Meteor over Russia

We're all doomed anyway.

Measurements of the Higgs Boson that was discovered by the Large Hadron Collider have established that the universe is in a metastable state. That means a vacuum metastability disaster is inevitable!

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/18/17006552-will-our-universe-end-in-a-big-slurp-higgs-like-particle-suggests-it-might?lite

http://news.discovery.com/space/higgs-boson-discovery-universe-end-130219.htm

I suggest we avoid it as long as possible by not taking a particle accelerator higher than the GZK limit. But still, what a sucky fate for humanity.

Interestingly, they say the wave of death will come at the speed of light. I'd always heard it will come at "near" the speed of light. Not sure which is right.

If our extinction comes "at" the speed of light, at least we will never know. If the wave of death crosses the universe at "near" the speed of light, it will give us a few months to contemplate our demise before it gets here, assuming we notice the universe being consumed by an ever-expanding ball of energy.

Hmm. Meant that to be a reply to one of the posts about avoiding an incoming asteroid.

Oh well. I guess it still works.

'I shall be in no greater a discomfort than I was before I was born"

That would be 49 plus a bit feet, Set.

Yes. I guess so.

But being agnostic, while I don't know that there is some sort of afterlife awaiting us all, I also don't know that there isn't (and I fervently hope that there is).

And I suppose that for any one individual, "the possibility that the universe will suddenly cease to exist tomorrow" isn't much different from "the possibility that they will be run over by a bus tomorrow".

In any case, for the sake of whatever humans are alive when the universe switches off, I hope the wave of death travels at the speed of light, so they don't have a month or two to think about humanity's imminent extinction.



I just did a little reading to try to figure out whether doomsday will travel at exactly the speed of light or not (no luck figuring it out), and I stumbled across this on Wikipedia:

"The addition of gravity to the story leads to a considerably richer variety of phenomena. The key insight is that a false vacuum with positive potential energy density is a de Sitter vacuum, in which the potential energy acts as a cosmological constant and the Universe is undergoing the exponential expansion of de Sitter space."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

Sounds like the false vacuum could explain the 'dark energy' phenomenon that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

No such luck it seems. I expect that Nature magazine is reputable enough to trust that they know what they are talking about:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0.html

"Such a bubble would expand at close to the speed of light, with enormous energy release"

great, now I have something else to worry about.
I would have a laugh though , imagine spendi in the middle of one of his extra dense, punctuation filled posts, AND-he wouldnt have finished.


Hed have eternity to edit.

Actually, having it expand at "near" the speed of light could give us a few months of warning (but no hope of doing anything about it), because the energy from all the burning protons and neutrons would travel "at" the speed of light, and would therefore range ahead of the main wave of death.

However, I thought about it a bit more, and humanity might still die before we knew what hit us.

The destruction of every proton and neutron in the universe will generate a LOT of energy, and the first light that reaches us will probably be enough to bathe one side of the planet with instantly-lethal radiation (then getting the other side as the planet rotated). And it will probably also provide enough "solar wind" to strip the planet of its atmosphere after a few days.

wehave at least 4 gamma burst sources within range of complete annihilation. Hows that for "c' in action

Why does Russia get all the best meteors such as the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk ones?

The one below flew over America but never even bothered to land-
Wiki- "In 1972, an unusually bright meteor from space was witnessed bouncing off Earth's atmosphere, much like a skipping stone can bounce off of a calm lake. The impressive event lasted several seconds, was visible in daylight, and reportedly visible all the way from Utah, USA to Alberta, Canada. Pictured below, the fireball was photographed streaking above Teton mountains behind Jackson Lake, Wyoming, USA. It was possibly the size of a small truck, and would likely have created an impressive airburst were it to have struck Earth more directly"