10 Scariest Theories Known to Man

Any others ?

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CrazyNeutrino said:

10 Scariest Theories Known to Man

Any others ?

> False Vacuum … Eventually however that false vacuum has to pop, even after billions of years in this false state and we and everything we know in our visible universe will disappear in an instant with no warning whatsoever and there is nothing you can do about it.

I totally agree. This is not even a hypothesis, it’s a fact. The discovered mass for the Higgs particle proves once and for all that our universe is unstable. Physicists call it “metastable” only because it’s lasted for 13.82 billion years so far. Some time in the future the whole universe is going to die in an inconceivably violent blast of raw energy.

The only solace I have is that when (not if, when) it happens it will happen so fast that I won’t be aware of it.

> Great filter

Yes. I hadn’t heard of it called the “great filter” but am totally familiar with the concept. It appears in the Drake equation as “L”, the lifetime of a civilization. In my lifetime there was always the possibility that the great filter was nuclear war, or beyond and even more frightening are the new weapons in a future war so powerful that nuclear weapons are negligible by comparison. Associated with the “great filter” is the frightening concept of a doomsday machine – let us assume that if something is possible then it will eventually be built – we know that a whole swathe of doomsday machines are possible, therefore eventually it will be built and wipe out the human race, the only question is when. I’m happy to supply engineering details of a dozen or so doomsday machines.

> Brain in a Vat

I take it that this comes from the movie “The Matrix”, but the idea dates all the way back to Plato, if not further. It’s the foundation of the branch of philosophy called “Epistemology”. Luckily, unlike the previous two scary theories, this is just a possibility, not a fact.

> Higher Dimensional Beings

Not “scary” in the slightest. Fun.

> Fermi Paradox

This has already been mentioned – it’s identical to the “great filter” above.

> Quantum Suicide/Quantum Immortality

This seems to be a version of Schoedinger’s cat. In which the measurement of an event changes the state of the event. The concept seems to be – if we keep measuring everything then nothing will ever change – quantum immortality.

> Sixth mass extinction

There are inadvertent human actions – their influence is small unless they involve declaring war against wild creatures (antibiotic, pesticide, herbicide, agriculture). Deliberate destruction by humans in a war between people is more worrying, I’ve mentioned the doomsday machine above.

But let’s move on to natural causes of a sixth mass extinction – flood basalt, asteroid impact, Sun going Red Giant, massive solar flare, a passing Sun knocks the inner planets into elliptical orbits, freezing of the Earth right down to the bottoms of the deepest oceans, superheating of the atmosphere, poisoning of the whole atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, plague/pestilence, degeneration of the human race. All are possible.