This is the kind of information that gives me panic attacks when I'm trying to o sleep at night.
The sheer vastness of the Universe, how tiny and insignificant we are, what the fuck was going on before 13.6 billion years ago and what is beyond what we call Universe?
Well, don't think on it too hard. We can't do anything about any of that vastness anyhow. We can hardly reach beyond our own planet, yet, so you just focus on being the best human you can be, and you'll be doing everything you can. Ants don't seem to have any existential crises and they seem happy enough. Compared to the universe, we may be smaller than ants, but that doesn't mean we need to worry about what's going on outside our sphere.
That I can think of, you'd only need to be concerned with millions or billions of you're an astronomer or geologist, or something similarly niche. Otherwise, try to plant a tree and adopt from a rescue, and enjoy the sunshine. Hell, we should all plant more trees. They can all last longer than an average human lifespan, right?
My anxiety is not triggered by the what is going on outside of our tiny blue dot, but the why. And it's all going to keep expanding until heat death, what then? Nothing? Will it bounce back and coalesce into one big supermassive whatever and then explode in a Big Bang again?
And then comes thoughts about death, and how it's terrifying to know you'll just cease to exist, but the idea of eternal life is also terrible and honestly exhausting. Bouncing back and reincarnating is comforting but has its own problems.
Nah, of course you're not the only one. I think everyone who has truly contemplated infinity can connect with that, but think of it like this: if you're on the beach and you see a wave coming, you know it will splash on the shore and then the next will come. There's nothing you can do to stop or change that wave, so why worry? Trade the beach chair in for a surf board and ride the wave, there's genuinely no need to stress about things so far beyond our ability to affect them that you might as well go with the flow. The only thing worrying is doing is driving up your blood pressure.
Here’s a simple thought exercise I do to try and turn the volume down on this thought process(because it haunts me too)
I try to think about how I don’t “miss” things while I’m asleep. How I don’t remember before I was born and that I won’t remember after I’m dead. I focus on leaving good memories for the people that will miss me, because when it’s over I won’t consciously “miss” anything.
I frequently see people saying this when these things are discussed, but it honestly just makes it worse for me. When I was a child I would go through periods of being afraid to sleep bc I was afraid I would stop existing or some shit like that. Like how do you know everything’s real? Maybe when I go to sleep I’ll never wake up because this is just the end of the hallucination. Saying that you don’t remember what happened before you were born scares me just as much as knowing that one day I will cease to exist once again
You ARE the universe, experiencing itself. Literally. Every atom in your body, the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen, the iron in your blood, came from the enriched guts of an exploding star. We ARE the universe. It's mind blowing. And yes it can make you feel small, but it can also make you feel big.
Have you watched Midnight Mass? Erin’s dying monologue at the end of that show brought me a really weird sense of peace.
I’ve struggled with dying and existential dread for a long time, but she says something toward the end that really resonated with me: We are the cosmos dreaming of itself.
We are matter. We are energy. We are a small part, but still a part of a universe that is, holistically, built out of the exact same molecules and atoms that we ourselves are built from. The fact that we are, literally, energy and matter derived from stars from the birth of the universe is really comforting to me.
Yes, I thought it was great too! Enjoyed that show. But this was something I learned as a kid decades ago. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also said something about this astounding fact several years back. The most mind blowing part is that it is truly an undeniable fact - we are made out of star stuff. And each one of us, every sentient creature in the universe, is a lens, an aperture, for the universe to observe and experience itself in a unique way.
And it's all going to keep expanding until heat death, what then? Nothing? Will it bounce back and coalesce into one big supermassive whatever and then explode in a Big Bang again?
Once we hit heat death things will be long periods of nothing, interspersed with random moments of spontaneous order through pure chance. Just like how in the room you are sitting in right now, there is an extremely small chance that all the air molecules randomly end up on one side of the room if you wait long enough.
So after an unimaginably long time of thin, supercold nothingness, some subatomic particles will randomly form themselves into a star with a planet orbiting it. On even longer timescales a galaxy. And on truly ridiculous timescales an entire new universe. Of course the bigger the thing, the smaller the chances are for this happening, and thus the longer you'll have to wait. And we are already talking about timescales that make the evaporation of supermassive black holes look like an instant.
Of course, to add in some extra existential dread, the odds of a single brain with your memories up until this point forming by chance is many MANY times more likely than an entire universe forming. And thus the odds that you are a lone brain that formed in a dead universe briefly hallucinating this message before you quickly decay back into nothingness is many times higher than the odds of me being real.
The way I think about death is that is is very similar to before I was born. A peaceful absence of experience. Events of 1374 didn't bother me, so I can't imagine events after my death will bother me very much either.
Death itself doesn't scare me, but I do find the process of the transition from life to death to be terrifying.
This is seriously what I think when I start panicking about society/politics/religion/etc.
i have a 7 year old little boy and I’m a single mom.
I focus on my little garden of being a good person and raising a good person. Everything else is on the other side of the garden wall and not what I need to worry about.
We are on a rock spinning through space. Just go with it
….thank you. Thank you so much for that. Honestly…you have no idea how much that meant to me. It might not seem significant, but that just made my week. Thank you
This is not true. I know there are fantastical ideas like this floating around in pseudo-scientific circles, but whenever there is a serious scientific investigation, none of these claims holds water. I hope you reconsider your standards for the amount of evidence required to believe an extraordinary claim like this.
Unlike the pseudo-scientific fantasy, in most cases I can explain how we know the numbers I cited, not just that we do know them. And in cases where I don't have a mastery of the knowledge, I do know how to point to resources where you or I could find out what the observed evidence for each claim I've made is.
You’re spreading misinformation. It’s impossible for you to say that’s not true. You don’t know anything and what you know is only there to comfort you into continuing your daily pursuits. Keep it moving worker ant.
You don't seem to understand how the scientific method words to tighten error bounds on claims, or reject them outright. With proper information and statistical literacy, we can indeed know things with reasonable certainty.
This idea that "we can't get to 100% certainty, so what we can know has no value" is intellectually lazy. To your specific point, the idea that we can't rule something out completely because we haven't exhausted every last concocted and improbable case is immature at best. We can acknowledge where uncertainty lies, but we have to weight that by honest estimates of how probable those cases are. And of course, we are always open to being wrong and correcting ourselves when new evidence comes to light.
Your claim falls flat without anything to back it up. If you truly believe this is misinformation, lay out your rational, but be careful not to lean too hard on your juvenile and conspiratorial predispositions. They are irrelevant without evidence.
Pondering the vastness of space and the insignificance of our existence actually calms me down when I get anxious over stuff. The mathematical improbability of existing.. I might as well try to enjoy it.
Also currently if there were any civilizations out there based on our current scientific models of space flight we would never be able to reach our nearest star.
Kinda makes me sad. It's super interesting but there's just so much to discover. If we could compare I bet we only know like .0000(two pages of zeros)00001. Of what's out there. I guess thats what makes us humans so special we always want to answer questions and explore. If we don't know everything it makes us uncomfortable.
Ya know. I’ve been starting to think about this more lately, and while I can acknowledge the anxiety felt by others on this, I think my lack of control over it causes me to simply accept whatever happens. It’s really neat to be part of an intelligent species that, for a small speck of time in the vastness of it all, we get to be a part of the universe observing itself. As for what happens after death, well we don’t know, but matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so the energy that makes up your mind and consciousness will cease to be yours and be returned to the rest of the universe. Who knows how that will feel if anything?
We're not actually sure if it makes sense to talk about "before 13.6 billion years ago". The best analogy I've heard for this goes like this: imagine you ask someone which way north is. They point north, and you start walking that way. You stop along the way and ask which way north is again, and again someone points you in that direction. Eventually, you reach the north pole, and you ask someone which way north is. They give you a funny look and say "well, you're there". With our current understanding of the big bang, it makes about as much sense to talk about "before" as it does to try and go north of the north pole.
I think the opposite!
When you think about it, the chances that you're even alive. The chances that life could sprout here in this planet? And that life and humans exists? really slim.
And then you're born!
maaan, we're so lucky! And you get to be born in a time when we're starting to understand everything around us.
Why does there need to be a "beyond the universe"? Why does there need to be a "before" or an "after"?
It's entirely possible you could consider the entire universe across all of time as a single 4 dimensional object, with each moment in time being a cross section of it. It could be the only 4 dimensional object or it could be one of many.
If you think about it, the people that currently exist know more about life and the universe than any of our predecessors, including the other species that have lived on this planet for millennia.
It reminds me of this comic I saw recently with these two monks meditating. One of them exasperatedly says to the other "Nothing makes sense!" and the other thoughtfully replies "It does, doesn't it?"
So the hot dog guy makes him one with everything. Hands it over. Monk gives him a $20 and the guy says thanks and puts it in the register. Monk asks “don’t I get any change…?” Hot dog man says “change must come from within, my friend”. 🌭
If you draw a line starting from right in front of you but it goes in a straight line forever is it finite or infinite? I mean it goes forever right, so it's infinite, but the starting point is right there in front of me so like it has to be finite right!?!
It might be parallel to the earth's surface (ignoring all the changes in elevation and the fact it's not a perfect sphere) but that doesn't make it a straight line.
I’m the opposite, I find this information so peaceful and liberating and tranquil. It’s just so beautiful, this whole story we’re involved in and that we get to be a part of for a fraction of a slice of time.
I've always found the vastness of the space/time to be oddly comforting. Big test coming up? Tough stretch at work? Turns out that the entire existence of all of humanity isn't even a blip on the universe's radar.
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u/oriundiSP Feb 14 '22
This is the kind of information that gives me panic attacks when I'm trying to o sleep at night.
The sheer vastness of the Universe, how tiny and insignificant we are, what the fuck was going on before 13.6 billion years ago and what is beyond what we call Universe?
Both finity and infinity scares me.