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Comment by edoloughlin | Hacker News Reader

The universe could also spontaneously stop existing[1] but I still put my seatbelt on when I get into my car. It’s about probability.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay

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People who get existential crisis out of this can find relief in the fact that the Universe can expand faster than the decay. So, it is possible that decay never reaches your region of Space.

They should also get relief in the fact that there doesn't appear to be any reason to think our universe is even subject to that "risk".

> The effects could range from complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies and stars or even biological life while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe

What an interesting wiki article. It’s incredible this is proposed as a sliding scale effect, where the tunable parameters on that scale are the fundamental physical constants of the universe itself.

Yes please lets focus on probability. And cost-benefit analysis. We'd be a lot closer to solving all sorts of problems, including the asteroid one and any climate-related ones, if people had thought about probabilities when dealing with nuclear power in the 80s and 90s.

Humans don't seem to be very good at symbolic reasoning though.

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