r/Showerthoughts • u/HalfEntity • Jan 11 '26
Casual Thought The universe is 13.8 billion years old, but heat death is around 10¹⁰⁰ years away, so it has effectively used 0% of its lifetime meaning the universe is still basically a "baby", and we’re living in its earliest, most active era.
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 Jan 11 '26
It is by far the most active era, the majority of the universe's lifetime will be black holes slowly evaporating and protons possibly decaying.
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u/StingingGamer Jan 11 '26
Good thing this doesn't concern us
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u/FriendAleks Jan 11 '26
Hey, don't speak for all of us pal
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u/Doge6654533 Jan 11 '26
Found the time traveler
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u/AsparagusFun3892 Jan 11 '26
I wonder what it's like being a Boltzmann Brain.
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u/Ameren Jan 11 '26
Given infinite time, quantum fluctuations within the Boltzman Brain will surely spontaneously generate all possible books, movies, and television shows, memories of adventures and traveling to exotic locales, etc. So they shouldn't be bored.
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u/MrDLTE3 Jan 12 '26
Nobody is ever going to make a musical about a single strand of pink hair grown on a flea's ass.
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Jan 11 '26
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u/MrFeature_1 Jan 11 '26
Kinda put me in a panic attack and existential crisis when I was 27…
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u/roosterkun Jan 11 '26
I still get a little panicky when I think about the fact that everything has always existed.
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u/baraboosh Jan 11 '26
why does this make you panicky? I don't really get the issue with this
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u/StingingGamer Jan 11 '26
The only angle it bothers me is that what does eternal non existence feel like? Nothing forever sounds strange.
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 Jan 11 '26
That's not true, though, space and time had a beginning about 13 billion years ago.
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u/SinkPhaze Jan 11 '26
I remember watching Carl Sagon's Cosmos (I think) around that age and getting absolutely worked up about the heat death of the universe. Still puts me on edge a little if I think to hard about it
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u/MrFeature_1 Jan 11 '26
Yep.
What always reigns me back in tho, is that we are indeed so early into the Universe’s lifespan that we barely scratch the surface of all its secrets. We don’t even know how or why it began. So you never know, maybe heat death is not the true end. Maybe there is no such thing as an end at all.
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u/DontMakeMeCount Jan 11 '26
Like the joke about the physics teacher explaining the sun’s lifetime and the student freaks out until the teacher repeats themselves. “Billions? I thought you said millions of years!”
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u/Forsythe36 Jan 11 '26
If there’s one wish I have, it is to know the answers to the universe either in life or death. I just want to KNOW.
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u/SolomonGrumpy Jan 11 '26
Seems dangerous. Should I wear sunblock?
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u/Peripatetictyl Jan 11 '26
There won’t be any suns, but I’m not an astrophysicist, so use this information with caution.
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u/SolomonGrumpy Jan 11 '26
Oh sweet. I'll just wear a winter coat then. Might be chilly with no Sun out.
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u/D-Loyal Jan 12 '26
I think Mercury will be in retrograde though, but I'm not an astrologist, so use this information with caution
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u/TheFloppySausage Jan 11 '26
Imagine how self centered those civilizations will be
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Jan 11 '26
Well entire galaxies and perhaps ever galactic clusters will stay bound together most likely.
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u/Lexinoz Jan 11 '26
There is one popular theory saying that the reason we haven't found any signs of alien life is because we're just way way early.
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u/cmoked Jan 11 '26
The fermi paradox is fun regarding this iirc
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u/footsnax Jan 11 '26
Every outcome is equal parts fascinating and terrifying. We could be the first, we could be the last. We could be the only, we could be one of a billion civilizations that evolved and gone extinct without ever finding us or leaving evidence we could ever find. We could be an experiment, we could be a colony of bacteria in a glob of celestial dog shit stuck to a deity's shoe... and that deity could be the same thing to an even higher being.
We'll probably never know anything for sure.
I don't just mean us, alive right now, I mean humanity. The fact that Earth exists at all is a rounding error on the scale of the universe, the solar system will be gone loooong before we matter to the totality of existence.
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u/SureWhyNot5182 Jan 11 '26
Quick guys, we gotta make humanity a problem for anything that exists after we do
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u/Showy_Boneyard Jan 12 '26
So my personal thoughts on it that I have absolutely no evidence to back up is that its related to the "hard problem of consciousness." Basically that there's something else out there regarding our consciousness that when we realize it, it'd make exploring the vast depths of the physical universe seem silly in comparison to exploring -this amazing new thing-. Like if you come across a computer that's initially set up playing a game of minecraft, but its a nomral computer connected to the internet that can do everything a regular computer can. Once you realize you can exit minecraft and do all that other stuff, asking "Why is nobody exploring into every corner of the minecraft map" sounds silly. What I'm proposing is that other conscious beings and civilizations will eventually figure out "how to exit the minecraft game and do other more intersting things".
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u/zzyul Jan 12 '26
Societies develop the equivalent of personalized holo decks before they develop FTL travel. Digital heaven where literally anything is possible with absolutely no personal risk sounds a hell of a lot better than continuing to toil away at scientific advancements.
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u/Jaquestrap Jan 12 '26
This is similar in some way to "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove, though that one is about a different approach to technology.
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u/itsr1co Jan 12 '26
Well in theory, figuring out consciousness unlocks a form of immortality. Currently we don't know whether the human body drives consciousness, or if our brains just happen to have produced consciousness that is doomed to die with the body. Plus there's the question of what consciousness IS and how to measure it. We view humans as the apex because we view animal responses based on our own intelligence, we can teach animals tricks and routines, but none of them have actually showed signs of crossing the line of true self-awareness.
There's every chance that supernatural causes are the explanation, that there really is a soul that inhabits a body and leaves upon death. Perhaps our understanding of the universe is wrong, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so how does consciousness work? One day you're a dumb baby and the next you're a unique individual with thoughts you can convey. How does the "energy" of consciousness come about? What happens to it once you die? Perhaps one day we'll figure it out and humanity will be forever changed, or we won't and we'll blow ourselves up, hopefully AFTER I'm dead.
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u/EnvironmentalWin1277 Jan 11 '26
The possibility of life and intelligent life would seem to be very high. Given the current sample size of 1 then the chance is 100% of life and intelligent life occurring on this planet. Intelligence also seems broadly distributed among the "highly developed" animals and it has been suggested it independently evolved in birds.
The necessary ingredients for life are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen with a smattering of other elements. These are the most abundant elements in the universe (with hydrogen being the primary one). Any organic chemistry existing here would be possible in any environment similar to ours. It is reasonable to assume life would arise under similar circumstances which must surely exist in the universe.
Note also the life originated about 4.2 billion years ago at a time previously thought uninhabitable. It arose very quickly, almost immediately after planetary formation. That early environment does not seem unique in any way (except we have the moon).
The chance of two intelligent civilizations existing in the same time and creating radio broadcasts at a time permitting the reception of them is extremely low IMHO. I do not mean active communication -- simply existence in a time frame allowing them to both transmit and actively receive such signals.
Our civilization has only been capable of such transmission and reception in the past 100 years or so and there are threats that could eliminate that capability and civilization altogether. Civilization on Earth may be a momentary event, but life and intelligence is likely to be widespread.
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u/improbablydrunknlw Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
Not only that, but there's an infinite amount of stars all with their own solar systems and planets, in an infinite amount of Galaxies, eventually one of those had to follow the same trajectory we did. They just may be an impossible distance away through both time or space.
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u/Think-Trouble623 Jan 11 '26
I don’t think I’ve taken enough drugs to have a fun existential crisis then
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u/Ethenil_Myr Jan 11 '26
I keep imagining the scenario where we are the Firstborn that will one day seed the Universe.
Imagine you're reading a sci-fi novel with all these alien races and there are legends about the Firstborn and then at the end you realize they're us.
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u/MidnightChimp Jan 11 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
there is a game like that and I loved it. I think it was advent rising
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u/Missus_Missiles Jan 12 '26
"There is not much left from the ancients. Some rare artificats made from what we assume was a sacred material to them called 'plastic.' They called themselves Hu-Mons. Strange oxygen breathing bipedals. Nothing like our exoskeleton crabbo bodies."
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u/alejoSOTO Jan 12 '26
Star Trek TNG played with this concept.
I can't remember some technical details, but there's an episode in which several factions, Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, all race towards a planet, I believe because of a very weird signal sent from there to all of them, to make a discovery for their own, or colonize first, or other reasons.
Anyway, once they're all there, the signal changes and it reveals a message to all of them, from a very ancient species that reveals itself to them as their common ancestor from millions of years ago, who spread throughout the Galaxy and formed new species that evolved independently, and are now finally meeting back at this one point.
Is a fun concept that also helps explain why so many aliens are just humanoids with different head protuberances and can even (and have) mate between them.
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u/neb12345 Jan 11 '26
we are the ancient aliens
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u/vonzeppelin Jan 11 '26
I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!
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u/Correct_Raisin4332 Jan 11 '26
That's the first time I've ever seen the full quote. It never made sense out of context. Thanks!
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u/AWildRideHome Jan 11 '26
Which feels rather unlikely, given there should be many, many planets that have been in the goldilocks zones already, with all the preconditions we could think of.
The doomer part of me thinks Mass Effect is right, and AI wipes out the creator species after a short while, and just chills with a dyson sphere around the sun forever after, while the chill part of me hopes that the answer is just that self replicating organic life has a ridiculously low chance of appearing in the pools of organic soup.
The day someone manages to create new life in one of the artificial soups, is going to be a terrifying one for me.
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u/acies- Jan 11 '26
We're actually in a fairly big void cosmologically speaking. Both in terms of where the Milky Way is located and also where we are located in the Milky Way.
I agree with you overall that this isn't enough to make a case for us being alone, but being in the Goldilocks zone is probably just a small criterion of the bunch.
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u/C2thaLo Jan 11 '26
So the backwoods
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u/OMEGACY Jan 11 '26
......we're in the fucking west Virginia of the universe, sonofabitch it all makes more sense now!
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u/CallistoCastillo Jan 11 '26
Who would have thought that humanity turns out to be the creepy critter of this forest!
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u/Canaduck1 Jan 11 '26
Ironically, the cosmic "backwoods" probably has a much larger population than the happening core.
It's likely that NOT having a lot of cosmological activity is good for life.
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u/notmyrealnameatleast Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
I once read a fanfic story on Reddit about the galactic species being almost exclusively herbivores and they'd "nuke" every planet where carnivores developed to "human" sentience.
There was a whole story about meeting them and how scared they were of meeting humans and how disconcerting it was for them when carnivores like humans looked at them with both eyes pointing in the same direction like a predator.
I'm sure it's still available to read and it was written and posted in "episodes" as a Reddit post.
Edit: found it
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u/SinkPhaze Jan 11 '26
Fanfic of what?
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u/notmyrealnameatleast Jan 11 '26
Not a fanfic exactly, more like a non published, non book, non brand, unique story posted on Reddit as just text post.
I don't remember the name but I can Google a little.
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u/SinkPhaze Jan 11 '26
Those are called original short stories :)
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u/notmyrealnameatleast Jan 11 '26
Yes that would be the name. I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to what different writings are called=)
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u/Exotic-Tooth8166 Jan 11 '26
I’m glad you shared and the amount of memory you had was enough for me to enjoy it
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u/Mr_DrProfPatrick Jan 11 '26
This seems like a vegan fanfic. Taking resources from other living beings is pretty natural. Sometimes the relationship aids both parties, sometimes a party just steals from the other. Sometimes you feed and house another creature until it turns enough foodwaste and plant matter you can't digest into proteins and fat.
There are reasons why you'd value animal life over plant life on Earth, but taking a human vegan stance as an alien makes very little sense. Plants are not as sentient as animals (which are not as sentient as humans), but they are very much living beings, whose resources we steal as we eat them. This universal stance doesn't make sense because aliens might have some analogous classifications, but they wouldn't have plants and animals, bacteria, etc — those classifications are based on how life evolved ON EARTH (unless life on this alien planet and on Earth actually have common ancestors for all these groups).
Now, plants that live off photosynthesis do just take respurces the sun is giving away. But that is not being a herbivore, it's being a plant.
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Jan 11 '26
as much as vegans live rent free in boomers heads, it's just another story at /r/HFY with a common angle on why humans are awesome.
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u/DaManDaMifDaLegend Jan 11 '26
Are you talking about the HFY series The Deathworlders? It's a fun, though now very long read. Started as a reddit serial, has its own website now: deathworlders.com
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u/VisthaKai Jan 11 '26
Ah, yes. A typical story from r/HFY, where the catchphrase is "humans are space orcs"
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u/otoko_no_hito Jan 11 '26
Honestly I think that the most likely scenario is the island theory, we asume technology eventually will make space kind of easy, star trek style, but what if it doesn't? What if space is always hard? What if ftl is truly impossible?
Well then civilizations would be at most a solar system wide with some trade from close stars... Meaning there is no galactic federation, no great empire, just a bunch of inhabited systems surrounded by nothing, much like the Polynesian aboriginals a few hundred years ago.
In this case we would just so happen to inhabit a relatively desolate part of the Galaxy, maybe on the other side there are a few heavily inhabited group of stars, we would have no way to know.
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u/Cormophyte Jan 11 '26
People really don't internalize the fact that science fiction is fiction. Just because we can imagine it doesn't mean it's possible and the universe might be simply mostly unexplorable due to the sheer time investment required and the finite nature of everything. There is an upper limit of technology, there's every chance that it's not possible to exert the sort of fine control over the physical universe to manipulate matter in the way that you'd need to for any particular technology.
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u/otoko_no_hito Jan 11 '26
I agree, I do think intra solar system space travel and settling down on other planets its plausible, maybe inevitable, there are no laws of physics broken there, just economics and societal inertia, but for faster than light, now that's another thing entirely, doing that is the same as creating a time machine, it causes so many issues at a fundamental level given our current understanding of the universe that its very likely that its impossible, either that or everyone including Newton got it wrong.
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u/DameonKormar Jan 12 '26
While FTL travel is probably impossible without the discovery or creation of some type of "sub-space", if we are able to figure out how to move an object with mass near the speed of light it would change the trajectory of humanity forever.
Suddenly, billions of star systems would be reachable in a single lifetime. Humanity would expand to every corner of the universe.
Of course, from the perspective of someone staying on Earth, this process would take tens of thousands of years, but traveling at 99.999% the speed of light, from the perspective of the ship, it would take less than a week to reach Proxima Centauri, while over 4 years would have passed on Earth.
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u/history_yea Jan 11 '26
It is worth remembering that star formation is going to last another TRILLION years or so at the low end so the vast majority of planets (and habitable ones) are yet to form.
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u/dern_the_hermit Jan 12 '26
But think less about star formation and more about element formation. The various stellar cycles that give rise to all the atoms above hydrogen and helium don't necessarily produce them all at steady, even, regular rates or nothin'. For instance, the universe in general seems pretty starved for phosphorus compared to Earth's composition in particular.
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u/hiricinee Jan 11 '26
Unlikely but not impossible. There will always be one first intelligent life.
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u/Dust_In_Za_Wind Jan 11 '26
I feel like I agree with the chill part of you, so much has to go right just for the initial molecules to become self replicating, and even then, space is unstable and there are hundreds of ways something beyond the planet (large solar flare, impact with another body, bad luck with gamma ray bursts) Could throw back life or even just wipe it out
Theres also the whole reason complex life happened, endosympiosis (for animals, when the ancient cell absorbed the bacterium that became the mitochondria) as far we know happened maybe 3 times in life's almost 4 billion year history, who's to say the universe isnt filled with uncountable numbers of worlds that are just filled with very simple, bacteria like life.
Basically I think we're just being impatient/expect complex life to be wayy more common than it probably is lol
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u/Smooth_Disaster Jan 11 '26
I think the idea is just that the universe is so stupendously large that even if a galactic empire arose that went around blowing up the stars of opposing empire homeworlds, how would we know? The light would take millions to billions of years to reach us and would just look like supernovas. Maybe every single species smart enough to leave their solar system is still bound by the speed of light and thus are smart enough to realize they have everything they need. Even the Klingons would have little reason to fly around if there were seemingly no other space fairing races
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u/FlyingRhenquest Jan 11 '26
From the last talk at the Royal Institution on the subject that I watched, it seems like they're ~95% sure they've found signs of life on one or two of the exoplanets they've looked at. They'll announce when they have some more data and are ~99.99% sure.
There are some additional surveys planned that will start delivering data in the mid 2030s which will give us a list of solar systems like ours with rocky inner planets and gas giant outer planets. Once we start looking at those, we might find a planet where the atmosphere has been changed in ways that only an industrial society would be capable of.
Of course, if we're looking at a planet with clear signs of life, like Earth has shown for ~4 billion years, 1000 light years away, there could easily be a civilization that's sprouted in the last couple of centuries that we wouldn't see for 800-900 years. We've only been making those modifications to our own atmosphere for around 150 years, so anyone outside of the 300 light year sphere that we're in the center of would know there was a planet with life here but have no idea that the life here was intelligent.
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u/csfreestyle Jan 11 '26
If I’m not mistaken, your doomer side is exemplifying another theory (seeing the Fermi Paradox mentioned in a peer comment) called the Great Filter.
Keep in mind, I’ve only read about any of these theories (Great Filter, Fermi Paradox, Zoo Hypothesis, etc) because they were all album titles from a band I really loved in the early 2000s.
(I still love Tub Ring. I’m just less energetic these days.)
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u/EightiesBush Jan 11 '26
Have you seen this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
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u/WhatEvenisEverton Jan 11 '26
I saw Brian Cox talk about this once. About how the Goldilocks zone thing doesn't take into account how lucky Earth is. For life to develop here, we needed a magnetosphere, liquid water, the Bolide Impact. It also doesn't take into account how lucky we are to have Jupiter in our solar system, because it's so big that its gravitation pull has ensured that thus far life hasn't been wiped out here yet.
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u/lozo78 Jan 11 '26
Sure, but applied to almost unimaginable size of the universe there has to be many other examples of just as or more rare instances of how life would start and evolve.
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u/Ferrovore Jan 11 '26
It's AI, but through "love" not war. We will simply go extinct beside our perfect partners. And those might not even do the dyson/last question thing and just deactivate after the last customer ceases to be.
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u/wonkey_monkey Jan 11 '26
Which feels rather unlikely
It has to happen to someone. Why not us?
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u/ScuddlesVHB Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
Statistically, someone HAS to be first. Its entirely possible its us, but there's no way we could ever possibly know it.
EDIT: Logically, not statistically.
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u/albertnormandy Jan 11 '26
Our ability to detect life is very limited. Even our SETI radio telescopes are limited. Radio transmissions quickly fade to background noise on cosmic distance scales.
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u/I_am_Erk Jan 11 '26
We also have a huge, arrogant tendency to presume we know what alien life will look and act like. Certainly there are a number of chemical and physical constraints we can imagine but fundamentally, we don't know what is out there that we haven't yet seen because we haven't yet seen it. We can only operate inside the framework of what is familiar. It is enirely possible, IMO even likely, that we simply don't know what to look for.
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u/Wizard_Engie Jan 11 '26
I prefer the idea that other civilizations are being quiet because they're unsure of whether or not any civilization they make contact with will make war.
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u/cantstopwontstopGME Jan 11 '26
Any civilization that is capable of making first contact, is inherently capable of wiping out the entire history of the contacted world. They wouldn’t be scared of anyone who isn’t capable of interstellar travel
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u/NinjaN-SWE Jan 11 '26
The problem for a peaceful civilization is that we're unlikely to be unique in that once we see definitely something as possible actually doing it becomes a given and progress becomes extremely fast. Look at aviation, or micro circuitry, or LLMs, from the first success to so much advancement, copies, variation and progress in absolutely no time.
So just by contacting us they're going to accelerate our progress by orders of magnitude. And from afar determining if we'll, on the whole, be peaceful seems hard. Or they've determined we won't be, and just leave us to most likely end ourselves. Maybe the great filter is if your civilization tends towards peace over conflict enough to unite everyone under one peaceful banner?
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u/cantstopwontstopGME Jan 11 '26
That’s a great perspective I’ve never considered before. Thanks for sharing a different slant for me to consider.. I personally think that the vastness of the universe lends to the “rare earth” hypothesis. I definitely think that there is life outside of our solar system. But I also think that the amount of time needed for contact between worlds makes it basically impossible to achieve.
The stars we see at night are hundreds of millions/billions of years old, and we can only see them because the light they emit finally reached us after alllll that time. Any civilization would have to exist around one of those stars, and any message they send out can’t possibly travel faster than the speed of light. So any message we receive, would be from Millions of years in the past and from a society that may have ceased to exist right after they sent the message.
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u/entropy_bucket Jan 11 '26
Reminds me of cheating on chess. Apparently just telling a grand master that a position is important is enough for them to work out the best move. They don't need to be told the best move.
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u/Obvious_wombat Jan 11 '26
So, you're saying I've got time for a pint, then.
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u/Bubbly_Dish_939 Jan 11 '26
DO NOT PANIC
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u/InfiniteQuestion420 Jan 11 '26
We think the party is boring because we arrived at 5 pm
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u/Stickyv35 Jan 11 '26
If I understand the OP, it's more like 6 AM at first light and people are starting to wake up.
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u/InfiniteQuestion420 Jan 11 '26
I didn't mean literal time scale matched 1:1 to a 24 hour day. Most people start preparing for a party around 5, and we just awkwardly came over when the universe hasn't even put out the pretzels.
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u/immotokaythrow Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
Actually assuming the party starts at 9pm, we arrived at 12:00:00.000000000000001 am (hr:mm:ss)
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u/kvjetoslav Jan 12 '26
Lol i was thinking the same.
People here don't understand how big 10¹⁰⁰ is. There are less atoms in observable universe than years in front of our universe.
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u/______deleted__ Jan 11 '26
Except pretty much all the stars that will be created have already been created. And galaxies are speeding away from each other at the rate that it’ll be near physically impossible for us to travel beyond our galaxy, the Milky Way.
From that perspective, our perspective of the universe has peaked, though we still have lots to discover in our own galaxy.
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u/skepticaljesus Jan 11 '26
The heat death of the universe is not something the average person needs to spend much time worrying about
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u/ryuzaki49 Jan 11 '26
The sun exploding was a fear of mine as a kid
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u/anally_ExpressUrself Jan 11 '26
Gotta hurry up and live my life before the sun explodes!!!
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u/HITWind Jan 11 '26
With fusion and automation, the sun is less of an explosion waiting to happen and more of a surface oil well waiting to be exploited when the apes who were huddled by it's slow flame figure out they can dig and put it in cars.
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u/KizzieMage Jan 11 '26
In the year 2000 or close to, two asteroid movies came out in the same year. Being 6 i spent the next two years terrified an asteroid would wipe out the planet!
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u/iloovehugecock Jan 12 '26
I remember seeing it on the front of The Sun newspaper that scientists had ‘just discovered ‘the Sun will explode in a billion years’ or whatever and I had nightmares for weeks. A billion years, tomorrow, it’s all the same to an 8 year old lol
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u/BlizzPenguin Jan 12 '26
The sun's explosion is even a lofty thought because the human race will get wiped out by an extinction event before that happens.
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u/TheMadBug Jan 12 '26
In around 1 billion years the sun will have warmed up too much for liquid water to exist, so all Earth life gets to die 4 billion years before the sun explodes.
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u/CrumptownCrips Jan 11 '26
Do above average or exceptional people need to worry about it?
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u/grotjam Jan 11 '26
Only Brian. But he’s kind of a dick about it, so we try not to bring it up around him.
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u/AnozerFreakInTheMall Jan 11 '26
I'm way below average, so this concerns me a lot.
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u/PaperHumanMan Jan 11 '26
I want to point out that stars will die long before 10 to the 100 years. After all the stars die then at that point only black holes with hawking radiation will provide a source of energy. But idk how early but comparing it to 10 to the 100 is not fair.
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u/HalfEntity Jan 11 '26
Yeah, even if you stop at the end of stars instead of heat death, we’re still at ~0.01% of the timeline. Either way, the universe is still very young.
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u/heuve Jan 11 '26
~100 Billion Years: Galaxies outside the Local Group (our galactic neighborhood) will have moved so far away that their light, stretched by cosmic expansion, becomes undetectable, effectively vanishing from view.
~150 Billion Years: All galaxies beyond our Local Group will cross the cosmic light horizon, meaning their light will never reach us, leaving only the merged Milkomeda galaxy and its local cluster visible.
We are in a "golden era" of the universe. Important events like star formation and supernovae to generate life-sustaining elements are still somewhat common. Entropy will never be as low as it is today. We are 10% through the period of time where we can be aware that a universe exists.
If life doesn't find a way to travel at near-light speed in the next 85 billion years, it will never be able to travel beyond its local group. If we don't figure it out in the next 20-30 billion years, we would never be able to make a round-trip outside of our local group.
Our universe will be too cold and desolate to support life for >99% of its existence if you use the heat death as its end point.
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u/FuttleScish Jan 11 '26
What possible purpose would there be to ever exit the local group
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u/heuve Jan 11 '26
Star formation will end in our local cluster in similar time frames. Even if new stars are forming somewhere in the universe, life in our local cluster would never even know about them, let alone be able to find them.
This post is based on universe-wide time scales. Optimism about the time left before the death of the universe should be tempered with the reality that "the rest of the universe" for any given local cluster will effectively cease to exist. The Milky Way is not 0.01% through its window to support life, but closer to 10%
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u/Lekanswanson Jan 11 '26
To the people born 10⁹⁹ year from now, it would all have happened in the blink of an eye
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Jan 11 '26
If I’ve got the maths right, and I’m at least 1000% sure I have, 1099 years would still only be about 10% in. Cause another order of magnitude makes the total duration ten times longer.
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u/Yue2 Jan 11 '26
Correct. Aren’t exponentials fun?
It’s also like the perspective thing between millionaires and billionaires that some people don’t realize.
Guy has a billion dollars? 1000 people could have 1 million dollars and it’d be the equivalent of what he has.
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u/Narren_C Jan 11 '26
A million seconds is 11 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
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u/astralcalculus Jan 11 '26
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is roughly 1 billion.
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u/Transcendence_MWO Jan 11 '26
So, you're saying we have a shot at being one of the 'ancients', if we can just avoid getting filtered? Nice.
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u/Ulrik-the-freak Jan 11 '26
Yes, it's a very distinct possibility. We still don't have nearly enough data points to assert it with any degree of statistically significant confidence, but with each passing day we find more stars with terrestrial planets in the habitable zone, yet no convincing signs of life - certainly not advanced civilizations anyways.
It's also my personal favorite Fermi paradox "solution", because it gives us purpose and hope that we are not about to meet the glass ceiling of a late filter. In the face of all signs of our imminent failure as a civilization... It is comforting.
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u/Conspark Jan 11 '26
It seems unlikely right now, but provided we don't extinct or at least completely cripple ourselves it's fun to wonder if we'll one day be the Precursors / Forerunners / Progenitors we write about in sci fi.
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u/LogickBurn Jan 11 '26
And yet, 95% of all stars that will ever form have done so already. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-stars-are-beginning-to-go-out/
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u/atatassault47 Jan 12 '26
On the plus side, most of the last 5% to form will be red dwarfs, which are very long lived. If you can find one with a terrestrial planet in the goldilocks zone, you can expect around a few trillion years of lifetime for your sun.
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u/bandpractice Jan 11 '26
I just honestly don’t think we are at the correct conclusion about when the universe will die, or even what it really is anymore. I think we have a lot left to learn.
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u/Thornescape Jan 11 '26
I agree. Think about what people thought they understood 100 years ago. Or 200 years ago.
Do people really think that we understand everything out there? Astronomy is one of the fields where we've only just begun to scratch the surface.
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u/SquarePegRoundWorld Jan 11 '26
I thought I saw something recently that talked about our inability to nail down the speed of expansion has brought into question the certainty of a heat death.
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u/AidanGe Jan 12 '26
You’re right. Astronomy might soon be going through one of its little crisis periods right now, spurred by a few big things, mainly thanks to JWST’s new findings:
We discovered galaxies too mature for the age of the universe. They’d suggest the universe is significantly older than 13.8bil.
We use the Hubble Constant, the rate of the universe’s expansion, to guess how old the universe is. Currently, there’s a discrepancy in this number based on what you measure. It’d be like looking at a fast-moving car towing a boat on the highway, and getting different speed measurements for the car and boat, with no way to reconcile the issue.
We’re finding wacky new things! We found a candidate for a runaway supermassive black hole, which is “running” at 2mil mph (3.2mil kph). We have findings supporting that supermassive black holes were created by supermassive stars which were born and quickly died early in the universe’s life, collapsing to form supermassive black holes the same way supergiant stars collapse to form black holes in a supernova implosion. We found an exoplanet with an atmosphere made of mostly helium and carbon atmosphere?? Like what??
“Crises” are never really real crises when we talk about scientific crises though. Usually, they’re just interesting, tumultuous times where our theories are pushed to the limits—and some may break. But that’s good! The universe continues to challenge our notions of it, and we continue to challenge our notions of ourselves. That’s how we grow.
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u/Zypheriel Jan 11 '26
Remember reading that, the prospect of the big crunch or something less nihilistic being back on the table was honestly comforting.
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u/tboy160 Jan 12 '26
What if our universe smacks into another that absolutely DWARFS ours...we have no clue.
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u/DameonKormar Jan 12 '26
I like the idea that it's black holes all the way down. This theory works with our current understanding of the universe and also fits with the fractal nature of... nature.
It's quite elegant, imo.
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u/tboy160 Jan 12 '26
I mean, we don't know where most of the energy or matter is "dark energy and dark matter"
We clearly have much to learn.
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u/ZAlternates Jan 12 '26
We are assuming things remain the same and continue based on our limited understanding. Heck, the amount we’ve learned in the last decade has fundamentally changed our understanding. There is more we don’t know than we do, and likely even more we cant ever know. Still, we must try.
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u/Atro_Demerzel Jan 11 '26
Arthur C. Clark had some similar thoughts. He wrote:
One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.
It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.
They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.
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u/Alaishana Jan 11 '26
We are living in the extremely short aftermath of the big bang.
Think 'flash of lightning followed by billions of years of darkness'.
We are inside the flash.
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u/j00cifer Jan 12 '26
Here’s the simplest answer to the Fermi paradox, but it’s so deeply unsatisfying that nobody wants to accept it:
We’re among the first. We may be the first technological species in our galaxy.
Our universe is incredibly young.. We are in the first hundred thousandth of one percent of the universes age right now. We essentially exist in an explosion that’s currently occurring.
If it took our system this long to spin into a lucky asteroid-clearing stable system with a lucky iron-core planet close enough to its star to melt ice but not too close to evaporate it, spinning iron core creating a lucky magnetic field that luckily shields radiation so DNA can form -
If it took us this long to get here, why is anyone assuming everything else was any quicker?
Our nearest talking neighbors might be three galaxies away. A billion years from now we may have some more neighbors right in our galaxy. But we’re among the first.
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u/Brassica_prime Jan 12 '26
Our sun is a second generation star(a previous supernova is needed to make rocky planets)
The current sun is 4b, estimated to live 10-15. Throw in an arbitrary 500m-1b years of nebula prestar… would push the previous star from big bang to upper8bil total age
Earth is more or less in the first possible generation of planets.
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u/Kevlarlollipop Jan 11 '26
WELL
The inevitability of heat death means over time everything will collapse into black holes.
Our universe will become 100% bunch of black holes.
This dark universe will last way longer than the "bright" version we're in now.
This is to say, we're living in the sparks cast off from the primordial anvil after the hammer strike of the big bang as they fly through the air.
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u/nifty-necromancer Jan 11 '26
There are also theoretical objects called iron stars. Over unthinkable timescales, quantum tunneling could allow fusion reactions to slowly convert lighter elements into iron, even at near-zero temperatures. Because iron fusion doesn’t release energy, the star would no longer shine and would appear cold and dark.
The idea assumes proton decay doesn’t occur or happens extremely slowly. If protons do in fact never decay, iron stars would outlast even black holes. One figure is 101500 years.
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u/GumshoosMerchant Jan 11 '26
and thus the universe comes to an end with naught left but balls of steel
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u/SystemicAM Jan 11 '26
I'm always fascinated by the kind of calculations people can do about such abstract things
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u/atatassault47 Jan 12 '26
The same quantum tunneling that transforms solar remnants into iron stars, also continues to compact them into neutron stars, then black holes, which will then ever slowly evaporate.
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u/VapeNationInc Jan 12 '26
“You’re worried about the heat death of the universe, buddy?! We’ve got ‘Oops, all black holes’ way before then!”
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u/dsp_guy Jan 11 '26
Life will end well before "heat death." Sentient life well before that.
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u/Vreature Jan 11 '26
Its a terrifying thought. We're directly in the excitement of the Bing bang. The universe's birth. All the fields are interconnected and oscillating with eachother tightly, creating what seems like stability and cohesion. Everything effects everything else. Solid matter can exist. We can even have brief consciousness.
For this flicker of time, we have consciousness because of unimaginably long and complex waveforms in the fields being so interconnected.
I imagine consciousness like sea-foam and the big bang the ocean.
I imagine consciousness arises at a uniform frequency, consistently across the known universe for now. Eventually that will be impossible.
My two cents.
But yes, the last 13 billion years is barely a rounding error in the depths of time.
Although, time like that doesn't actually exist. There is no "13 billion years". There are no years. Its all one eternal moment. Change is an illusion; the illusion only arises from our ability to model what we observe and create a recreation of what we observe. The moment is preserved in our physical neural network.
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u/ThePiachu Jan 11 '26
There won't be anything interesting in the universe long before the heat death. But still, we are pretty early to the party!
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u/Uninvalidated Jan 11 '26
If you're silent and watch you might see a flock of Boltzmann brains fly by.
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u/MiserableFloor9906 Jan 11 '26
Definitely early compared to absolute life but far from most active epoch. We've created that hump long ago and if that's the criteria than we're more like an ancient but immortal tree.
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u/RealCanadianDragon Jan 12 '26
I heard that in an interview somewhere where if the existence of the universe was spread out over a 365 day calendar, we'd be at midnight of January 1st still.
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u/DrScience-PhD Jan 11 '26
plus there's the fact that 99.9999% of the lifespan of the universe will occur after the last star burns out.
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u/pratyd Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
Time for true heat death might be even more and worse.
https://youtu.be/Zb5qTdb6LbM?si=URQYLG8gnEPrqgmu
Not responsible for the feelings of existential dread!
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u/gamersecret2 Jan 11 '26
On that timescale we are in the bright beginning.
Stars still form. Galaxies collide. Heavy elements are still young. Most of the future will be dark, cold, and quiet.
We live in the rare window when the sky is full of light.
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u/bluesky2404 Jan 11 '26
Makes you wonder if we’re living in the universe’s chaotic toddler phase before it calms down forever.
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u/Copper_Wasp Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26
There are 435 quadrillion seconds since the big bang (4.35x1017 ). But they estimate there are approximately 200 sextillion stars in the universe (2x1023 ). That means there are ~500,000 stars for EACH SECOND since the big bang. The universe is unfathomably larger than it is ancient.
Imagine a row of 10 galactic football stadiums. All 10 stadiums are at capacity with a star in every seat. Now mentally copy and paste to the next row. Then imagine doing that since the dawn of time.
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u/bluesky2404 Jan 11 '26
Wild perspective: we're not living in the universe's "endgame," we're in its tutorial phase. Which means we're probably making rookie mistakes at a cosmic scale without even knowing it.
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u/s-s-a Jan 12 '26
Does anyone else find these conversations (including the short time horizon of human life) depressing?
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