this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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What if we're not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?
no my vacuum is working fine, thanks
But is your refrigerator running?
Haven't been able to get the fucker to stop after storing my meth in it!
I think she's on lap 24,512 now.
That is literally what the current big bang theory says! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch?wprov=sfla1
Look up vacuum decay. It's theoretically a thing that can rewrite spacetime at a lower energy level, and would expand out from a point in a bubble. The expanding bubble would erase and rewrite everything it touched into the lower energy level.
Yes I know what vacuum decay is, and the thing I referenced, the inflaton field, is a hypothetized false vacuum near the very start of the universe, that went through this exact process, giving rise to our current vacuum and ending the hypothetized inflation era
I know there's a hypothesis that our current vacuum could be metastable as well, but that's a seperate thing
Yeah, I believe the Higgs field showed us to be metastable, unless new findings have invalidated that.
Well, that might suck slightly less in the long run?
That depends. The chances of finding other life are lower. That would also make a cosmic horizon that we would never be able to see beyond. It would make us unable to find the beginning of everything.
Those are all really interesting factors to consider and I appreciate the response!
I'll come clean, when I wrote it, I was just making a funny, like... A "decaying vacuum" would suck less over time. . .than a black hole. Lol XD
To your point though, less likelihood of finding other life is such a wildcard, for sure. (Less likelihood of meeting cool benevolent spacefarers...but also less likely to be spotted by something like Mass Effect's Reapers, or accidentally bring home Xenomorphs or extragalactic pathogens lol)
And...not being able to ever see the beginning of everything...my curious mind says that'd be such a bummer but also...oddly beautiful? I'll have to ponder that...
Frankly, I'd love to be able to explain how the universe started. That would be the final nail in the coffin for religion.
We're inside a dust cup?