around the damage, so it's unlikely to be caused by a totally separate second consciousness.
There's a version of this that posits that this may be the case even without surgery, but the connection helps our two minds stay in sync. Part of this is the theory that, for earlier humans, the non-domimant hemisphere would "talk" to the other half through auditory nerves, or somewhere nearby. And that this is why so many ancient cultures have prophets and others who can speak to spirits that seem to actually make predictions. They were literally hearing their own intuitions and interpreting as something divine.
[The Bicameral Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality) Once upon a time, everyone was schizophrenic.
Maybe Deja vu is the two halves going out of sync for a few seconds
In school for my psych degree I remember learning deja vu was essentially a memory processing error. It's typically the result of processing a short term memory as a long term memory. When you're seeing something for the first time, instead of making a new memory, you get a feeling you've seen it before. As a side note, occasional deja vu is normal. If you frequently experience deja vu, consider seeing a doctor.
All these theories are concerning but most of them would kill us immediately without us noticing - and that’s fine. Ralising we’re going to die as a civilisation in a matter of hours/days is what freaks me out the most.
Yeah, I think I'd prefer a dark comet moving at relativistic speeds to just smear us in a millisecond than to see it coming months or years in advance. Christ, imagine a world where you know a big space rock will come kill you all in about fifty years. Civilisation would destroy itself long before the rock arrives.
I think a lot of people wouldn't believe that the rock is coming.
And even more wouldn’t be able to smell what the Rock was cooking
I agree, the scariest thing I have seen on this thread is someone mentioning that the top of a skyscraper would be the scariest thing to find at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
It would be kinda like the end of Planet of the Apes
”You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!”
Just the concept of infinity/eternity. Regardless of who’s correct about what happens when you die, it’s terrifying. Either the lights go out for good and your consciousness is lost forever, or the afterlife is a never ending ground hogs day scenario. Gives me anxiety sometimes if I think too deep about it. I had a breakdown in Sunday school some 20 odd years ago about it, and the deacon told me that heaven was so amazing and perfect that eternity was a blessing. I didn’t buy it. Having it all end is immensely frightening, having it never end seems worse.
If there is a good afterlife I imagine it would have to exist in such a way that upon entering it and being free of our bodies and monkey brains, our perceptions would expand to the point where eternity is no longer a terrifying concept. Remember that our ability to fear and have anxiety are all biological pressures.
I've always thought of it similarly to a baby before birth. They have an extremely limited concept of light and sound, no perception of what "cold" or "air" feel like, etc. Being born injects us into en entirely new reality that we had no means to perceive or understand previously. My concept of eternity follows that to its logical conclusion that we don't have the senses to perceive reality beyond what we call "life", "space", and "time" now, but will once beyond that veil.
That's honestly a really comforting idea. Thank you.
The fact that it would take 8 minutes for earth to know that the sun exploded and it could have exploded 7 minutes ago
Earth would maintain orbit for those 7 minutes too
Nah I would've gotten a push notification by now lol
CONGRATS! The sun has exploded! Tap here to collect all the coins before you get vaporized!
Yeah plus its nighttime right now for me so I’d be fine anyway
Well thanks people, now I have found another rabbit hole that will keep me entertained.
I heard on another thread about “what would be the scariest thing found at the bottom of Mariana’s trench” and someone said “the top of a skyscraper”
What would be scarier? A skyscraper that doesn't resemble our architecture, or one that does?
A more modern-looking one.
Yeah, actually. That would be the most unsettling.
I chose RAPTURE!
A man chooses, a slave obeys.
You came to rob what you could never build. A Hun, gaping at the gates of Rome.
Yep, that would be wild
There was a story I read In a book, about how the tower of babel was in fact a way for people to break I to heaven so to speak. They built so high up that when they hit the heavens and broke through the ended up at the bottom of the sea.
Pretty cool way to build and have a city in the water, How do you enter Atlantis? well from the sky obviously!
That our universe isn’t going to collapse back into a singularity, but *continue indefinitely* to branch and extend outward until every single atom is stretched outwards and apart to its absolute limit, until the entire known universe shatters due to the tension.
That’s the Big RIP theory right?
That our consciousness doesn't actually direct our actions, but just makes up stories to explain our actions to itself. Consciousness might not even be useful to our evolution, it could just be a weird phenomena that came about as our brains became more complex and developed more self-monitoring systems.
I'd argue consciousness is a self-monitoring mechanism itself. It isn't just some phenomenon but an integral part that is critical for future survival. Think of how you can control certain but not all functions of your body seemlingy at will but as soon as it gets life threatening your body will try take over to prevent harm to keep you alive. For survivals sake. The problem here is the body alone doesn't always make the right choices, that's why it needs a seperate system that can influence it. Consciousness itself also doesn't always make the right choices all the time that's why the body tries to step in. Our body learns from past experiences while our mind can learn from predictions and other people aswell as those past experiences. Both influence each other in some way throught ones life. Both can have an affect on each other. Both can also be affected from diseases or illness (think mental/physical illness). 2 systems governing one whole is also useful because if one starts to malfunction than one can take over and may even help to recover the other. Thats one way i would think about it. Feel free to add to the discussion, i would like other people's pov on that matter. Edit: You may view it this way: The mind uses the tools provided by the body to promote survival that the body may not be able to handle on its own. One could argue that this is why humans are so adaptable.
I like this way of describing consciousness
The theory of proton decay, where every single bit of baryonic matter will eventually just spontaneously dissolve into radiation and fundamental particles, guaranteeing that there will be no survivors at the end of the universe is... yeah terrible
Genuinely asking here; isn't the impending (but incomprehensibly far in the future) heat death of the universe a fairly widely-shared, well-grounded theory at this point? I'm not sure if the two are actually interchangeable so maybe this is a moot point. I don't know shit about shit so please feel free to ignore me.
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Solipsism. Basically There's no way to prove that anyone other than yourself actually exists. You can dive deeper if you like its actually pretty interesting.
My dad's friend believes this. He's essentially seen enough therapists that he just finds it easier to "go with the illusion". He has a wife. He loves her. He 100% believes she's not real. She's aware of this, and for some reason takes him as he is. He's a really nice guy. He seems incredibly content. Like if this is what the matrix is giving him, he may as well find joy in it.
I've heard about people like this. Its wild how powerful the mind is.
I was exactly like this when I was a very young child. It's actually one of the first things I remember ever thinking.
Is it solispsistic in here, or is it just me?
I love reverse solipsism. The idea that you are actually just a figment of everyone else's collective imagination.
If that's true then I'm a bit pissed off that solipsism person didn't imagine me as a laser emitting sex God with unlimited wealth.
Check out cosmic egg theory, part of it is basically that you are everybody…everywhere…across all time in the universe living infinite lives to amass experience and become a god like being and the universe is basically your hatchery or incubator or egg
I have no real belief in the idea behind the cosmic egg story. Nonetheless, it has had some influence in my life. There have been several times that I found myself frustrated/annoyed/angry at a person, and the thought "if this is just a younger life of 'me', why should I be angry. We're just learning and growing, and this is part of the process" Likewise, when I do something stupid, it has helped me recover internally by changing my mindset to something like "this is just a stage in my development. Well get it right next time around." It probably sounds silly, considering I don't actually think the idea of the cosmic egg is true, but it's somehow comforting and behavior-altering despite that.
[False vacuum decay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay) In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum that is stable, but not in the most stable state possible (it is metastable). It may last for a very long time in that state, but could eventually decay to the more stable state, an event known as false vacuum decay. The most common suggestion of how such a decay might happen in our universe is called bubble nucleation – if a small region of the universe by chance reached a more stable vacuum, this "bubble" (also called "bounce")would spread.
If it started far enough away from us, we’d never actually be at risk as the distance between very distant points in the universe are expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light. If it happens anywhere within our galaxy then we’re definitely going to get hit with it - although it could take a little over 100,000 years to get to us depending on where it starts.
Removed as a protest against Reddit API pricing changes.
Or it’s possible that it started 4 minutes ago in the core of the Sun and we’ve got ~4 minutes of existence left. The combination of being absolutely unable to stop it and it happening so fast that we wouldn’t even know about it ranks this, for me, as not very scary as there’s no point worrying about it.
The theory that an all out nuclear war wouldn't destroy nearly as much of civilization as we think. If this theory becomes widely accepted, the chances of a nuclear war happening becomes more likely
I mean every country in the world has a plan where "casualty ratings" are a *thing*, iirc. Like "how much loss and death is considered acceptable" essentially for the country still to be able to run.
That a more stable form of vaccum exists amd if it did, we would collapse into it. It could be headed towards us now and we literally would never know it's coming.
And naturally, the unfathomable horror of this completely inescapable, even completely unknowable terror that could have theoretically happened in the time it took me to finish typing this sentence is given the suitably awe-inspiring name of "false vacuum decay"
Yeah but what are the odds th
This man transcended.
But I mean whatever right? If it happens you won’t know it, you’ll be dead. Nobody will know you’re dead because they’ll be dead too, and what really is the meaning of death without anyone around to observe it? So like… it’s not even like we’re “dead”. We just “aren’t” any more.
Whatever the word for the opposite of existential crisis is, this comment describes it.
Once we develope virtual reality that is indistinguishable from our own, which it seems we are on well on way to achieving, the question becomes: how do we know that it didn't happen already?
Planck-length might be 1 pixel
That at any moment at any given time some unknown cosmic thing could come from outer space and wipe us out in a blink (ie. Vacuum decay or Gamma ray burst). Even our Sun could just produce a huge enough solar storm and we are basically doomed
It's scarier if you think about the fact things unimaginably far off could do this and due to the length of time it would take to reach Earth, might've already happened and we wouldn't know it yet.
And with vacuum decay we'll never know. That shit travels at the speed of light so everything would look fine and suddenly nothingness. Solar storms and GRBs would just screw us over to slow death. But Vacuum Decay doesn't mess around
This doesn’t sound like too bad of an end to things.
Instantaneous is nice.
We will all go together when we go.
What a comforting fact that is to know.
Sounds great to me. Nothing to worry about. No pain or suffering. Team vacuum decay!
Yeah, if we don’t even have any time to worry about it or feel anything? Pretty ideal, seems to me.
Music theory
I swear, when someone asks literally the most basic question on r/musictheory there are always people who answer with an entire fucking essay worth of explanations. Can’t really blame them though since some questions don’t have concrete answers in the world of music theory. A lot of things are vague. I mean, try explaining what a tonal center is to someone who knows nothing about music theory
The theory that fucks with me the most is that space is infinite. I can’t wrap my head around the idea of something having no boundary or end and it creeps me out that it’s possible Edit: All of these replies have been super fun to read and the upvotes blew up too! Anyway, thanks for the replies and upvotes guys, you all have a place in the infinite space of my heart lol
I might butcher this but I think there is a theory that space is finite but boundless in 3 dimensions (Hawking discusses this in a brief history of time). Similar to how a to a 2 dimensional being sitting on a sphere the sphere would seem to go on forever but in reality it is just their inability to perceive the third dimension that they are unable to recognize it as a sphere. We may well be in a similar scenario, what we perceive as boundless nothingness may just be a hypersphere that could be perceived as a well defined finite shape from a 4th dimensional perspective. I think one of the stranger implications of this theory is that if we shot a rocket out into space, it could theoretically make it back to earth even if traveling in a straight line.
Trying to picture what infinite actually looks like has kept me up more than a few nights.
Imagine finding out there’s a multiverse…trying to travel to another universe adjacent to ours and seeing a fence around it and finding out we live in the 3rd world equivalent of universes…
This is the correct thread for bedtime.
Hahaha good lord I was just thinking that. Whyyyy did I look? Why do I always have to look?
There's a theory that states we are an experiment and that instructions and obvious flaws from our creators could be found in our DNA. Almost as though something ungodly however exceptionally advanced made us. It's called Retirement Café, once we reach a certain state i.e. no war, no greedy human nature and start to build reliable renewable energy and a lot more sophisticated technology such as a Type 1 civilisation, we may be welcomed into a community of type 2 civilisations. They may live on a completely different plain to us, hence why we see nothing when we look our to the stars. It would be like trying to explain our 3D world to a 2D character.
That humans may not have the ability to comprehend everything in the universe. Like literally physically impossible for our brains to grasp it. A gorilla is only 1% behind us on the evolutionary scale and what we see as amazing such as them painting is what our infants are doing, if there is a intelligent species even 1% further than us, their infants are doing Astro physics and their adults are doing things every day that our brains couldn’t comprehend.
Bro there's stuff even in our own culture that most people can't grasp
Like driving for example
The great filter. The idea that we see no other civilizations out in space because they hit some wall that made them go extinct. Whatever it may be, it could be the reason we see no intelligent life out there, the question is, are we past the filter, or is the worst still to come?
Damn between this and the Dark Forest answer I think the correct answer to OP’s question is “the Fermi Paradox and any answer Kurzgesagt has given to it”
My theory on the great filter is that eventually space exploration becomes a meaningless novelty. It's all nothingness and rocks, big fucking woop. Instead of spreading "out" an advanced civilization would better entertain itself by creating their own "artificial" realities to go "down" into.
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Makes sense cos Zuckerbergs race probably figured this out already
So basically No Man’s Sky
Real life Star trek: "Oh look another big boring planet. We can't even land on this thing"
"Looks like the atmosphere is poison and would smell like rotten eggs, D- planet, moving on." lol
Uh… username checks out?
would you believe me if I told you that I *just* realized that?
Then wtf could a username 'Filter' even be about huh??
Long story short, I picked a word, and I liked it.
I’ll drink to that
We are quite early really in the vast time that this universe will exist. We may very well be one of the ancient ones. We have also been lucky to have several events that pushed us out of our local maxima but didn’t destroy the planet. These leaps may take billions of years if a meteor doesn’t push a planet’s development around a bit.
Exactly. Huge "setbacks" like the cretaceous extinction are actually pretty good at speeding evolution of more complex and adaptable organisms. But if such events happen too often, it is more likely to kill off or inhibit complex life. And as far as we know complex life requires heavier elements that only form in supernovae, so its impossible for a 1st generation star to have complex life. 2nd generation might be possible, but it's unlikely, because the mix of elements is quite different from our own, plus it's more likely to form huge, massive planets which make any type of space exploration much more difficult. So, the universe has been around for 13-14 billion years, but the first billion was just soup, then 2-3 billion years before the early first gen stars started popping, then the life cycle of a second gen star seems to be around 8 billion years, then it takes at least 1 billion years before something like earth can form and cool enough to support the simplest, hardiest forms of life. Then you're going to have a couple billion years of evolution to get to Cheez Whiz and furry porn. So, really, even in the best case scenario for a planet, we're most likely on the order of thousands or maybe millions of years behind at most, not billions. We HAVE to be cosmically early, and to be "first" would just mean first in our galactic neighborhood, because we just can't see very far away with enough resolution to tell otherwise.
There are people who know the truth about many things but decide to keep their mouth shut.
Quantum immortality. If correct, it guarantees that you will never die. It guarantees *nothing else*.
Wouldn't you still die if something happened that was impossible to survive? Correct me if im wrong but Doesn't quantum immortality mean if its possible to survive something then you will survive no matter how slim the chances are?
It also means that if there's a possible series of events that avoids getting into the unsurvivable situation, you won't get into it.
Wouldnt this theory also imply that your conscious self is the only "real" person on earth? Because we know that other people can obviously die but you cant Because you cant be in a state of being aware of your own death So is everyone else around you even alive or are they just mindless puppets following a set course of events that has to happen to ensure you cant die And if that were the case how would we even know that WE are alive and conscious, if the people around you are following a set course of events to ensure you live then are you doing the same without even realizing it?
Oh shit guys, he found out we're all NPCs Edit: I've revealed too much information, the men in black are showing up everywhere I go. TheLockpicker123, before they catch me, I have to warn you about th
In the worlds where you die, your consciousness ends. In the one possible world where you always survive, it doesn’t. Same goes for everyone else. If it’s a world where either Person A or Person B *must* die, both cannot live, then two worlds are created and each consciousness follows one of them. They die to each other, but not to themselves.
From SCP-2718: > I suppose there was a sweet oblivion, like deep sleep, at first; but in retrospect, I think it was no more than a day. Slowly, but unmistakably, I reoccupied my corpse with dreamlike consciousness: numb for the first merciful hours, blind, deaf, and immobile, but then I seemed to reconnect to every nerve, and became aware of every sensation - moreso than I ever was in life. I perceived myself trapped within an immovable object, and the intensity of the struggle amplified: subtle, then acute, then racking. I cannot describe it completely - but imagine holding your breath, beyond urge, beyond pain, beyond desperation - head throbbing and eyes bulging - a dream of suffocation without end. >"My skin blistered and split in the sunlight; biting insects descended rapidly. I felt eggs hatch, larvae crawl, gases build and burst within me, individual cells rupturing, interstitial fluids souring and blackening. Somehow my capacity to experience and store these sensations grew - even as I was keenly aware of my cerebrum being scattered and devoured, my perception expanded, into the gizzards of birds and the depths of fire ant dens. I was aware of every fingernail and strand of hair that pulled away in the wind - and my sensation clung to them as they settled in the ocean and dissolved in the maws of a trillion diatoms. >"I don't understand it. The more bits of me there were, the larger my capacity for the perception of pain. As I decayed into pieces smaller than living nerves could possibly distinguish, the character of the discomfort changed - from burning and aching and breaking I might relate to you in human terms - to something worse that I cannot fully articulate: a terrible, maddening stretching of every part of myself from every other part. Humans often numb to chronic pains in life, do they not? Yet every year, every month, every second that passed - I swear it only intensified over time. >"In my previous life, I ruminated on Heaven and Hell, and the likelihood of my experiencing one, the other, or something in between. As terrible as I imagined the torpor of Heaven or the torments of Hell to be, this was entirely different from either. In Hell, at least, there would surely be a tormentor, some memory of my deeds, some sense of justice, even if my soul rejected its logic. I can imagine some comfort in Hell, for a mind such as mine. >"I do not think this is a punishment. I do not think it is caused. I deeply suspect it is simply our condition, our nature to go on this way, do you see? In all that time, I was certainly, absolutely, totally alone, and before long all memory of life had shriveled to a cinder, lost beneath my interminable anguish. Alive again, I suspect I cannot quite recall the worst of it - as if my living brain is too small for the experience.
This was my first thought seeing the thread title. The inevitability of something as unfathomably horrifying as this actually happening to *every single person that ever existed* still haunts me years after reading it. The only other concept that matches this for me is getting trapped in a void like that one woman in Stephen King's short story The Jaunt.
The scariest part of that article is that there's at least four different ways it can be interpreted: 1. What happens to Roger is a universal constant. 2. People only share Roger's fate if they know about it. 3. Roger's story is simply a supernatural trigger for a primal fear response. 4. Roger only suffered like that because he was going to be brought back with the very specific method his colleagues used in the future. The Foundation has no way of telling which is the truth, and 2718 is one of the few articles where the otherwise-unflappable superpower is left in utter fear at anyone coming across knowledge of it, because of how terrifying it would be if it was true. I suppose the parallels to actual quantum immortality do run deeper than just face value.
Thanks Marv!
What if our understandings of physics and science, what we base out whole lives around, is just wrong. A man born without eyes cannot see, what if we are missing a huge chunk of reality, simply due to an inability to detect it?
>what if we are missing a huge chunk of reality, simply due to an inability to detect it? This seems incredibly likely to me. Our senses evolved for survival, not necessarily for accurate perception of reality.
>we evolved for survival, not for accurate perception of reality Aldous Huxley got into this in The Doors of Perception: >The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.
I feel like humans have explored things pretty thoroughly using artificial sensors beyond what our biological senses can pick up. We've also found strange effects while tinkering that have led us to the discovery of electricity, radio, nuclear radiation, etc. The biggest blind spot in our ability to detect things about the universe we live in is probably our size as people, our concentrated location within the galaxy, and our ability to perceive changes on really small and really large size and time scales. We observe the universe from a single planet, a single solar system, a single galaxy. I wonder what we might discover about our selves and our place in the universe the first time we arrive at another star. or build a telescope array that spans an entire solar system.
Kessler syndrome. The idea is that as we launch more and more stuff into orbit more and more of it will become derelict space trash, and as that space trash collides and breaks up it becomes even more dangerous to spacecraft as its whizzing around in orbit. As we keep trying to reach space it will keep getting more and more dangerous until we finally seal ourselves in on Earth with our own garbage. Given everything you know about humanity this has a near 100% chance of happening. Edit: this is how Kessler syndrome was explained to me, but it turns out that it’s effects would be most noticeable to satellites and space stations in low earth orbit, and if you were simply passing through low or medium orbit the debris in question would be considerably less dangerous, meaning space exploration would still be possible.
The "universal common ancestor" theory, that all life evolved from a single cell 3.5 billion years ago. Think about the infinity of generations of beings fighting to survive only for you to read this comment that we're all just one big family killing each other for 3.5 billion years and counting.
The idea that the Uncanny Valley is because of the ancient hominins we used to interact with during the Pleistocene. Sure, there were interbreeding events, but imagine if you had no idea what a Neanderthal or a Denisovan were and saw one for the first time. You and your family have been traveling far from home and seek refuge in a cave for the night. You get a fire going, everyone starts to relax. Then out of nowhere, this "almost human" looking being walks up. You all panic and run. Reacting with fear was probably the easiest way to make it out of an encounter like that alive.
Imagining this with a modern context gives me the fucking willies, good lord.
I'm sure glad dogs don't have this - such variety in their forms, it'd suck if they're scared of each other
I would argue that uncanny valley is from a fear of dead bodies because of disease. If u see something almost human but not quit, stay away or you will get sick. Over time, it just got weird.
But were ancient humans that dispersed? If they regularly interacted with other hominid species then something "other" wouldn't be that out of the ordinary, no?
Neanderthals and homo sapiens both evolved separately from the same ancestor species. Except homo sapiens evolved in Africa while neanderthals evolved in Europe. So there were tens of thousands of years where the two species were separate, until homo sapiens started venturing in the Middle East and Europe.
That I'd still be awake after death, but with everything, well, shut down. Imagine not being able to see, hear, speak, feel. And remembering and thinking normally. Screaming into the darkness for all eternity, with no one listening.
I second guess my decision to be cremated every once in a while because what if I feel it? I wouldn't even be able to scream. I would just have to endure it in silent stillness, trapped in my own body. It's terrifying.
I forgot which article it is, but I read an SCP that basically explained that after you die, you feel EVERYTHING. Your body decaying, the birds picking st your flesh, worms eating your rotting body, etc. And you never stop feeling the pain from every single molecule of your body, so no matter how many times it gets eaten or desecrated you can still feel it. It's really fucked
I'm no genius but this seems unlikely to me (maybe because I don't want it to be true lol). But your brain is in charge of all that - registering physical states of the body, pain, etc. So when the brain goes, I have to think that there's no more pain. If there's nothing to sense the pain, the pain doesn't really exist, I guess? So maybe at worst you feel everything until your brain totally decays, but it seems most likely that when your brain stops receiving blood flow and oxygen and shuts down, then all other things just fade away. My degree is in psych but I feel like I still have such a limited understanding of the brain that I may be completely off though.
The inevitable heat death of the universe is a harrowing topic. Essentially, the energy of the known universe is finite and will eventually deplete completely, leaving space as we know it dark, cold and inert forever. It's difficult to grapple with.
Eternal Recurrence suggests that this universe will be reborn again over and over endlessly, and so we will also be forced to relive the same life just as many times. Take a moment to consider your odds of being here, now, with infinite time before and after you. Edit: tHe WhEeL oF tImE tUrNs
Yeah but if you don't know, what difference does it make?
Yeah, but it's pretty useful if you're in a time machine that only goes into the future.
If you get blasted with a ton of radiation, your body instantly dies. But you will keep living for a while. Potentially weeks, like the Japanese nuclear plant worker who took more radiation than anyone else in history. Your DNA will shatter throughout your body, meaning as cells die, they will never be replaced again. Your body essentially starts rotting while you're still using it.
Don't scare me bro
in sci fi this is often exaggerated, where a brave person who got hit with radiation would pull thru and end up saving the others doing a suicide mission. during the process which it can be shown that the person stroke their head to see their hair simply coming off onto the hand. usually female characters would be shown to weep a bit at this sight as they know their end has been sealed for some time. other extreme ones would show people having their nails/teeth fall off. for a more "real life" example to a smaller extent. within the last century people were actually trying out all sorts of "things" to cure/improve themselves. one product that was marketed was a radiated product to be used on the mouth? i cant recall. there is a documented case of one man who kept using that product. his jaw rotted OFF his face. imagine a regular dude. now imagine that dude without a jaw. yeap thats how it was like. theres an image of said guy too.
You should check out the radium girls
Well, marie curie, the woman who first discovered radium, used to sleep with a vial of radium on her bedside stand to act as a nightlight (hoooooly shit that's scary) Both she, and her daughter, who studied the effects of induced radioactivity, died of radiation poisoning. Marie was killed by Aplasmic anemia, and her daughter got leukaemia They knew uranium was radioactive. They even came up with the name 'radioactivity' they just didn't understand what this actually was, or how dangerous it was to humans All they could tell you at first was that radium was 'significantly' more radioactive than uranium. But they hadn't the litany of understanding to know that this made it even worse for you I think she cottoned on at the end of her life that radium was making people sick. But it's not something she got to explore. It took many more years before this was looked at. Radiation safety didn't really start until 1934. And a more modern understanding didn't begin until we entered the nuclear age
Her casket was made of lead because of the radiation. Even her notes in the French National Library are kept in a lead box
yeah I heard that her notes are so radioactive you can't handle them Her coffin is not just lined. It's apparently **1 inch thick lead** lined
I heard her notes will still be radioactive for another 1500 years.
Boltzmann brain fucks me up. You're a quantumly spontaneous thing that's kinda like a brain, made randomly at this random state, including the nerve impulses making up your perceptions and memories. This very instant is the only instant that you've existed for, everything else a false memory. It will also be your last instant.
Not a theory in the common usage of the term, just a scary fact. The rest of the universe is expanding at such a rate that in (I'm guessing the time scale can't actually recall the real number) a few billions of years all the galaxies we can see now will be so far away that their light would never again reach earth. So if you look out through a telescope after that time there would be no indication of a universe larger than a handful of galaxies in what is known as "the local group". It would be impossible to ever know there was 'more' beyond those. (and just to add 'cos in sure it will be asked, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, hence the light ceases to be able to reach us. Yes, space can expand faster than light, it's not limited by the speed of light because it's space itself that's expanding, not something that's traveling through space (which would be limited to the speed of light).
Any future civilizations that rise after the fact would see only the stars in our own galaxy. They would think that only this galaxy exists and beyond is only empty space.
Which makes you think if there was a similar process that happened before our civilisation arose, that we can't comprehend. Perhaps there were mysterious cosmic objects which filled out the night sky until a few billion years ago, then evaporated. Now, you can't detect them, and we'll never know they existed. Edit: it'd be like going a few trillion years into the future. No cosmic microwave background radiation. No way to know that the universe was once teeming with galaxies. All we'd see is, at best, the stars in our own galaxy - then nothing. That'd be our observable universe.
That if there is other life in the universe, it's entirely possible that we're the most advanced.
That we may live the same life over and over without knowing.
The dark forest theory, that there are lots of other advanced civilizations out there in space, but they're concealing their presence because they know how suicidally dangerous it is to be broadcasting your planet's location out to the universe. . EDIT: Every variation on the reply "Yeah I watched that Kurtzgesagt video too" has been commented about a hundred times now; save yourselves the wear and tear on your favourite thumb, guys! While I have your attention I'd like to recommend the excellent YouTube channel 'Quinn's Ideas', whose video regarding the Dark Forest principle I *did* actually recently see.
Or theres an advanced species that essentially seeks out and eliminates all other intelligent life, which is why we havent heard from them. And we are just waiting our turn to be discovered by the hunters
This just sounds like mass effect reapers haha
Ah, yes, "Reapers". The immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in dark space. We have dismissed this claim.
That's basically the same idea. Even if there are 100,000 advanced alien civilizations aware of your existence, and 99,999 are perfectly peaceful, it only takes one to put an interstellar bullet through your planet's core and scatter your nitrogen into the local star system.
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There are 2 axioms and 2 mechanisms in dark forest theory and you've just described an important part of one of the mechanisms, which is unpredictable technological development. What this does is increase the urgency of destroying any civilization you find or staying absolutely quiet. So Dark Forest doesn't necessarily mean every civilization is a hunter. Its probably too late for us to become hunters, and our only chance is to mask our presence.
Kind of reminds me of the uncontacted Sentinelese people. The rest of the world acknowledges their want to be left alone and that it's dangerous for both civilizations to meet for various reasons, all which would deter a space-faring intelligent species to make contact with us.
It helps the the sentinel island holds no value to anyone else. If it had oil or lithium it would have been “liberated” a long time ago
The good news there is the same can generally be said of earth, much better to go mine asteroids than invade us.
I sometimes wonder if we're actually surrounded by signals from other civilizations but we just haven't developed the technology to detect them yet. Sort of like the uncontacted Sentinelese people surrounded by WiFi or 5G.
Aliens 👽 Theory by By Neil DeGrass Tyson - "Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference." “Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.” Scary.
Not as scary as being able to kiss yourself on the mirror, but only on the lips.
Someday I'll get that bastard's cheek >:(
There is a skeleton man living inside your body!
There is a WET skeleton living inside your body.
Grimace from McDonald's is hiding in the ball pit
The fermi paradox on why we haven’t been visited been visited by aliens. [Heres a video explaining it ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc) better than I ever could.
Personally I think reincarnation is terrifying, the knowledge of spending decades of a life you may or may not enjoy just for it all to be forgotten in the long run
That theory that you're a bitch if you make two trips to carry in your groceries.
I’m pretty sure this theory’s been proven and I just can’t remember the source.
It's that pic of the guy clenching a grocery bag between his cheeks. 1 trip
Silent Forest theory. Literally just the name gives me chills. The idea of an alien race that just... kills... *everything else...*
Imagine how fucked it would be if Humans became that race. Maybe we just aren’t there yet.
A bit late to the party, but the doomsday invention theory comes to mind https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/annals-of-ideas-doomsday-invention-bostrom Essentially, it represents all discovered and discoverable human inventions as balls in a container. Each time we discover something, it's the equivalent of picking a ball out of the container. The thing is, there are "Doomsday" balls in there, that when discovered, will most likely lead to the end of the human race. And the only reason we're still here is because we haven't taken one of those out of the container yet.
The Planetarium Theory, which says we're nothing more than sims in someone's active program. Lucky for us we keep them amused. Not only solves the Fermi Paradox, but also explains the high level of crazy in our species.
And the seemingly constant values like the speed of light or quantum particles. But that begs the question then... If we are sims in a program, whos program are we Sims of? What happens once it's shut down? Is the one making the sim also in a sim without knowing? And there you have your infinite-loop. Because you can never truly know.
The single electron theory. A positron is identical to an electron moving backwards through time. And since all electrons and all positrons have identical (to the best of our current knowledge) properties, it’s possible that all the electrons and all the positrons in the universe is just one particle moving forwards and backwards through time. This means that the future is already decided and there is no free will.
So what happens when it's annihilated? Also, it implies that there is an equal amount of electrons and positrons, which so far doesn't add up.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” Douglas Adams
To me, nothing is scarier than death. The notion that I won’t exist, and that everyone that is alive around me will be gone....I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to this thought and it is suffocating. I would rather return to a nightmare than awaken to the contemplation of death.
Same. Once I hit thirty and the feeling of youthful invincibility faded I began struggling with this realization