The year is 2077 and Captain Archie Atlas is about to boldly go where no man has ever
been before.
His grandkids are at home watching the event via their Neurolink device, wondering what
the hell is going to happen to their beloved spaceman as he approaches a black hole.
Thing is, nobody knows what will happen, but we do have an idea of what could happen.
The gravity from the black hole will be so strong that Atlas’s feet are pulled away,
elongating his body so much he looks like a piece of spaghetti.
There’s even a term for that: spaghettification.
Atlas might also just be torn apart or even evaporate.
Either way, he’ll sure justify earning that super-massive wage NASA pays him every month.
But that’s not what happens, not completely anyway.
Only one part of Atlas gets the spaghetti treatment, but he actually splits into two
realities.
One of them enters the hole and the other stays outside it.
The crew on Atlas’ spaceship, which is a safe distance from the black hole, hear his
last words, but they are slow and broken.
They hear their captain say, “My God, it’s full of…”
What they can see is his spaghetti-half seemingly stuck in the same place at the mouth of the
hole, albeit he looks like he’s been stretched across the surface.
But the other him is in freefall having passed the event horizon.
He is just fine having the happiest thoughts as he heads towards the singularity.
…he’s not sure what’s there, maybe oblivion, maybe someone’s bookcase on Earth.
It’s highly likely he’s never getting out.
He’s passed the point of no return.
Inside the spacecraft, aptly named Hades 6, the crew are all in tears seeing the other
Atlas looking like a human noodle.
Down on Earth a tsunami of RIPs are being sent down the Neurolinks.
So, what happens now to Captain Atlas?
The obvious answer is he suddenly finds himself on Earth at the dawn of intelligent life in
monkey form, throwing bones at a monolith in the desert.
Something happens, and then he’s inside the body of a character on the TV show F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
In fact, he’s going to experience all reality on Earth since time began.
Maybe you think that sounds like a load of baloney, or maybe you think during lockdown
Infographics writers have been hitting the glue, but the truth is, no one knows what
would happen.
Scientists have lots of theories, perhaps a little bit different to our scenario, but
not all that different.
One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is what is down a black hole.
That’s the thing about the universe.
It’s complicated.
So, that’s one thing we don’t know about the universe, the conundrum of what would
happen if someone tried to go into a black hole.
If you think that’s a bit of a mind-bender, we have a lot more information to mess with
your head.
Ok, so we used that word “infinite” a couple of times already.
The question is, do we know for sure the universe is infinite?
If it is, does that mean there are infinite copies of you doing exactly what you are doing
now, or maybe copies of you doing something a little bit different than you are doing
now?
Does it mean somewhere there’s a bunch of monkeys randomly hitting keys on a typewriter
and at some point one perfectly writes the complete works of Shakespeare?
The answer is, it’s possible.
There’s the theory that around 13.8 billion years ago there was a Big Bang and the universe
started expanding, something called “cosmological inflation”.
Eventually, with a bit of hard work and patience, galaxies formed and at some point so did the
one that our dear Earth sits in.
About 3.7 billion years ago microscopic lifeforms graced the Earth and fast-forward a bit and
here we are talking to you.
If everything started with a Big Bang, what came before the bang?
What exactly is nothing, because surely there always has to be something?
Scientists aren’t exactly sure.
British physicist Stephen Hawking said there was nothing before the Big Bang, but it was
a weird kind of nothing.
He’s dead now, so maybe he’s walking around in heaven kicking himself for all the false
information he provided us during his time on terra firma.
Don’t laugh, a good portion of the world thinks God created everything and we guess
they think before God got to work on the universe there was just him, bored and lonely with
a lot of time on his hands.
Anyway, according to Hawking, the universe doesn’t have a boundary.
He says it was once a subatomic ball called the singularity.
In that tiniest of particles, the laws of physics didn’t exist.
“It was always reaching closer to nothing but didn't become,” Hawking said about that
ball.
He gave an example, saying there’s nothing more south than the South Pole.
He said, “There was never a Big Bang that produced something from nothing.
It just seemed that way from mankind's perspective.”
We told you this show would be a mind-bender.
What he means is humans are unable to understand anything outside of space and time.
What we call nothing before the Big Bang was actually something, but something we can’t
comprehend.
Not all scientists agree with Hawking’s theory of cosmological origin.
That’s because no one has incontrovertible truth as to its origin, except maybe the evangelist
Billy Graham, who died just a few weeks after Hawking.
He once said, “God had no beginning!
He has always existed – and He always will…
God is greater than the universe.”
Even if you think God did indeed create the Universe, no Christian scholar has ever been
able to explain what came before God just as no scientist can tell you exactly what
nothing is.
It’s like this, to some scientists at least, we can’t perceive anything outside of our
own laws of physics, so we just can’t explain what nothing is.
Nonetheless, physicists eternally disagree about nothing.
A few years ago a bunch of them got together at the American Museum of Natural History
to talk about “The Existence of Nothing” and not surprisingly everyone had a different
theory.
Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson summed the showdown up with the words, “Maybe nothing will never
be resolved.”
Here at the Infographics Show we like what the perpetually happy British physicist Brian
Cox said after being asked what came before the Big Bang.
His answer was: “We don’t know.”
Embracing academic humility, he said that the universe might well be eternal.
Maybe things just exist, he said, but he can’t be sure.
No one can be sure.
Maybe the answer lies inside a black hole.
There are some scientists that talk about a “Mirror Universe”, which is a theory
along the lines that there’s a parallel universe next to the one we live in but in
that universe, time runs backward.
Instead of particles, it has antiparticles.
One scientist explained it like this.
Imagine an egg yolk.
Then imagine the process of it turning back into an uncracked egg and subsequently the
egg being inside the chicken.
Then imagine the process over again going forwards.
The universe could be this cycle continued.
What passes away comes into being.
Then there’s the “multiverse” theory in which every possible outcome can happen.
One scientist penned the term, “eternal chaotic inflation”, which sounds applicable
to the bad news we heard in 2020.
What that scientist was talking about are universes outside our universe constantly
forming and growing.
As for what’s going on in those universes, well, we just don’t know.
Maybe right now in a galaxy far far away there are easily upset creatures, droids, and humans,
getting wasted in a cantina while listening to jazz music.
Anything’s possible in a multiverse- except one thing: Han shot first, and Lucas can re-edit
the original trilogy all he wants but we know the truth.
Which brings us to another matter, something else science can’t tell you about the universe.
Is there life on other planets?
It would seem egocentric for humans to say in this vast, maybe infinite universe, there
is no life except here on our tiny blue planet.
As for what that life would look like, well, how can we possibly imagine something that
does not exist in our world?
We might create aliens for fun in stories, but we do so based on what we know already.
Another lifeform could be something we just cannot imagine.
Human knowledge is a toolkit, and it only works in our world.
It is probably useless elsewhere.
Ok, so how big is this universe of ours.
You need to ask this when you’re considering life on other planets.
Depending on what source you’re reading the numbers change.
They change for good reason because a lot of guesswork is going on.
But, it’s thought just in our own galaxy, The Milky Way, there are 100 to 400 billion
stars.
That’s a lot, and again, science can’t be sure.
We also don’t know how many stars have planets, but most do, so we’re talking about billions
of planets, too.
We also believe that many of those planets could host life, we just can’t get there
yet and break some bread with the aliens.
To further put things into perspective, listen to this.
If you were traveling at the speed of light you’d be doing a steady 670,616,629 miles
per hour.
That’s a berserk speed, but let’s pretend it’s possible.
Maybe now you’re thinking, ok man, at that speed, I could do a round-the-universe trip
in no time at all.
You’d be wrong, so don’t put that on your bucket list just yet.
A study in 2018 said that traveling at the speed of light it would take 200,000 years
just to cross the Milky Way.
That’s hardly an adventure, it’s only flying across your own hood.
In Earth terms, it would be like popping out to buy some toilet paper.
If you were traveling at 60 miles per hour it would take you about two trillion years.
The Milky Way, that thing that contains billions upon billions of stars and planets is just
one galaxy.
How many galaxies are there?
Science doesn’t know of course so it has to guess.
One estimate is two trillion galaxies.
Add up those numbers and come back to us and say you don’t believe in life outside of
this cute blue abode of ours.
Now think about that bucket list of yours.
200,000 years to get out of town if you could travel at light speed and you’ve got two
trillion places to go.
Well, maybe you've got forever to go.
We doubt there's a sign after the two trillionth galaxy that reads, "Dead End".
Planets outside our solar system are called exoplanets, and scientists believe there are
many planets with conditions similar to those on Earth.
That could mean right now, somewhere in the universe, things that look like dinosaurs
are wandering around on a planet.
It could mean somewhere in space there’s a planet suffering from a global pandemic
or on another planet there are millions of narcissists obsessed with an app called Tok-Tik..different
to Tik-Tok only in name.
There could be a place where someone like you is looking at his phone watching a show
about things we don’t know about the universe.
Everything and anything is possible...we think.
Ok, so there is this thing called matter.
You are matter.
Your phone is matter.
The air you breathe is matter and even the thoughts in your head are matter.
Cool, everything is matter, but is there non-matter?
Well, there is this thing in the universe called dark matter and it’s not matter as
we know it.
There is a lot of it, too, perhaps making up about 25 percent of the universe.
The problem is, we think it’s there, but we can’t actually see it.
It doesn’t emit light and it doesn’t emit energy, so we can’t observe it.
We just think it’s there because of the way it interacts with other things in the
universe.
Scientists say that this stuff has a gravitational force that affects the matter we can see,
such as other planets.
But that’s about it, we don’t really know what it is.
It’s like a cosmological ghost.
Then you’ve got dark energy, which makes up about 60 to 70 percent of the universe.
We don’t know exactly what that is, either.
We think that dark matter pulls things towards it and dark energy pushes things away.
Look at it this way, if the universe is expanding then something is pushing against our space-time.
So you’ve got normal matter, all the stuff you can see, which makes up about five to
ten percent of the universe.
Then you have these two mysterious matters that fill up the rest of the space.
One is slowing down expansion and one is speeding it up, a kind of yin and yang relationship,
a bit like everything in life really.
Everything has its opposite, but the pushing matter has more force than the pulling matter,
which is a good analogy for human behavior.
We need more push than pull otherwise we wouldn’t create anything, but we require resistance,
so we don’t get out of hand.
You know something else, we don’t even know how we got here.
Yep, that’s true.
We have expressed all these grand ideas of a primordial soup that somehow created the
chemicals that became the building blocks for life, but it’s total guesswork as to
how those things became beings that could type 120 words per minute on their smartphone.
We don’t really know how DNA formed.
We are a mystery to ourselves, and let’s not get started about consciousness.
There’s actually a theory that the universe has consciousness, it’s called “panpsychism”,
and it’s quite popular with some far out folks in the philosophy community and people
that have smoked DMT.
Is it true?
It could be.
Do we even know how long we’ve got?
Does Earth have a life expectancy?
It’s thought in millions of years from now most of life on Earth could end due to some
massive disaster such as an asteroid strike.
There will be something left, though, so we might need to be whacked by what’s called
a rogue planet to really see the end of life on Earth.
It’s a possibility.
It’s also possible that Earth itself could one day go rogue.
It's all guesswork of course.
Maybe one day God will get bored of our habitual whining and kick us like a soccer ball into
the next galaxy.
After life has been destroyed, there will still be a floating rock in space that humans
once called Earth.
By the way, that word likely comes from the Old English word, “eorþe”, which means
ground or soil.
The Earth could be hit by a rogue planet and if that doesn’t finish the place off, the
sun will start expanding in about a billion years.
In five billion years that thing will turn into a red giant, though modern theories actually
believe Earth will just be pushed away from the sun rather than swallowed up by it.
Literally, anything could happen, except... probably... nothing.
Now you need to watch this, “Why It Would Suck To Live Through The End Of The Universe.”
Or, have a look at this, “50 Surprising Facts About Space You Didn't Know.”