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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Why? It wouldn't be able to cause you any harm, if true (according to our understanding of physics).

Generally I've chalked these feelings up to a certain type of existential dread. Described in this article[1] fairly well.

Kind of reminds you of the total perspective vortex from the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. Truly, on a universal scale even the most important and impacting human on an earth scale does about as much as a neutrino interacting with us.

[1] https://medium.com/s/story/are-you-suffering-from-existentia...

Yeah, I'd be a lot more worried about that big ball of fire that scientists all agree will one day consume us.

Yeah, this'll rightly induce some anxiety!

https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426

Nothing a bit of stellar lifting can't fix. ;-)

The one I'm terrified of is the switch where the laws of physics all change at the speed of light. We will simply cease to exist and not even see it coming.

Don't worry, we won't notice it either, if it does happen. :)

Nah you’d never see it coming and have no prior for believing in it, so not scary. What is scary: a super intelligence alien race enveloping all matter into Dyson swarms. You’d see stars shifting into uniform infrared emissions in an expanding sphere at nearly the speed of light. Suddenly the stars go dim... and then it reaches you.

Well, that gets into game theory stuff, though. For example, one could say that logically any aggressively expansive intelligent species on that scale should take the position of being friendly and supporting to lesser-advanced intelligent species by default, as a way to encourage other more-advanced species than them to take the same position.

The real danger would be a super but unintelligent race doing the same (think "giant space ants"), since they wouldn't have philosophy department chairs.

Why would that encourage any higher intelligence aliens to do the same?

If you're smart enough to think about it logically, you're probably also smart enough to realize there's always a bigger fish.

The exception would be the fanatically oriented, as acting in opposition to logic is part of the basic premise.

A bigger fish would have already taken over the universe.

The universe is really, really big.

Think Rorschach from Blindsight.

I am a simple man, I am just afraid of sharks and box jellyfishes.

Have you read "Schild's Ladder" by Greg Egan?

It's a great book. I might be the only person in the universe writing fanfiction of it, so I'm biased, but I think it's one of his best.

Can't quite make myself claim it's better than Orthogonal.

Is this in reference to a particular named theory or just a random musing?

Sounds like they’re referring to vacuum decay: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

Ech, I'km ok with that, becauase we eouldn't really experince it. There are much grimmer things out there

Depends where it happens. The speed of light is quite slow relative to the size of the universe. So Higgs field collapse could happen a long way away and take millennia to reach us. Perhaps as the collapse propagates across the in universe it meets some huge energy event which pushes the Higgs field up again and rescues matter.

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