15 Ideas That Horrify Scientists

on July 23rd 2010 the world changed forever and all it took was for one guy to post one idea on the internet an idea that has since spread like wildfire and been described as the most dangerous thought experiment of all time just like most wildfires The Inferno has devoured its way through multiple corners of the internet infecting hundreds of thousands to even millions of people it lives somewhere on the horizon of philosophical thought experiment and urban legend named after one of the most famous monsters in European folklore Legend says that if if you ever Lay Your Eyes on this Beast your life is already over the idea works the same way once you hear it you are a part of it and there's no going back the people who really grasp the nature of this idea have reacted in complete horror with one of the greatest artificial intelligence researchers of all time begging anyone who hears this idea to keep their idiot mouths shut but unfortunately for him this idiot mouth is not going to be kept shut today to provide some context most artificial intelligence researchers say that we're about 20 years away from the technological sing Singularity which and I quote is a technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history meaning artificial intelligence has gotten so Advanced that it no longer needs human input and can update and upgrade itself at speeds that we can't even comprehend leading to an artificial super intelligence if you've seen any of the AI advancements in the past 1 or 2 years and just how genuinely insane they've been imagine what that will look like in 20 but for argument sake let's say that it's bad like really bad and in the future we have an artificial super intelligence millions of times smarter than we are in control of every piece of technology on this planet and it's not very nice so it splits Humanity into two groups the halves and the have knots the have knots are sentenced to a lifelong punishment that is so cruel our human brains can't even comprehend it and the halves who are treated much better but still enslaved to this artificial God and the way that it determines who is in what group is did they support its creation like I said this is not a nice Ai and any action not directly related to the support of its birth including no action at all would be viewed as an act against it the super intelligence has access to an infinite amount of information including information released before its birth and who had access to it which includes Rocko's basilisk the name of this thought experiment and once you've heard about this potential super intelligence you have three options either help build it ensuring that humanity is one day enslaved actively protest against it trying your best to ensure that a general super intelligence never sees the light of day or you can do nothing and if it ever comes to be it'll one day know that you saw this video and chose not to help it guaranteeing yourself a lifetime of punishment so what is it going to be while you think that over I want you to take a look at this galaxy right here well I have some bad news for you because even if we left Earth today traveling at the speed of light we would never be able to reach it the same goes for this galaxy right here and this one too and 94% of all of the galaxies in our Universe they are forever out of our reach and moving away from us faster than the speed of light thanks to the expansion of space in 100 billion years from now every single Galaxy in our universe will be too far away for us to ever reach them and in 2 trillion years from now the universe will have expanded so much that galaxies won't even be able to see each other that means in the far future even if another technologically advanced species were to evolve they will never know that other galaxies exist and their universe will be a lot smaller now if these Mass scales of space and time haven't quite given you that pit in your stomach feeling yet then I would like to push it a little bit farther one day the universe is going to end and everything that ever was and everything that will ever be will just cease to exist and then there will just be nothing three of the potential ways that this could happen is directly related to the expansion of space so I'll start with the most Pleasant and work my way down option one is called the heat death of the universe where space continues to expand for billions and trillions of more years slowly pushing all of the stars and galaxies away from one another until the universe is too cold and too dark to sustain anything at all and all of the stars begin to die out one by one option two is called the Big Crunch by now we know that the Universe has been expanding for the past 13.8 billion years ever since the Big Bang but the question becomes will it stay expanding forever could it eventually lose the momentum that it gained during the big bang and eventually start to slow down and if the expansion of the universe can slow down then can it stop completely because what we know about gravity tells us that if the universe did stop expanding the gravity of everything inside of it would become too strong and start pulling the edges backwards this would trigger a reverse big bang and almost immediately compress everything in the entire universe to one infinitely small dense Point crushing everything and anything in the process option three is called the Big Rip and assumes that instead of slowing down the expansion of the universe is accelerating exponentially but if it continues to accelerate exponentially it's going to reach a speed where matter can no longer hold itself together anymore and the universe rips itself apart from the inside out the next two Universe ending scenarios are arguably a lot worse because in theory they could happen at any moment we are no longer talking about millions or billions of years from now these end of everything scenarios could be on their way to us right now and we would never see them coming to understand false vacuum Decay you first need to understand understand the higs field which is basically just an energy field that our universe is built on allowing things to have mass we believe that the Hig field is currently in its lowest energy state which gives us the vacuum of the universe but if we're wrong and something were to push the hick field into an even lower energy State everything that we know about Mass would change completely and this change in the energy state of the universe would start out like a tiny bubble of Decay and because this bubble of dead Universe was moving towards us faster than the speed of light we would never see it coming neutron stars are the second densest thing in the entire universe only behind black holes but I would argue that they are the much scarier of the two we already know for sure that when two neutron stars collide together they release a massive explosion of electromagnetic radiation in the form of gamma ray bursts these are called kilonova explosions and they are so large that the cosmic rays they produce will vaporize any and all atmospheres within 36 light years of the explosion that is a blast zone of about 324 trillion km or about 200 trillion miles and would vaporize anywhere between 12 to 100 star systems but these kilonova explosions aren't even the worst part and it's what might be at the core of these neutron stars that would be the real Universe Destroyer it's inside of their cores that we might find the most dangerous substance in the entire universe Strange Matter the thing about Strange Matter is that if it exists it would be perfectly dense perfectly stable and indestructible more stable than any other matter in the universe you know the story of King Midas the man who anything he touched would turn to Gold well Strange Matter is kind of like that and when neutron stars collide they might release these tiny particles known as strangelets these strangelets could fly through the universe for millions of years but when they touch something instead of turning it to Gold they would convert it to Strange Matter wreaking havoc on the normal matter that makes up said object if a strangulate were to connect with Earth remember they could be as small as an atom they would convert the entire planet into Strange Matter destroying all life in the process if one were to hit our sun which is a much bigger Target it would turn our sun into a strange star and Earth would freeze to death very quickly some theories suggest that these strangelets could be flying around the universe at pretty insane numbers with more strangelets in the Milky Way than there are stars but because they're so small and distance between objects in our galaxy is so large one just hasn't connected yet well we wait for the earth to be turned into a pile of strange mus let's move on to the densest thing in the known universe black holes now I do want to put a quick disclaimer here if you suffer from melano heliophobia which is the debilitating fear of black holes this portion of the video is probably not for you there are likely millions of black holes in the Milky Way alone some of them are massive like Sagittarius A which is at the center of the Galaxy and about 4.3 million times larger than our sun some of them are mobile and scientists have found a runaway black hole moving at 3. 5 million mph or about 5.6 million km hour but whether they're stationary or on the move the vast majority of them are invisible and don't come into view until they start eating some nearby space stuff or Stars it's probably unlikely but never impossible an invisible black hole could be making its way on over to us right now and we wouldn't see it until we were being sucked inside of it I think another one of the reasons that people are so scared of black holes other than the fact that they completely distort space and time themselves is that we don't really know what happens inside of them there's this common thought that if you were to fall into a black hole you would be spaghettified which is only partially true because black holes have such a strong gravitational pull that they actually start to bend time itself this is called time dilation and as you're Falling Towards the black hole time will start slowing down for you so while seconds could be passing for you hours or even centuries could be passing for everyone else outside of the reach of the black hole then as you fall closer towards the Event Horizon you're going to start seeing infinite copies of yourself everywhere because gravity isn't just distorting time it's also distorting light and space so you will see yourself from the back the front side and every angle all around you once you pass through the Event Horizon that is when everything starts to change and it's at this point that no matter what you do you are never getting out of it but I do have some relatively good news for you the bigger the black hole the safer you would be in theory the tiniest of black holes would probably turn you into spaghetti pretty quickly as it pulls you through a hole that could be smaller than an atom but if you were falling into the largest black hole in our universe ton 618 which is 60 billion times bigger than our son you would have a lot of room and basically an infinite amount of time to get to the singularity if you had the right supplies and your ship were to allow it theoretically you could live inside of this black hole for quite a bit of time and I do mean your time because time outside of the black hole is going to be moving thousands to millions of times faster than it is for you and you could sit there and watch the entire universe evolve in a time lapse right in front of your eyes which brings me to my personal favorite topic on this list what the is time and I'm here to tell you that nobody has a clue for a very long time we thought that time was absolute meaning that ever since the Big Bang the entire universe was operating at the same point in time think of it like one universal now where everything within the confines of the universe shares the same present moment but that is in fact not the case and there is no such thing as a universal now let's take a look at black holes for example if you've seen the movie Interstellar I'm sure you remember the scene from Miller's planet where because of its proximity to a black hole 60 Minutes on the planet is equivalent to 7 years back on Earth my favorite thing about this is they actually did the math for it and it checks out so think about that for a second for person a 60 Minutes has passed but for person B 3,679 th200 minutes have passed so whose minutes were more real time can also be affected by speed with one of the most famous examples being the twins if you have a pair of twins who are both 20 years old and you sent one of them to the star Serius at 99% the speed of light and then back again upon their return the twin who stayed on Earth would be 37 years old and the twin who was traveling would be 22 years old these two people who were born on the exact same day only minutes apart from each other now have an age gap of 15 years this isn't a case of one twin aging faster than the other one this is a case of two twins simultaneously moving through time at different speeds theoretically that means you could have two events happening at the same time in the universe for one person and those two events be separated by years for another or in someone's time person a could still be alive but in someone else's time person a could have passed away years ago so is person a still alive or not this is why you might hear people say that time is an illusion because while time is psychologically real that doesn't necessarily mean that it is fundamentally real so let's take a quick look at the arrow of time which is the way that we humans experience the passing of time from your birth to your death for all we know the way that we experience time might just be a way for our Consciousness to process rhythmic phenomenon heartbeats planetary rotations solar rotations The Swinging of pendulums the ticking of clocks every single moment that you have ever lived and every single moment that you will ever live could all be happening right now and the only way for your Consciousness to process all of it is to move through it One Beat at a time which brings us to the block Universe where you have to imagine the universe shaped like a four-dimensional cube with three dimensions of space and one complete dimension of time you have the big bang at one end of the cube and the end of the universe at the other and every single event that happens in between all exist within the cube just like how you could find a coordinate in space on this Cube You could also find a coordinate in time if the universe formed as one complete entity right from the moment of the Big Bang then your life your birth your death this moment right here has all existed and will continue to exist forever but if that's the case then the only reason that we experience time the way that we do is nothing more than the second law of Thermodynamics that all things must move towards disorder this is why an egg can never be uncracked or toast can never be unburnt or a leaf can never fall back up to a tree it's not that time is passing because time doesn't pass it's already complete but the conscious brain can only process the universe in in the same direction as disorder this too has some pretty large implications because one of the fundamental beliefs that we humans have about ourselves is the power of Free Will and living inside of a universe where everything that will ever happen has already happened kind of contradicts the point Sal malansky a professor who has spent his entire life studying the notion of free will put out a disclosure to psychologically vulnerable people saying they should probably skip this discussion entirely so if that's you I will give you the same warning because and I quote on the deepest level If people really understood what's going on and I don't think I fully internalized the implications myself even after all of these years it's just too frightening and difficult think about it like this whether time is fixed or not one of the fundamental laws of our universe is the law of cause and effect for there to be any cause there first has to be an effect or every action has a corresponding consequence anything that has ever happened in the universe was caused by something that happened before it and that thing must have been caused by something else before it take this coffee for example for me to even be able to drink this right now first I had to brew it I was only able to brew it because I had the coffee beans and a machine for me to have those beans I had to have gotten them from the store for them to be in the store someone had to have packaged them before that someone had to grow them before that someone had to plant them long before that someone had to discover coffee in the first place in Ethiopia in the year 800 ad long before that homo sapiens had to evolve in the first place on a planet that had been born 4 bill ion years prior the chain of events that led to me having this cup of coffee goes all the way back to the very start of time and actually every single thing that happens today is part of a long unbroken chain of events that lead back to the very first thing that ever happened the big bang and since that moment when the very first thing happened there has been a corresponding event that happened after it some of these were Universal events some of them were Cosmic there were physiological events as well as neurological and psychological ones to put this another way you you're feeling a bit hungry so you walk into your kitchen and see a fruit bowl with a banana and an apple you now have three options you choose to eat one of them you choose to eat two of them or you choose to eat none of them this is the concept of Free Will and I know it might not feel like it when making a decision as small as this but every single thing that has ever happened in the universe has led up to you making this decision why were you hungry in the first place the physiological reasons that evolved for life to need food your genes your upbringing your current environment all of the things that led up to you addressing your need for Hunger with fruit instead of candy for example then you have the neurons that fired in your brain the moment you made your decision which by the way could be recorded in your subconscious 300 milliseconds before you even became aware of what you were going to choose but then most people will say well I am my brain which is debatable itself but let's say for the case of this argument you are you are the neurons that fired in your brain that made that decision but that decision was made by a brain that has evolved in a million different ways because of a million different things in its life outside of its control in another unbroken chain that leads all the way back to the day you were born that only happened because your parents had met with another chain leading back to the day they were both born and backwards and backwards until the start of everything the illusion of Free Will is the choice between the banana and the Apple but the real Choice the one where you have complete control would be outside of that chain to be fully in control of any decision you would have to be in control of the entire universe which we both know is not possible but once again if time is fixed you are always going to make that choice anyway

Channel: Thomas Mulligan

Views: 1,078,180

Keywords: roko's basilisk, ai, artificial intelligence, space, universe, james webb, galaxies, the big crunch, the big rip, false vacuum decay, neutrons stars, strange matter, black holes, the arrow of time, entropy, the block universe theory, free will

Id: F1W9TtshrQI

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2024