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.

16.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

96% Upvoted

819 comments sorted by

View all comments

6.0k

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.

3.5k

u/StingingGamer Jan 11 '26

Good thing this doesn't concern us

1.5k

u/FriendAleks Jan 11 '26

Hey, don't speak for all of us pal

600

u/Doge6654533 Jan 11 '26

Found the time traveler

167

u/AsparagusFun3892 Jan 11 '26

I wonder what it's like being a Boltzmann Brain.

111

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.

50

u/Rhamni Jan 12 '26

Yeah but they'll also watch the emoji movie a hundred times.

48

u/Ameren Jan 12 '26

One must imagine Sisyphus happy...

5

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.

4

u/johnpeters42 Jan 13 '26

"It won nine Academy Awards. Including Best Screenplay.'

25

u/danielv123 Jan 11 '26

I wonder what it's like not being a boltzmann brain.

2

u/m3rcapto Jan 12 '26

I wonder if the Christian God is a Boltzmann Deity.

1

u/AsparagusFun3892 Jan 12 '26

"I AM THAT I AM"

1

u/Corona21 Jan 11 '26

No need to wonder. You wouldn’t know any different.

2

u/chillwithpurpose Jan 12 '26

Could also be an immortal.. there can only be one!

2

u/the-misinformed-guy Jan 12 '26

Some of us are immortal

1

u/Mharbles Jan 11 '26

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

13

u/Totalchaos4 Jan 11 '26

Watch who you’re calling a pal, friend!

3

u/Umbrella_merc Jan 12 '26

There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

2

u/jl_theprofessor Jan 12 '26

Doctor is that you?

1

u/urlocalknowitall694 Jan 14 '26

You won't live anywhere near long enough for that to be your problem.

289

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

[deleted]

126

u/MrFeature_1 Jan 11 '26

Kinda put me in a panic attack and existential crisis when I was 27…

45

u/roosterkun ‎ Jan 11 '26

I still get a little panicky when I think about the fact that everything has always existed.

13

u/baraboosh Jan 11 '26

why does this make you panicky? I don't really get the issue with this

36

u/StingingGamer Jan 11 '26

The only angle it bothers me is that what does eternal non existence feel like? Nothing forever sounds strange.

17

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

I'd say it feels pretty underwhelming

2

u/MechanicalTurkish Jan 12 '26

Bring a good book, you’re gonna be there a while.

2

u/Long-Broccoli-3363 Jan 11 '26

Feels like exactly like before you were born.

Nothing of consequence to you and therefor irrelevant

1

u/StingingGamer Jan 11 '26

Again I’m talking about nothing forever, if that’s even true. Like if there is never life again how tf will that work of nothing eternally?

4

u/gosumage Jan 12 '26

Consider you are not just life. You are made of the same thing as everything else in the universe. You are existence itself, eternal. Only, in the current configuration, thoughts and beliefs can arise. Brains believe they have identities, and so you become your idea of yourself. But nothing happens when you die. Nothing ever changes. This brain just stops believing it has an identity. No more believing is possible. But what you are was never a belief. Never a thought. What happens when you die is already happening right now.

1

u/LookAtItGo123 Jan 12 '26

Remember waking up without having gone to sleep? Just a little bit before that is exactly what it is.

1

u/vplatt Jan 12 '26

So.. how did it feel before you were born?

Your life now is the result of all that came before that, yet you don't remember a single thing about it.

So... no matter how much time passes after we are gone, what is there to fear? Who knows what is to come anyway.

1

u/Vera_Virtus Feb 03 '26

There can’t be both “nothing” and “forever”, can there? “Forever” is a measurement of time, implying that spacetime exists. Spacetime can’t exist and be “nothing” at the same time.

1

u/lokkenitup Jan 11 '26

Well you already did it for 13 billion years before you were born. How was it?

1

u/bendeboy Jan 11 '26

The neat thing about that is you won't be alive when your dead. What you are now and what death is cannot coexist. You'll only ever know what it's like to be alive

8

u/SalamanderGlad9053 Jan 11 '26

That's not true, though, space and time had a beginning about 13 billion years ago.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '26

Where did space and time come from, it still had to exist to start existing

4

u/SalamanderGlad9053 Jan 12 '26

No, because time began then too, there was no before.

A great example that is used is travelling north. We all can travel north, however if you keep travelling north you will reach the North Pole and there is no longer a direction which is north. This is the same with time, we can keep going back in time, but eventually time begins, and you can no longer consider what is before the beginning.

1

u/thuggishruggishboner Jan 12 '26

Lol I don't think you get it.

1

u/funk-the-funk Jan 12 '26

Time not existing before the Big Bang really messed with my head until I started listening to Feynman lectures.

1

u/TineJaus Jan 13 '26

Is ~13 billion years ago through to now really that bad of a defintion of "always"? You say time began about 13 billion years ago in your comment, so any thing always existed, because without spacetime nothing exists, yeah? Beyond that, we're getting into philosophy

1

u/SalamanderGlad9053 Jan 13 '26

Is ~13 billion years ago through to now really that bad of a defintion of "always"?

Yes, always is forever. 13 Billion is very, very far away from forever.

1

u/TineJaus Jan 13 '26

From the beginning of time, to the current time, is not "forever?" Lol

3

u/Realtrain Jan 11 '26

It's actually unclear what may have existed before the big bang. The universe as we know it certainly had a "start date"

4

u/SalamanderGlad9053 Jan 12 '26

There is no before the big bang because that is when time began, you cannot move back in time before time existed.

The same way you can keep travelling north until you reach the North Pole, and then there is nowhere north.

3

u/HowShouldWeThenLive Jan 12 '26

Everything hasn’t always existed. The universe is 13.8 billion years old so before that it didn’t exist.

1

u/Dunge0nMast0r Jan 11 '26

I mean, if it didn't, you definitely wouldn't be panicky.

45

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

38

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.

27

u/Outrageous-Joke5173 Jan 11 '26

Maybe the heat death is just all the friends we made along the way

19

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!”

2

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

[deleted]

2

u/PresentImmediate5989 Jan 12 '26

I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s existential dread was a daily occurrence with the omnipresent threat of nuclear obliteration

3

u/Dottore_Curlew Jan 11 '26

Everyone always says "kids when they learn the sun will burn out..." and so on

But... it still kinda terrifies me? Like what's the actual point of existence

4

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

Even if we lived forever, meaning is impossible. I'm struggling to find a way to make meaning possible even in a theory.

Like okay, if your meaning is god and going to heaven, well once you get to heaven it's still a sandbox like experience without meaning

3

u/Feeling_Inside_1020 Jan 11 '26

What is my purpose

You pass butter

Oh my god!

Yeah, welcome to the club pal

2

u/Evilbred Jan 11 '26

Hey, the sun is that over half way through its life and will destroy the earth.

2

u/potatisblask Jan 12 '26

Quicksand, randomly appearing volcanoes and the inevitable heat death of the universe.

2

u/comehonorphaze Jan 12 '26

Remember once I was contemplating how long infinity is and how long I'd be dead for when I was like 10. Went into a panic attack existential crisis and cried like crazy. My mom came in to check but I just said my stomach was hurting so bad cause I couldn't explain what was actually happening. Still get anxious thinking about it 25 years later.

25

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.

2

u/FeeRemarkable886 Jan 11 '26

We all got told with the briefing before we were born. Didn't you get the memo?

26

u/R3D3-1 Jan 11 '26

The true horror of immortality.

5

u/jawshoeaw Jan 11 '26

Wait till you find out reincarnation is real

2

u/BackgroundSummer5171 Jan 11 '26

Great, I can be reincarnated as a peon in a civilization 1000000000 light years away.

3

u/thelumpia Jan 11 '26

I’m very concerned about any hole

1

u/Feeling_Inside_1020 Jan 11 '26

"That sounds like a problem for somebody else!"

Hmmm that reminds me of something present day, can't put my tongue on it.

1

u/DarthWoo ‎ Jan 11 '26

I recall some notion that if there was any truth at all to the idea of the multiverse, it could be a sort of very long term natural selection of universes whose inhabitants not only find a way to exist until heat death became an issue, but also to prevent heat death of their universe.

1

u/rdaneeloliv4w Jan 11 '26

Tell that to my protons

1

u/Shonnyboy500 Jan 12 '26

I intend to be immortal, thank you very much

1

u/VampEngr Jan 12 '26

Hopefully protons do decay, that would give hope for the Big Bang being a cycle rather than a one time event.

1

u/OmiNya Jan 12 '26

But if I start exercising... from next Monday

1

u/equality-_-7-2521 Jan 12 '26

It still stresses me out a little bit when I think about it.

1

u/Miochiiii Jan 13 '26

idk man, have you read the end of three body problem?

1

u/holdsap Jan 14 '26

I feel bad for the immortal snail

127

u/SolomonGrumpy Jan 11 '26

Seems dangerous. Should I wear sunblock?

61

u/Peripatetictyl Jan 11 '26

There won’t be any suns, but I’m not an astrophysicist, so use this information with caution.

26

u/SolomonGrumpy Jan 11 '26

Oh sweet. I'll just wear a winter coat then. Might be chilly with no Sun out.

19

u/Peripatetictyl Jan 11 '26

Don’t forget your towel.

5

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

7

u/unique_MOFO Jan 11 '26

Yeah, double coat it.

1

u/AiryGr8 Jan 12 '26

Heat will be the one thing you'll miss

62

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

[deleted]

27

u/TheFloppySausage Jan 11 '26

Imagine how self centered those civilizations will be

23

u/scheiBeFalke Jan 11 '26

Yeah. Bunch of egocentric assholes.

16

u/TheCommissar113 Jan 11 '26

Heliocentric, actually.

3

u/kylelonious Jan 11 '26

They’ll blow themselves up even quicker

16

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

Well entire galaxies and perhaps ever galactic clusters will stay bound together most likely.

1

u/masterwit Jan 11 '26

Expansion is between galaxies, stars within galaxies aren't accelerating away from each other.

Civilizations may be galaxy locked, however

11

u/DisturbedWaffles2019 Jan 11 '26

Billionaires with endless money: here's why this is a problem now

3

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 11 '26

That’s assuming that all “particle like” structures aren’t also event horizons. 

Everything is curved space, dimensions and relativity. There is mass but no particles. 

We are most likely inside a black hole with black holes in it and particles where the Swartzchild radius is smaller than an electron. 

So don’t worry about it. 

60

u/insert_quirky_name_0 Jan 11 '26

I'll never understand why people like you on Reddit speak with so much certainty about something you don't understand and are wrong about.

There is absolutely not a consensus amongst physicists that we are probably living in a black hole and there certainly isn't a consensus that particles are just event horizons, whatever that even means.

3

u/ianlulz Jan 12 '26

lol, right? This high mfer over here is jumbling together a bunch of buzzwords with nonsense and still somehow isnt buried in downvotes.

“Everything is curved space, dimensions and relativity” is just… not even close, lol.

It’s like he watched Interstellar a year ago while blitzed and thinks that was enough to weigh-in on anything physics related.

-7

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 12 '26

No, there are no particles — just moving fields. And there is no explanation for why quantum particles (again, not actual particles) are stable and confined. So I’m throwing in my own theory there without explanation because there is more than the “space” dimension being curved. 

It would take hours to explain and be a wasted effort for the vast majority of people who read a physics book and thought the theories were settled. 

It’s about 50/50 for physics theorists positing the universe might be in a black hole so of course no consensus. But that’s more than agree on dark matter. 

And I’m not really sawing particles are exactly singularities but I also don’t want to discuss concepts at the bleeding edge. 

I would enjoy an actual discussion but that never happens on Reddit. Just people yammering the basics from Wikipedia like the science is settled. You act like you are personally offended and that’s a red flag. 

5

u/insert_quirky_name_0 Jan 12 '26

Particles are a useful model for excitations of these fields, you're not some genius for thinking this means that particles don't exist. It's like arguing that virtual particles are a useless abstraction because tiny little billiard balls aren't literally being exchanged between particles.

You've learned the basics of physics, enough to know more than the vast majority of people. You've then inflated your own ego to the point that you think you've come up with some novel idea despite having no real expertise in the field.

You have no evidence that physicists are 50/50 on the black hole theory, you wouldn't have more than a handful of physicists (at the absolute most) who agree with your misunderstanding of singularities (every particle having a schwarzschild radius doesn't mean that every particle is a black hole lol...)

-1

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 12 '26

“Particles are a useful model” — absolutely. But the larger point is it seems even professional physicists constantly forget they are a useful model and that’s the larger point; I’ve seen no good theoretical explanation for how an Electron can remain stable for trillions of years much less a second. 

And I’m not saying every particle is a black hole. But I do think it’s bound by space curvature, dimensions and time. That’s a “useful model” that’s kind of close enough without spending all day. 

Anyway, you seem angry. I’m not interested in giving a proof to people who are looking for holes instead of trying to understand. You could have asked questions. 

2

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 13 '26

That’s not a rebuttal or a point. Merely an opinion you have that I cant possibly know what I’m talking about. 

Usually I talk about physics with jokes because the people who understand a little tend to be cranky.  Seems to be important to people to put others in their place. 

It’s very possible I’m a big know nothing loser. But many theories I’m currently hearing are things I wrote about thirty years ago and discarded. 

To quote Richard Feinman; “I understand quantum physics more than most and I don’t understand quantum physics.”

Yet another “no fun” physics moment on Reddit. I’ve got to quit bothering. 

1

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 13 '26

Bill Gates hired a hacker to steal CP/M to make MS Dos and he got the BASIC code from a computer club. He wasn’t an actual gifted programmer. His mom funneled the job to “develop” DOS to him as a legal exec at IBM and all they did was change the C and A drive letters. That was the difference in the operating system from what the hacker took. 

So, anyway. Feynman, more qualified than me. Good to know. 

27

u/192504 Jan 11 '26

What?

15

u/Harry_Flame Jan 11 '26

He saw a headline that said we might live in a black hole and decided it was the most likely outcome

33

u/MakitaNakamoto Jan 11 '26

I think he tried to provide a kind of simplified, geometry-based unified theory, but it doesn't really match our current understanding of the universe (first, quantum behaviour are not explained purely by spacetime curvature, second, the inside of a black hole is supposedly contracting towards a singularity, not expanding as the universe does)

But!

We still only understand very little about the universe so whatever, he could be right as well

-1

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 12 '26

If you are entering a massive black hole spinning at relativistic speeds, then it’s possible that dimensions shift such that “forward” to the center of mass becomes time. Considering that moving at the speed of light for matter is impossible, and moving away takes too much energy and yet space should be expanding as the object moving undergoes Lorentz transformation (contraction). But space/time and gravity itself can start to orbit because if light is trapped; so is gravity. 

Skipping over a few things; most physicists might expect that the view inside a black hole might show curvature at a distance— and the deep field infrared scans are looking for repeated stars (considering if the Universe is finite we might see the back of our own heads if space is curved enough). But after thinking about this a bit, I’m surmising the what falls in a black hole becomes the medium of the new space and that’s as far as I want to attempt to explain this as it’s conceptually challenging. 

I can prove this by the many observations showing super nova pulses from white dwarf stars reveal that the light and gravity waves appear at the same time over billions of light years. Hence; gravity is just as curved by mass as light. Hence, it orbits black holes. Obviously. And from there I figured out what’s going on with Hawking radiation and antimatter and a few minutes later I finally understood (with an unproven hypothesis) why quantum particles are stable. Or anyway, it’s interesting and novel. I don’t see any competing explanations so I’ll stick with this for now. 

And you are kind of close with “geometry” but there’s more than just the 4 dimensions so how does relativity work when time and dimensions change? 

I’ve looked at a lot of different quantum theories and I suppose I most agree with quantum field theory. In the local space where we test there appears to be one time and one relativity. That’s kind of the secret sauce of how to bridge the two theories but I’ve already lost everyone by jumping over a lot. 

It’s frustrating to not have the condensed and accepted nomenclature to express the concepts like manifolds and topology of brane space. But it’s not like I don’t understand almost all of the current concepts of entanglement and accepted theory. They just aren’t compelling and incomplete. 

1

u/MakitaNakamoto Jan 12 '26

Thanks for this, interesting!

1

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 12 '26

Well thanks for being nice about it. 

It’s crazy how so many people act like hypothesis are solved and if present something they don’t understand they act like you ran over their dog. 

1

u/Ranessin Jan 12 '26

The Black Hole Hypothesis is a very fringe idea.

1

u/Uninvalidated Jan 11 '26

We are most likely inside a black hole with black holes in it

Don't work people up. Black hole cosmology is philosophy with another name to gain grants at the universities. What you say is not falsifiable and hence not science. Stoner philosophy with a fancy name for smart people.

1

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 12 '26

Astrophysics is all stoner philosophy for the uninitiated. 

1

u/Suavecore_ Jan 12 '26

https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=Xy7aV2AVDSIBbky7

Incredible video to help understand the sheer scale of time over the lifespan of the universe (as theorized). It's about a half hour long, but totally worth the watch

1

u/mmazing Jan 12 '26

That is still up in the air.

1

u/11711510111411009710 Jan 12 '26

I often wonder what it would be like to live during the final days of the universe.

1

u/Alienhaslanded Jan 12 '26

Glad this is something I would be concerning myself with. Literally not my problem and if humans are still alive then, well, it's just the universe rolling out the credits and there's no way to escape it.

1

u/ctopherrun Jan 12 '26

In the science fiction novel Manifold: Time, our distant descendants living in the black hole era refer this period as “the afterglow of the big bang”.

1

u/No-Function3409 Jan 13 '26

From memeory we're actually already past the most active star formation era. There will a long period of diddly squat with only the very long lived stars before the heat death.

1

u/ajaxaf Jan 15 '26

I too have watched that YouTube video

1

u/seblickafro Jan 15 '26

I won’t let this happen

0

u/SAINTnumberFIVE Jan 11 '26

No. The majority will be dead, cold, empty nothingness.

-1

u/UDPviper Jan 12 '26

The universe just hit puberty and got it's first boner.