Michio Kaku - What Happens in the Far Far Future?

michio when I was younger the far future was my next paycheck today sometimes the far future seems like the next election but let's think really about the far future not just when the Sun burns out and five billion years or so but push it as far as we can what can we say today about what the far future of our whole universe really will be well philosophers and poets have asked the question will the world end and fire or ice we can now give an answer the universe we think will die in ice now if you take a look at our universe you mentioned that our Sun will poppy die in ice our earth will probably die in fire probably be eaten up by the Sun as it dies our Milky Way galaxy will probably die in fire as it collides with Andromeda a nearby galaxy and gets eaten alive by our closest galactic neighbor but our universe seems to be in a runaway mode is careening out of control every textbook says that our universe is a bubble of some sort that's expanding but slowing down every textbook says something like that that's wrong the latest evidence shows that the universe is not slowing down but it's speeding up out of control and that we will probably all die in ice trillions upon trillions of years from now and what happens to the particles in our universe everything is as the universe acceleration speeds up and gets faster and faster all the particles will just get more and more dispersed from each other that's right and the night sky will be unrecognizable in the future the galaxies will be so far away that light cannot even reach us anymore and it's gonna be quite dark at night as the sun's blink out in outer space and the distant galaxies are so far no future human generations assuming we we all survive in some way which is not 100% sure of course if you look at the newspaper every day but assuming we do galaxies will wink out over time and and just our local group would be attracted to one another and eventually if you extend the time even further even the slowest burning stars begin to die and expand the core explode and then and then grow cold themselves that's right the universe seems to involve in five basic stages the first stage was the fiery Big Bang and the creation of the early stars we're in the second stage a very early stage of the stage of star formation but on a large scale of things life and star formation is dust the very first two stages then we go into a much larger stage where the stars begin to die as you mentioned white dwarf red dwarf stars begin to dominate the universe then black holes all of a sudden all the stars are gone in the future that nothing but dead neutron stars we have black holes that are dying embers of these gigantic objects that once flared up in the universe even beyond that atoms themselves begin to disintegrate the proton which is the bedrock of our existence everything we see in touch is made out of protons they begin to disintegrate and in the far future everything becomes a gas a gas of electrons a gas of neutrinos and temperatures are so low that no machine can possibly create any motion in this distant future in other words the laws of physics are a death warrant to all intelligent life so what is that what does that mean I mean how can we reflect upon that everything seems so normal we look around we see ourselves we see our families but but the reality is the real reality undergirding everything we do is over this granted long period of time but in one sense it's not so long I mean we could write it with just a few numbers you need exponential numbers but you know 10 to the 100 10 120 years black holes evaporate protons decay and so you might have you know an electron every you know quai trillion cubic light-years or something and that's it and it just it keeps expanding from there I mean what is that I mean at you that just seems so incredible it seems like there's gotta be something else well the job of us physicists is to calculate the engine driving this runaway expansion of the universe it seems to be something called the cosmological constant the dark energy the energy of nothing nothing believe it or not the vacuum of outer space is a storehouse of energy that's pushing the galaxies apart that's why the universe is expanding out of control so I as a physicist want to calculate the cosmological constant the energy of nothing this anti-gravity that's pushing the galaxies apart one of the most embarrassing aspects of physics today is that when you calculate that number you are off by 10 to the 120 that's one with a hundred and twenty zeroes after it that's how big there's a mismatch between the theory and the experiment yeah that's been called the greatest blood mistake in the history of any kind of reasoning or or a science so it so it certainly shows that there's something missing in our understanding now some have speculated that as this universe expands maybe there's something else going on maybe the cosmological constant can reverse itself maybe through extra dimensions or something there'll be something you know something with extra dimensions colliding at some point they'll sort of reset the stage when we didn't even know it so you know you're familiar with those different kinds of theories how realistic should we take any of them or is the universal expansion into ultimate ice and then disintegration of ice - it's really nothing is that the most likely scenario are some of these others have some possibilities well we have anymore to be very good by the way because all of them would good that would restart it over again would just blow up blow us up into some new big bag so like that that would it wouldn't necessarily be particularly nice right to die in fire or ice meat there possibility is very pleasant we have looked for the engine driving this expansion and some people have looked for all turn ative cosmologies there is a theory called the big splat theory where our universe is a membrane this gigantic beach ball which collides with another beach ball and the collision could be periodic and each collision creates a Big Bang of sort trillion years or so right so in that universe perhaps we can start all over again but it does mean there's gonna be a fiery Big Crunch where everything we see around us will be in flames so you know we have a choice either be burned alive in fire or frozen in ice but either one seems to be a logical conclusion of the equations it seems to be unavoidable well it's it's probably not our generation but at some point in the future that's what humanity will will face that's right I work in something called string theory which supposedly gives you a theory of all these forces but at the center piece is the cosmological constant and so far as string theory is not developed enough to answer that question why do we live in a universe where our universe is expanding in a very mild way but is accelerating certainly this is the core of modern physics and modern cosmology is to focus on that cosmological constant philosophically it is is central to understanding what what our far far future will be but even in physics itself it has to be explained I think there's a shelf full of Nobel Prizes waiting for the physicists who can tease apart the cosmological constant which drives dark matter and dark energy because ultimately we are talking about the theory of everything and I think this is going to open up a whole new realm this is one of the central problems in all of physics if you have a theory of everything can your theory explain why nothingness is destroying the universe

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 28,706

Keywords: closer to truth, deepest questions, ideas of existence, life's big questions, pbs science show, robert lawrence kuhn, search for purpose, stem education channel, ultimate reality of the universe, vital ideas, What Happens in the Far Future, Michio Kaku, closer to truth michio kaku, far future, what will happen, future of the universe, what will happen in the future, City College of New York, Theoretical Physics, michio kaku physics, michio kaku future, closer to the truth

Id: OMYi2EZiOcU

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020