You are safe from: black holes, rogue stars or planets, supernovae, our sun, gamma ray bursts, big asteroids, comets and anything cosmological
Safe from colliding galaxies
* There may be civilizations here
if so they wouldn’t even notice they are in a collission of two galaxies until their astronomy is quite advanced
We are save even from something nobody has thought of yet like mythological space cows because we’ve been here for billions of years with nothing happening of that sort.
With gamma ray bursts and supernovae, because we now know our stellar neighbourhood so well.
Safe from gamma ray bursts
Safe from supernovae
Will get warnings for most small asteroids and your risk is far less than from lightning or even the very rare risk from a giant hailstone
Tunguska meteorite killed 3 reindeer herders in 1908 - Happens every few thousand years - similar effect to a large hurricane - caused by a 50 meter diameter asteroid - For asteroids we are tracking, we can predict when the "hurricane" happens to the minute - By 6 days before the impact it comes into radar range and we know WHERE it happens to within 100 meters - 2 days is enough time to evacuate for hurricane - With a few years warning we can PREVENT IT - Only 1% of Earth's surface is urban, expected wait time for 50 meter asteroid to hit urban area of 100s of thousands of years.
It is a real risk yes but as a personal risk it is very small far less than your risk of dying of lightning or even the very rare death by a giant hailstone. It is far less now than at the start of the century because we would spot the vast majority of 50 meter rocks before they could hit us. Nobody would have died of the Tunguska meteorite with warning - it is similar to a large hurricane in its effect. See my:
Safe from large asteroids and comets and far less risk from small asteroids / meteorites than from lightning or even the very rare risk of death from a giant hailstone
This is because we know our planetary neighbourhood so well.
For the dinosaur size rocks, we already know them all at that size. Four asteroids and four comets. None can hit us for thousands of years. That’s what you expect as they only come around every few tens of millions of years. Unlike dinosaurs we can deflect asteroids. I go into it here.
Safe from long period comets
A few long period comets pass by every year - but typically at a very great distance, often as far as the sun or further and never very close. The closest any got is Lexell's comet in 1770. That was over 6 times the distance to the Moon - very very far away. Plus a very small comet a few 10s of meters across came a little bit closer still many times the distance to the Moon.
No long period comet got closer than the Moon for as long as we've been doing astronomy.
It would take about 20 years non stop travel in a 747 going round and round the world 24/7 to get as far as the typical distance a long period comet passes by (similar distance to sun). Sometimes a bit closer but still usually years of travel distance of a 747 jet circling Earth.
Lexell's 1770 comet passed at a distance corresponding to 100 days 747 travel round and round Earth. Not stopping even to refuel, refuelling in flight.
We are in for a quieter time with comets until around 1.3 million years from now we get more than usual, or might do, with the flyby of Gleise 710.
Gleise 710 is a small star that passes by at a great distance but possibly close enough to deflect some of the comets from the Oort cloud towards the inner solar system and just possibly some could come our way.
If so we can deflect them with infrared laser arrays, something we could build already if we needed to.
. Why we don’t need to worry about the flyby of Gliese 710, over a million years into the future.
We know all the large near earth comets and they can't hit in thousands of years. Comet Swift Tuttle has a 1 in a million chance for 4479, nothing that big has hit for over 3 billion years - pretty much certain as we work out the orbit better and get closer to that century, we find that it is going to miss, on the very remote chance it can hit we would need to work out how to deflect it in the 43rd century. We already know how to do it with an infrared laser array.
. NEO asteroids and comets of 10 km or more
We can use the same method to protect ourselves from Swift-Tuttle in that remote possibility - or else just mine it away and use it as resources for space colonies.
When they didn't know Swift-Tuttle's orbit so well they thought it had a chance of hitting in 2126 but was soon shown to miss by a huge margin then.
As time goes on it is near certain we also prove that it can't hit us in 4479.
In that very remote 1 in a million chance that it is still in the risk list as we approach the 44th century, we need to start thinking about it from 4300 onwards perhaps. We could do many things. It's actually useful potentially as resources for space settlers, for the ices and volatiles, so maybe it has been mined away to nothing by then.
. Robert Walker's answer to What will happen if Comet Swift-Tuttle strikes the Earth in 2126?
Then there are the ice dwarfs and larger comets like Chiron, the "centaurs" that orbit beyond Jupiter. They are no risk to us either. In the very far future one of them may get broken up by Jupiter and then we may need more active defence against comets but that’s hundreds of thousands of years from now minimum.
We are also safe from giant comets / Oort cloud comets and interestellar comets. They are even rarer, much rarer.
For more on all this:
. Why you don’t need to worry about impacts from comets
See also my
Safe from “debris fields” - we pass through many of them every year if this means cometary dust - and the Star Trek debris field doesn’t exist, nto a real world thing
There is no such thing as a "debris field" in astronomy, unless it just means comet dust which leads to the beautiful shooting stars but harmleses to us.
I think the term probably originates in Star Trek.
The average distance between main belt asteroids is about three times the distance to the Moon.
You would see Ceres or Vesta and a few other very large asteroids if you happened to be on a nearby asteroid (you can see them with naked eye from Earth in optimal conditions as a very very faint star at the limit of visibility. But they would just look like this unless you were very close.
Credit Jimmy Westlake
The circled faint star is Vesta at its brightest.
The other bright things you see in the sky there are nearly all stars, very very far away. Amongst them you see Vesta but it looks no different from any of the faintest stars in the image.
Typically in the asteroid belt you would be further away from Vesta than this because the asteroid belt is huge stretches most of the way to Jupiter and in a big ring around the sun beyond Mars..
You might not be able to see any asteroids, or some of the faintest stars in the sky might be asteroids but you’d only notice if you kept an eye on them for some time and they moved slightly. And that’s in the asteroid belt where they are far more packed together than the Near Earth Asteroids.
Even the biggest asteroids Ceres and Vesta, if you can see them, would be so faint they would be indistinguishable amongst the numerous stars in the sky, faint as the faintest stars you can see in the Milky Way as separate stars.
Near Earth Objects are even further apart.
I think the idea comes from Star Trek.
I am a Star Trek fan myself, but though there are some fun ideas in it, the astronomy is no more realistic than Hogwarts :). Great fun but not science or astronomy.
There is nothing even remotely resembling the Star Trek "debris field". Star trek is written by script writers who don't consult with astronomers. For instance they often have scenarios where the characters explore a tiny asteroid with a breathable atmosphere which is utterly preposterous.
This is their idea of a “Debris field”
Safe from comet Encke- debris from the comet causes the Taurids meteor shower
Encke itself, does NOT come anywhere near Earth. The closest it gets to Earth's orbit is 25 million kilometers. Most times though Earth is in a different part of its orbit when it comes past. The closest flyby in the near future is in 2030 when it will be at a distance of 0.27435 au or over 41 million kilometers.
There is no way Encke can hit Earth,
Yes we get shooting stars twice a year that are small pieces of the Encke comet
The story that got turned into a fake asteroid warning is a story about a discovery of a clumping of one of the meteor showers we get every year.
They didn't find any new asteroids.
The new discovery gives astronomers a place to look to search for asteroids that could potentially hit Earth.
The more common smaller chunks in this stream will burn up in the upper atmosphere harmlessly.
We are in no more danger of being hit by space rocks than we were before this discovery.
If they are right this discovery will help make us safer by telling astronomiers that it is good to look in a particular direction to help to find more asteroids as they fly past at a great distance.
Safe from our sun
We are safe from our sun because we know our sun very well, this is why it can't do a supernova or a superflare
Safe from hypervelocity stars
Safe from black holes, rogue planets, brown dwarfs etc
With black holes, rogue planets, brown dwarfs etc because they are really rare likely wait time hundreds of billions to hundreds of trillions of years
And we can't be surprised by them suddenly, even for black holes, we'd notice by their gravitational effects on our most distant spacecraft at vast distances.
. Why we would see a rogue planet, black hole, neutron star or star long before it could get here
Safe from distant colliding galaxies
This is a beautiful Hubble photo of a colliding galaxy. Even if you were living on a star in the middle of that collision you wouldn’t notice anything as the stars pass through each other - the number of stars in the skyh would roughly double for a while. The bright blue areas are areas of star formation - with more baby stars than usual because the dust clouds in both galaxies collide with each other - but most of the galaxy will still be empty space with hardly any dust or gas even so
They are far too far away to harm us.
. Hubble’s Dazzling Display of 2 Colliding Galaxies
When you hear a story about a colliding galaxy - these are VERY COMMON
. When Galaxies Collide: Hubble Showcases 6 Beautiful Galaxy Mergers
This is a larger collection of 59 photos of colliding galaxies by Hubble.
. ESA Science & Technology - Hubble image collection of 59 interacting galaxies
Collisions of galaxies are so common it should be no surprise that eventually very far in our future the Andromeda galaxy will collide with ours. The Andromeda galaxy is visible to naked eye in a very dark night as the faintest patch in the night sky only for people with very good vision. It is approaching us but so slowly that there is no way anyone would notice any change in its appearance visually or its position in the sky in all of human history. If you could be instantly moved forward, say, 100,000 years, and looked at the same patch in the sky you'd still see no change in it's position.
It's nearly 2 million light years away.
But billions of years in the future it will get here.
Then even when it does collide with our galaxy many billions of years in the future - so far in the future that humans could evolve all the way from single cell creatures many times over - even then - the stars are so far apart - galaxies aren't solid. They are just lots of stars like our galaxy. We would see twice as many stars in the sky that's all. Half would be from our galaxy and half from the Andromeda galaxy but there would be no way to know which stars come from which galaxy in the middle of the collision.
Then eventually after the Andromeda galaxy passes through our galaxy many times back and forth they merge together to make an elliptical galaxy.
This collision is a time for birth of many new stars, far more than today as gas clouds from the two galaxies bump into each other.
Our sun would likely never come close to any star in either galaxy in all this time. There is a small chance that it would be ejected from the combined galaxy during the process, if so we'd see it fading away gradually over many billions of years and we'd be the only star in vast empty space in all directions.
But we could surely move to another star at that point, if we prefer to stay in the combined galaxy if that's what happens.
Here is an astronomer talking about it.
.
More details towards end of this with more links:
Safe from quasars
Even if the black hole at the center of our galaxy became a quasar it would be harmless. Though it is impossible for it to become a quasar. The reason is there is so much gas and dust in between so it would take ages to erode that away - anyway it is rare for the jet from a quasar to point within the galaxy and even if it does most stars in the galaxy will NOT be on the line of the jet.
And even if there was no dust or gas and a quasar jet was pointed right at us from the center of the galaxy we are still far enough away to be safe.
But it’s impossible. There isn’t enough dust and gas around it to supply it to become a quasar.
Safe from magnetars
There is nothing at all to worry about at a personal level. Magnetars can't harm you, as there are none close enough.
They can cause satellites to glitch but the gamma rays and X-rays can't get through our atmosphere. The very weak magnetic fields (at our distance) could potentially cause voltage surges and power cuts but our electricity grids are now well protected.
Magnetars are VERY OBVIOUS from a great distance away. If you get a video or website saying we are at risk of a magnetar it’s nuts
. On Magnetars, muons, gamma ray bursts, black holes and Phil Plait’s now out of date book
Safe from anything happening in the center of our galaxy
This is about how we are safe from anything happening in the center of our galaxy:
. Why we are safe from anything happening in the center of our galaxy
Safe from the end of the universe
. Nothing to worry about ‘Big Rip’ or Dark Energy’s strength increase
Safe from a second sun or an entire solar system doing peekaboo
Suns can’t suddenly pop out from nothing and surprise us. You will see many videos on YouTube and websites and photos claiming we have two suns.
In that case - a video that gets shared by people who claim we have two suns - you see the sun apparently in front of the mountain later on in the video
This is how it happens:
This is what it would look like if we really had two suns.
See:
. What is this - sunrise with what looks like a second sun rising? - offset double reflection
Our solar system has only one sun and if we were in a system with two suns close to each other it would be like the fictional Tattooine in star wars, everyone would know about it.
See also
. What to do if someone shares a photograph of what they say is a second sun
Why we can NEVER have three days of darkness
Our sun has enough fuel for billions of years. The sun can't go out. Image: Forest on a sunny day
See my:
. Why we can NEVER have three days of darkness
Safe from crank theories
You will come across many crank theories. They will try to convince you that there isi a conspiracy of astronomers globally who are trying to suppress their theory. Yet they can talk tyou about it and nobody even pops up to tell you that they are wrong.
They have youtube channels, websites where they try to persuade you of the nonsense. And nearly always they will tell you there is a big conspiracy of all astronomers and all governments in the world to suppress the information they are sharing on their website or YouTube video channel
How does that make sense?
It doesn’t.
This is a joke post I did to help people scared by one of many of these bizarre crank theories
You can make up anything. Terral Croft goes on and on about this “black star” which is as real as a tartan planet :). I.e. not at all just something from his imagination.
. STOP PRESS: Earth Buzzed by Surprise Tartan Planet NOT Black Star
There are many such crank theories and some may seem very scientific because they use scientific terminology - but they don’t string the words together in meaningful ways for scientists.
You can’t even make out what they mean.
This is another crank theory - this one is very popular amongst some new agey people. They think the universe is about to change from 3D to 5D but they don’t have a clue what “5D” means
. No the universe is not about to turn from 3D to 5D - doesn't make sense.
In that case they see it as something wonderful and beautiful though scary too - maybe it helps them to live better lives but it isn’t scence.
This is all junk science. See:
Safe from planetary conjunctions
A planet passing another planet as seen from earth doesn't do anything to us.
Conjunctions are harmless. They never did anything to Earth and never will do anything to Earth.
Gravity doens't work like that. When you point your finger at the Moon the gravity of the Moon doesn't pull at you through your finger.
Gravity doesn't work along lines.
The false prophets and other doomsday people will tell you the world is about to end whenever too planets line up. Often planets do pass by each other in the sky. This is nothing, just a photo-op. It is like the way two planes pass in front of the Moon in this video.
Click here to watch the video
Neither of the planes is anywhere near the moon and probably neither plane is near the other one is just a photo-op. In the same way the planets are nowhere near each other during a conjunction. This does NOTHING to harm Earth in any way. See my
Safe from the gravitational effects of planets
The only bodies to have a significant gravitational effect on Earth are the Moon and the Sun.
There is a rather neat theorem about tidal effects of planets and moons. The tidal effects of a spherical body are proportional to its apparent size in the sky and its density. That's it
The sun has similar but lower tidal effects than the Moon - even though the sun is much huger - but it is also far further away and so it has similar tidal effects as it looks the same size as he Moon in the sky.
But the sun is much less dense than the Moon so it has lower tidal effects.
Any planet that was going to have a significant tidal effect on Earth has to be very big and obvious in the sky. There is no such planet.
I cover that also in:
Safe from other planets - the solar system is stable and planets can’t jump out of their orbits.
. Size of the solar system - why Saturn can’t hit Jupiter and neither can hit Earth
Safe from lunar eclipses and solar eclipses
A lunar eclipse is just the light of all the sunsets and sunrises as seen from the Moon at the time of the eclipse - it means the sun has passed behind the Earth as seen from the Moon. Means our shadow passes in front of the Moon.
This is totally harmless.
The Moon looks red or orange just like mountains do at sunrise or sunset
. File:Alpenglow on Everest.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
As seen from the Moon it’s like this:
See my:
Earth can’t fall into the sun and the Moon can’t fall down from the sky - orbits are stable
Suppose we were able to throw the empire state building at the Moon, faster than a hypervelocity rifle. Would that knock it out of its orbit?
The answer is no.
QUOTE The building weighs 365,000 tons and its volume is 37 million cubic feet.
. Empire State Building Fact Sheet
Those would be American short tons or about 331 metric tons
. 365,000 short tons in metric tons
Even that would just slightly change the shape of its orbit.
This diagram may help. The yellow arrow shows someone throwing something out of the ISS towards Earth. Fortyfive minutes later it is moving in the same direction relative to the ISS but now this is away from Earth. So it just goes into a very slightly different orbit.
If you want to de-orbit something from the ISS you have to move it into an elliptical orbit that moves close enough to Earth to dip into its atmosphere from a height of 400 km up - height of the ISS - if you can do that the atmosphere slows it down so it doesn’t come back out again.
To do that you would have to hit it backwards in the orbit to make optimal use of the speed. Just throwing a ball wouldn’t do the trick, but there are some sports that can let you hit a ball fast enough to de-orbit from the ISS.
In this video Scott Manley asks if you can throw a ball all the way to the Earth. The answer would be a simple no, if it weren’t that the ISS orbits just a bit above Earth’s atmosphere. So, you just need to throw it hard enough to dip down slightly to skim Earth’s atmosphere. And the best direction to throw it is actually backwards along the orbit of the ISS rather than directly towards the Earth. Half an orbit later then it will be a fair bit closer to the Earth’s atmosphere and if you can get it deep enough within it then it will burn up as a fireball.
.
I go into it some more here:
Going back to the Moon, if you could hit it with a million metric tons rocket, three times the mass of the Empire State Building, it would shift it by about 43.2 cms a year. That’s less than 4 cms per lunar month.
But it wouldn’t move at 4 cms per month towards Earth.
Assuming you hit it backwards in its orbit, for the maximum change of shape, that would make it less than 2 cms closer to the Earth two weeks later than it would be otherwise.
You’d be able to measure that much of a change with the laser reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo mission. But only a tiny change in its orbital shape and still in a stable very distant orbit around the Moon.
A month after you hit it with three emprie state buildings it is just back where it was when you first hit it. But 14 days after that time in every month it is now 2 cms closer to Earth than it was - compared to a distance of over 300,000 kilometers!
Our rockets can’t set the Moon spinning either (not that it would harm anyone to have a slowly spinning Moon)
As for the Moon’s spin, it would make no difference to the Moon’s orbit if the Moon was spinning, The larger moons of planets tend to be tidally locked to their parent planet but when first formed they were likely spinning.
But we couldn’t set the Moon spinning with rockets either.
That’s because the Moon is lopsided.
This is the near side of the Moon. Those big red circles are “masscons” where ancient big asteroids hit the Moon
This is the near side of the Moon.
And this is it shown using lunar longitude and latitude, the center of the near side is 0, so this is a map centered on the far side of the Moon
https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/grail#mission-status
More techy details about its lumpy gravitational field here:
. Lunar Gravity Field: GRGM1200A
This shows the lunar coordinate system
. Selenographic coordinate system - Wikipedia
So the Moon is very lumpy and if you could give it a bit of a shove to try to get it spinning it would wobble back and forth due to the tidal forces of Earth for a while and end up back where it is now.
Even if you could get it slowly spinning, its spin would slow down over centuries and then stop because of the tidal effects of the Earth, assuming a very slow spin.
So, no, we don’t need to worry at all about the effects of even very heavy rockets landing on the Moon.
The Earth isn’t going to suddenly flip on its axis so that north points south and you see the pole star from Australia and the southern cross from the UK
See:
. Charles Hapgood’s out of date theory - no the Earth’s poles can’t shift suddenly
Magnetic poles aren’t going to swap this century - takes centuriers to thousands of years and no signs of it even starting
Both magnetic poles are near the geographic poles with no sign of them moving. And not much would happen if they did, magnetic compasses wouldn’t work well, soem migrating birds might get confused. Because of solar storms we’d need to wear more sunblock cream and be more careful with UV blocking sunglasses to prevent skin cancer and cataracts. Most animals unaffected and it’s happened several times every million years and doesn’t cause extincitons.
Our low orbit satellites would need more protection similarly to the ones in geostationary orbit and interplanetary spacecraft.
But this is for our distant descendants probably thousands of years or more l ikely tens or hundreds fo thousands of years from now.
My magnetic pole shift debunk here Debunked: No, we are NOT headed for a magnetic pole shift in less than centuries and it won’t do much whenever it happens - our descendants wlll need slightly better protected satellites and more sun block cream on sunny days during the reversal
Safe from planets such as Nibiru - the name of a Sumerian deity not a planet
Safe from neutrinos mutating whatever that’s supposed to mean - neutrinos do change flavour to other neutrinos all the time and nothing happens
This is the theme of that 2012 movie that scared many people.
There was a lot of nonsense in the 2012 film - it's about as accurate as Doctor Who i.e. not at all. Neutrinos are harmless and can't warm up Earth - the average neutrino can go through a light year of lead without stopping. The comedian Dara Ó Briain who has a good understanding of science (he studied science at university) makes fun of this “the neutrinos have mutated” line in the 2012 movie here. As he says it makes about as much sense as “the electrons are angry”.
Click here to watch the video.
My full debunk is here
Safe from stories from ancient mythologies
The Mayans never even had an idea of the world ending, most cultures don’t. But they believed the world is flat, that it’s the back of a crocodile or turtle floating in a lilly pond.
They notice the patterns of eclipses - as did most cultures that lasted for centuries. But they had no idea what caused them and didn’t know Earth is a planet.
Mayans thought we all lived on the back of a turtle or crocodile Mayans didn't know what stars were, and didn't know we orbited the sun. The mayan calendar doesn't end Mayans don't think the world will end But why worry about mayan ideas of the world anyway, unless you are mayan?
And had dates far in our future in their calendar
Mayan dates for celebrating new baktuns. 13th Baktun started in 2012. Continues to 4772 and beyond, far future. First Piktun Fri, Oct 13, 4772
See:
. Why the Mayans didn’t think the fourth age would end
. The Mayans had an origin story but no ending story - and celebrated their new Baktun in 2012
The Hindu Kali Yuga age is NOT about to end and is a religious rather than a scientific idea
The Kali Yuga age ends some time around the year 427000 according to most Hindus. Kali Yuga is a Hindu idea, it isn't in other religions. Hindus see the Kali Yuga as starting around 3,000 BCE and lasting for 432,000 years. It is part of a cyclical cosmology not an end of world or end of universe cosmology.
Also not based on science and observations but on religious ideas.
The idea that it ends soon seems to originate in an obscure Indian actress who thinks she is speaking for a Galactic federation.
It is not Hinduism.
She says she starred in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in India 20 years ago and claims to be a being from a Galactic Federation.
Anyone can say they are anything and may believe it too.
There are many people who believe they are the president of the US despite all the evidence to the contrary, for instance, and we always have a half dozen or dozen "Jesus's" some with many followers.
Her bio is here:
. Amazon.com: Sangeeta Handa: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle
Also not based on science and observations but on religious ideas.
Also probably most religions don't have end times. Even in the Abrahamic religions, Judaism beliefs are in an future of endless peace not an end of the world for those that take those beliefs literally.
. Many religious views about the world ending or not
Though this isn’t about religious ideas since I had to touch on the topic for this particular debunk, here is my debunk for people scared of future false prophecy dates
. Why you can ignore all date setting prophecies based on the Bible - no dates in it
Universe isn’t going to become 2D suddenly - holographic principle
First, the holographic principle is NOT about a simulation. It is rather about two dimensional physics (as seen one way) that is also 3D as seen another way. It isn't simulating anything else. It is just itself. It is nothing to do with computers.
This is an interesting theory according to which it has always been 2D in one rather strange mathematical way of looking at it and doesn’t change our experience of it as a 3D world - both are equally valid ways of understanding the world in this theory
The basic idea of the holographic principle isn't that the world isn't real, but that there is an alternative way of looking at it. We already have those. The quantum mechanical way of looking at things is very bizarre - and the way it depends on "observers" for the wave function to collapse into anything at all, or the way that two identical electrons can interfere like waves, and some more bizarre things like that.
None of that means that our ordinary world doesn't exist. It is just as valid a way of thinking about and understanding our surroundings.
In the same way the hologram theory is just another way of looking at things.
But it is a minority view with little to support it at present.
The holographic principle. isabout a possiblity that our reality has an alternative 2D description.
Not invalidating the 3D world. Not an artificial 2D world
Basically the idea is that it is simultaneouly 3D to our senses, but also 2D as well.
But that's not a problem because it is just another way of looking at the world.
The way we interact with the world is perfectly valid, it works, but there may be other ways of undertsanding it that give us other insights.
Safe from the universe being a simulation
The simulation theory is not a new idea, the new thing is just that Elon Musk and Neil Degrasse Tyson popularized what most see as a far fetched idea of interest in philosophical discussions but not plausible. And now others have latched onto it too, but it's still philosophically and scientifically implausible.
It's a bit like the modern popularity of solipsism [the idea that I am the only real mind who exists] as if it was a serious philosophical view -
AFAIK no philosopher has ever been a solipsist. Instead, it's an interesting philosophical straw man to test philosophical arguments against.
The simulation theory is rather similar. It is interesting as a philosophical idea but not a practical possibility.
I did a couple of video debunks that may help
.
1. The physics is ridiculously complicated for a simulation - We can simulate the ground states of simple molecules in quantum mechanics but large complex molecules are beyond us. It doesn't make sense to make a simulation so complicated.
People talk about using quantum computers to run a quantum simulation - but why not use them to run a classical simulation far far faster? What is the computational point in quantum mechanics?
2. The ethics of it is appalling if it is a simulation which simulates so much suffering. An advanced civilization with the technology to make a simulation - if it is possible at all, should have advanced ethics (we are going that way ourselves, more recognition of human rights)
The next two, [3. and 4. are for the idea of a simulation where we are computer characters - not for the Matrix type immersive VR]
3. Ability to understand truth can't be scripted yet, and there are reasons to suppose there can never be any computer script that truly understands such things as whether something is a school bus, say - can be programmed to say it and be right most of the time, but we may never have computer code able to truly understand anything.
4. Computer game characters, and Sophia, are just animatronics with chatscripts and we are clearly not scripted
For Matrix ideas,
5. If you have such awsome technology - why use it to simulate a world with so much sufferring - and why not use it to solve your problems, whatever they are, rather than to try to hide them? It is great fun as a movie but it isn't very logical as with many movie ideas if you look at them closely - they work because you get caught up in the axtion and excitement and don't inspect the premises closely.
This is my second debunk:
.
Also see my:
Is there any conceivable way to test whether or not we are in a computer simulation? (Is there any conceivable way to test whether or not we are in a computer simulation?)
The popularizers like Elon Musk for some reason think it is plausible. But it’s not very - I don’t think many take it seriously.
Like solipsism or the idea that all this might be a dream - the idea of a simulated world was just one of those curiosities that puzzle philosophers and intrigue scientists.
I actually got interested in it in the 1980s while working on my thesis on the mathematics of infinity and its philosophical grounding - such as whether you really tell the difference mathematically between finite and infinite when you can never actually enumerate all of an infinite collection.
I was actually more interested in the idea of a cellular automaton or other way of the universe itself being a kind of natural computer. Similar idea to simulation theory except nobody makes it, it is just naturally like that.
I go into that in my second simulation theory video.
It’s all very interesting and fun and philosophically perplexing in some ways :).
But not something to worry about or to be scared of.
I don’t think anyone would be scared of it if it weren’t for the likes of Elon Musk suggesting it’s a real possibility - and Nick Bostrom - as I explain in my debunk their reasoning has lots of holes in it. If the idea is even possible which isn’t clear, it’s hard to make sense of it being like this universe. But again philosophically interesting for sure.
Then - with the idea of space-time itself a kind of computer - again it’s philosophically interesting - and scientifically interesting too.
It IS possible that everything could be made of tiny bits, not just atoms but space-time itself. I talk about the idea that the universe could be a cellular automaton based on simple rules here
.
If our space-time was cellular we could hope to spot that. There has been some discussion of that.
But it is very much a minority view, only one person I know of Fredkin who is working on it for cellular space-time. It’s the idea of space-time itself being atomic - not just matter - but the space and time it is made up of also being atomic / celular.
That's more coherent than the idea of a simulation with all those problems. Including quantum mechanics - it could just be like that, rather than made like that by someone else.
But we have no evidence either way. It wouldn't change anything, just another way ofthinking about the world. Just like we have quantum mechanics where things work very differently from ordinary macro objects when you look at very small subatomic p particles particularly.
Naive realism as a useful philosophy for scared people
When I studied philosophy I was particularly interested in "direct realism" or "naive realism" as proposed for instance by Hilary Putnam. This is the idea that what seems to us naively to be the situation is how things really are. With all its difficulties and inconsistencies. The idea that this is a clearly very unsatisfactory way of thinking about things, but - it's like the "least worst" philosophy. That everything else just introduces more problems. They solve one thing but while making everything else worse.
So - just that naively what I see is what is real. A table is what I think a table is. It's external, it's not me, I can see it, touch it, move it around. All that is just the table, no point in trying to say it "really" is a collection of atoms made up of fundamental particles in particular states with quantums of light reflecting off it etc etc.
I think direct realism has a lot going for it actually as a philosophy :).
And in terms of anxiety it may help because why worry about all these other ways of thinking about the world?
Even engineers and practical scientists rarely need to concern themselves with general relativity or quantum mechanics or anything else other than basically Newtonian physics and an intuitive idea about the world that it's as we see it.
Safe from UFOs and aliens
UFOs, are unidentified flying things, or temporarily unidentified as many are later turned into IFOs with more research, Identified Flying Objects. But this is about why they can’t be aliens. Basically they aren’t technologically advanced enough, aliens a few centuries advaced would have the capability to send undetectable spacecraft even if just e.g. nanospacecraft to do whatever they want to do - so the issue with them being aliens is why do it this way? So I don’t think they are aliens.
. US new UFO report is about unidentified flying things, not aliens - why they can’t be aliens
If aliens are here then they are very careful not to leave even the slightest trace of their presense on the Moon, Mars, anywhere in the solar system and clearly have a policy that not only Earth but the whole solar system is not to be exploited by them, or not in any obvious way.
So they have a very strict "prime directive" as in Star Trek but they never break it.
Either that, or they aren't here.
. Why we don’t need to fear an alien invasion
Also safe from future aliens. You get lots of blog posts about the fast extinction solutions to the Fermi paradox because it’s scary. Few write about the sustainability solutions to the paradox although they go right back to Carl Sagan and they are far more plausible to my mind.
If you look at where we are going over just a few years we get many blips but over decades to centuries the direction is towards more human rights, more biorespect, more sustainability, increasing understanding of the importance of biodiversity and nature services etc. I think that projecting forwards that leads naturally to planetary and galaxy protection and that would lead to a galaxy where if there are aliens they would be next to invisible from a distance because they live in the galaxy in such a sustainable way. Not because they can’t do large scale changes but because they don’t want to.
And this is about how it would be impossible for advanced aliens to truly hide from each other as is required for the “Dark forest” hypothesis and why they are likely to be kind.
Safe from some cosmic thing nobody has thought about yet
There my “space cows” argument can help. You are safe even from mythological space cows
There is a way you can see for yourself that we are safe from anything that might happen to our universe. Let’s make up a silly idea, that you think the universe could be eaten by a “space cow”.
(This is an in joke amongst physicists, see Spherical cow)
There is nothing special about our current millenium as regards the universe as a whole. Myriads of stars and planets are born from gas clouds every day; other stars are getting old; myriads of planets are orbiting stars; myriads of galaxies continue turning; the universe is much the same as it has been for billions of years. To someone scared of mythological space cows, you could say:
"No space cow has eaten our universe for 13 million millenia, and there is nothing special about our millenium. It's not like the universe gets especially tasty for mythological space cows at 13 million millenia exactly. So even if it was theoretically possible,there is no realistic possibility of being eaten by a mythological space cow this millenium.
In this way we are safe from anything that could happen to the entire universe, so we are safe from some hypothetical cosmic thing nobody has thought of.
Remember your ancestors
This is simiilar to the Space Cow argument, but may be a helpful way of looking at it for some people as another way you can see for yourself that it is safe without all the complex maths. Remember that nothing happened to the universe in the lifetime of your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, going back to the first homo sapiens, back to astrolopithecens, homo erectus, back and back to the small mammels scuttling up trees at the time of the dinosuars, back and back to our single cell microbial ancestors and back to before evolution began on Earth, 13 millenia ago.
As for the Space Cows, there is nothing special about our current generation or millenium, so we are safe from some hypothetical cosmic thing nobody has thought of.
This is about the vast future timescale of our universe, it is still very young, a baby really
BLOG: Ways that life and civilizations could continue into the infinite future
You can also use this for our solar system since it has lasted for 4.6 billion years now. That’s 4.6 million millennia. You can argue in the same way that if there are space cows that go around eating solar sytems, then unless stars get especially tasty for space cows at exactly our age we can’t be signifiantly at risk.
And then - you can look around and see there are lot of sun like stars and some are much older than ours.
So there can’t be some phenomenon like a space cow that happens at precisely our age.
Also we’d notice the effects of something that was going around eating solar systems in our galaxy. We can see other stars much older thanours, and we can see other spiral arms and other galaxies and their stars are fine too.
So once again we are safe from some hypothetical cosmic thing nobody has thought of.
What happens when you die - best to keep an open mind
This is relevant because when people get scared of the universe ending it often slowly transforms into an increased fear of dying personally. Not for any logical reason but for emotional reasons I think. It’s also quite common with other “doomsday” fears. So this is my response to help them.
I DO think there is a continuation of some sort after we die but an open mind about how. My own personal belief system is reincarnation. Because i find it challenging to try to keep a completely open mind so I believe that but then in an open minded way to try to be open to whatever might happen.
I think for some people they can keep an open mind, others find it possible to be humanists which works well for them. But otherse have a natural belief in a life that continues and can’t even imagine anything different and for them then belief in an afterlife or reincarnation makes more sense or belief in spirits.
There is no way we can resolve this so why not stay with a belief system that works for you rather than try to straightjacket your mind into something it can’t accept?
But to try to have as open a mind as you can.
I did several answers to help people on these topics.
. My answer for the question on Quora “Is there life after death?”
. Robert Walker's answer to Is there life after death?
. I’m afraid of dying, can you help?
. Very unlikely we cease to exist when we die - personal view to help scared people
Safe from climate change and everything else
I wrote this blog post specifically to help people with fears about the universe.
. No risk of human extinction - and so much positive going on