| On the Many Ways We Could All Die |
Recently, I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of my time studying physics. While I’ve been mostly happy about this development, I’ve been jarred by the surprising number of apocalyptic scenarios portended by physicists. In between thoughts of quarks and wave-functions, I’ve been counting my breaths. Each one could be last. Science-induced neurosis is not new for me; I’ve been looking over my shoulder from the age of 10, ever since I learned that the sun can and will explode. I don’t think I had the right perspective on how long fourteen billion years really is.
At least as a child, I took solace in ignorance. I figured we wouldn’t really see the solar explosion coming. Now I know better. Before the sun goes nova, it will let out a sea of neutrinos. These are tiny, nearly massless particles (about 4E-33 grams, if you care) that don’t interact with much, and it took physicists a long time to find and prove their existence. They’re detected in deep underground caves in exotic locales, like Minnesota. The detectors will go off the scale should solar demise be eminent. We’d all get to sit around, watching the sky, biding our short time in a neutrino bath until swallowed by the red fireball. These days, this is the least of my worries—freed form a ten-year old’s perception of the world and possessing a few more years of scientific knowledge, I know full well the sun isn’t exploding tomorrow at dawn.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (brilliant astrophysicist and PBS talking head) has recently made a living of telling us how we’d die if we go sucked into a black hole. These things are gravitational singularities so intense that light does not escape. Of end of the world scenarios, this is one of the least pleasant. It is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that a black hole slams into the Earth, or perhaps one will be created at the soon to be activated Large Hadron Collider (a particle accelerator) in Switzerland. In either unlikely event, we would be treated to a first hand demonstration of the consequences of general relativity. As you watched your body stretch and break in two, you would correctly conclude that space itself is warped around these gravitational behemoths.
Eventually you’d cross the event horizon, a very literal line of no return. The gravity of the black hole would accelerate you relative to an outside observer, say some alien physicists observing the Earth.
This has some interesting side effects. About 100 years ago, physicists started to figure out that if you observe something going really fast, you’d see its clocks as running slow. Rather than being some sort of absolute quantity, it turns out that time is fungible, which is also a property of jello. Those alien physicists would actually never see you cross the event horizon. As you sped up, and got closer and closer to the speed of light, your look of horror would be frozen in time forever.
Less horrifying and painful, and equally improbable is the gamma ray burst. Gamma rays themselves are a lot like light from the sun or a light bulb, but carry a whole lot more energy. If a gamma ray were slam into earth, it would vaporize pretty much everything in its path. There is some good news. It could only hit half the earth at a time, just like sunlight, so if you were on the ‘dark’ side, you might be okay. If we do get a gamma ray burst, I hope it hits the southern hemisphere; I’m not using that right now.
The most bizarre way we could all go would be false-vacuum catastrophe. At some point in some middle-school science classroom, someone tries to impress upon us that in the dark vacuum of space, there really is nothing. We all struggle with what nothing really means, only to be thrown into the philosophical quagmire that most of everything we know is also nothing, just empty space in between the comparatively sparse atoms.
However, the nothing hypothesis isn’t exactly right. Much like the ocean, the universe supplies a constant barrage of waves, but of energy in place of water. The vacuum, the prototypical nothingness, teems with a menacing energy, laying in wait for its moment to come. The phantom, ‘dark’ energy pushes space apart at its seams, accelerating the fabric of the universe and hurdling us to an inauspicious and whimpering heat death.
If left to it’s own devices, energy can do some unexpected things. To properly fear the false-vacuum catastrophe, you’ll have to step back to high school chemistry, and in your head picture the ubiquitous molecular tinker toys that teachers are so fond of. It’s easy to picture a pyramid, with the wooden balls at each vertex, and rods holding the whole thing together. There’s a process known as tunneling, where the top point of your pyramid can somehow tunnel through the base, and end up clear on the other side, but you’d never be able to find in the base, just on one side or the other. It’s bizarre and hard to accept, but it really does happen.
Back to the malignant energy waves, they too may have another stable arrangement, and could very well tunnel their way to it. This would more or less realize the end of the universe scenario outlined in Ghostbusters, should the beams be crossed. The fundamental building blocks of the universe would be undone, leading to certain unmitigated doom. Fortunately, there’s no way to see it coming.
While I haven’t even covered a meta-stability disaster (think ice-nine), my greatest fear is getting eaten by a polar bear. The polar bear is the largest land-based carnivore (by a lot) and is a viscous hunter that thinks nothing of pulling a small whale out of the ocean, let alone engorging on a human. I was once told not to worry; its eyes and nose are so black that set against a suitably snowy landscape, I could see it two miles out (note to self: reassuring people are good). This may be true, but I fear that the clever, bloodthirsty bear will sneak up behind me. I’ll never see it coming.
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