Vulnerability, the Sequel

Turns out a cold can hamper the motivation to write an article. Heads up to aspiring bloggers.

But a sequel of more morbid thoughts was promised, and so it will be delivered. Ready or not, let's do this.

So, congratulations! You've survived asteroids, supernovae, and the death of our star. Let's see what's in store now.

5. The galaxy collission between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. While this won't happen for another five billion years, its consequences for Earth will be disastrous. She will be flung out of the new galaxy and will be lucky if another star pulls her into orbit atound itself. Or else...

6. Say that happens. But we'll still be under threat from supernovas and star deaths. But we've covered that, so let's get hypothetical for a bit. Say a black hole gets in the vicinity of Earth. Yeah, we'll be torn to bits and witness every second of it. Frenemies, those suckers are.

7. Venturing near a black hole is highly improbable. But say we, by some stroke of luck, get to be alive for the end of the Universe, the Big Chill. All the stars and black holes have disappeared. Literally nothing remains. But now, 10^35 years later, matter loses all of its meaning. Protons themselves start to decay. The human race, the only ones alive, start to disintegrate.

8. All of this won't even matter if a quantum fluctuation starts overwriting the univserse. Think of it as a Big Bang within a Big Bang. And the laws inside this new universe don't allow anything outside it to exist. So, yeah. Bye-bye, humans.

Thinking about this stuff puts one thing in perspective. We talk of "forever" and "immortality". But how long will that even last? Can we even conceptualize these words, or does the universe strip them of its meaning? How much do we really know, or have we really seen?

Vulnerability.

Basically this post highlights the ways in which we could die. Happy thoughts. If you're reading this in the morning, Hi! Enjoy your day.

Let's jot down the ways you and I and everything can be destroyed. Let's tear apart this house of cards. And not worry about the mess we make. Again, happy thoughts.

This list starts from stuff that we find easy to imagine, to stuff that will take an infinite time to happen. But these have a very real chance of happening nonetheless. Some stuff I cooked up from my morbid imagination. Good luck figuring out which is which.

So, here goes: 

1. An asteroid larger than 1.6 km across strikes Earth. This could create a mass extinction similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Unless…we stop it first.   
2. A massive solar flare tarnishes all our satellite technology, and sends the digital age back to square one. Or negative infinity…    
3. The sun becomes a red giant and engulfs the Earth. In 5 billion years. The Earth will be charred, and so will humans, unless we become spacefarers.    
4. A supernova ravages Earth from just a few dozen light years. We won’t even know what hit us. Betelgeuse is pretty close…

Now, the next few will destroy humanity assuming we’ve braved the aforementioned disasters. And no amount of hope and prayer will save us. But they will have to wait. I think this enough to ponder, though we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.

Perfection is Overrated.

If you haven't picked up on it already, I have a bit of an obsession with the origin of the universe. So here's another aspect of it.

In his documentary Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, professor Hawking says three powerful words: Perfection doesn't exist. (What did you think it was?) It's easy enough to see that in real life, but a better way to say it on our level is that perfection is highly subjective. And in my case, it is also overrated. Let me explain.

We think our beautiful universe is perfect (kudos to you if you don't). But the reality is far from it. Heck, the things we think are so beautiful and awesome - the Pillars of Creation, the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Horsehead Nebula, to name a few - are results of a deep imperfection in the making of our universe. Which brings us back to the mother of all beginnings.

With the moment of creation came a huge (and I mean huge) burst of energy; energy that would later be converted to matter (oops.  Spoiler alert.). But this energy was uniformly distributed. It would take 10^-35 seconds to get closer to the composition of the present-day universe.

After that moment, the Universe started expanding  faster than the speed of light (no, it does not violate any laws of physics). This expansion rendered the energy distribution of the universe uneven: dense in some places, not so much in others. The denser places became the matter we see today.

Imagine if this hadn't happened, if the aforementioned "inflation" hadn't messed with the energy distribution. If the universe had remained...perfect. In equilibrium, and gravity would never be allowed to take over. Here are three more powerful and scarier words to describe what would happen:  We wouldn't exist.

 Basically, this entire post can be summed up in one sentence: if the universe was perfect, we wouldn't exist. So why do we go nuts for some weird form of perfection which, in the end, only makes sense to us? Why do that word, its usage, its synonyms and antonyms even exist in our languages and our minds?

 This is deep. This is rhetorical, and I fail to present an answer. All I know for certain is that perfection is overrated.