The Universe is a Dick. Re-published.

Reason number one thousand seven hundred and eleven why life is devoid of any meaning and all the better for it: The universe is a dick. While being in and of itself the fabric and the laws that allow conscious beings to exist, it has a thousand and one ways to wipe out any and all consciousness on this or any other planet. All of which are inevitable. If one does not bring about the end of humanity, another will. These facts are at the heart of my existential nihilism. Before the hamster wheel of modern life, before the endless unanswered questions, before the lack of judgement in some afterlife, before the pain and suffering of billions of people, there is the cold hard facts of physics. Even if we escape the bounds of our solar system, travel faster than the speed of light, or be able to create and control wormholes, the results are in and there is only this inevitability; an empty void with no memory of all the trials and triumphs of a species from Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.

I find the laws of the Universe to be eternally captivating. I feel the same way about our mortality. The latter being entirely dependent on the former I would like to run down a few of the bizarre existential threats that the Cosmos may have in store for us. If we can refrain from bringing about our own demise of course.

These humanity killers are backed up by empirical evidence and are not speculative. It is incredible to live in a time where we can cast eyes so far into the future and contemplate our inevitable demise with a high level of certainty. I would hope that on some level we have all dealt with our own mortality. The loss of one consciousness out of billions is easier to take when we know that people we love will continue on. This well may be true for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years but there is no escaping that time for life on the Pale Blue Dot is finite. Whether the end is tomorrow or trillions of years from now, I think it is a useful exercise and a helpful reminder of the futility of our existence. I believe that by acknowledging the futility of our existence can we begin to shed all of the needless suffering. I’ll start with the most pressing threats to existence and wind up in the heat death of our Universe.

Let us start with a threat from the sky that will only affect human society. In the next few hundred years, somewhere along the way we will all stop laughing at the doomsday people. Those with bomb shelters under their houses packed with several years worth of food. The threat comes from the closest star in the sky, the Sun. Many of you will be aware of the phenomena of solar flares. They occur around sunspots, where magnetic fields are so strong they create holes in the surface of the sun. When these magnetic field lines become twisted past a certain point, they break like an overstretched rubber band leaving a helix of force lines extending from the sunspot. It is thought that the re-connection of these broken force lines causes our first threat to modern existence. When these force lines reconnect they eject a concentrated dose of high energy particles away from the sun, out into the solar system. High energy particles are carried by the solar wind unendingly. The interaction of these high energy particles and the Earth’s magnetic field are what give us the Aurora Borealis and Australis at the North and South Pole respectively. But, just like the Richter scale and earthquakes, there are solar flares and then there are SOLAR FLARES.

The largest solar flare ever recorded was also the first. It has been dubbed the Carrington event for the astronomer that studied it. In 1859 the event was visible to the naked eye and the Aurora that we associate with the poles could be seen as far south as Hawaii. The collision of the ejected particles, and their huge amounts of energy, with the magnetic field stripped the Earth of some layers of its protective cocoon.  This event set telegraph lines on fire and must have meant a sign from a higher power for primitive, uncontacted cultures all over the globe.

Now, the Sun is truly enormous and spins just like the Earth. The space around the Sun is also unfathomably huge. Therefore, it takes a direct hit from a coronal mass ejection (CME) to affect our lives here on Earth. It would be like spinning on a roundabout and throwing a silver dollar trying to hit a golf ball miles away. But they happen and the effects may well result in a cataclysmic interruption to our way of life. A CME strong enough can push through the many layers of magnetic field lines and touch down on Earth, blowing transformers on major power grids, rendering inert many GPS satellites, and disabling many different types of electronics. No direct physical harm would come to anyone during one of these events but the damage to modern life may be unrepairable. All financial transactions that rely on a digital clock would cease and bring markets to a stand still, unable to reopen for an indefinite amount of time. Data servers could be wiped and the information lost for weeks or months. We have all seen how crazy people get when the Dow falls too much in a day, you can only imagine the chaos of a completely record-less global economy. Judging by humanity’s previous brushes with calamity, I doubt we would fair much better than those in the past. NOAA and NASA have centers that give advance warning to utility companies and other relevant components of modern society but even a warning could not protect us from an event that was too large. A 2014 study of ice cores in Greenland sought to answer how often these events actually strike the Earth and the result is disconcerting. They found two extreme solar events occurred in the last 1500 years and concluded that the frequency is about the same. Therefore, one is coming and there is nothing we can do about it. When it does, let’s hope we can avoid some sort of apocalypse but seriously who are we kidding.

Since we have been discussing the Earth’s magnetic field a bit, let’s move on to a little less threatening but nonetheless fantastical danger to modern society: Geomagnetic Reversal. We all know the Earth has two poles north and south. You may not know that they are not static and can move some distance around the “top” and “bottom” of the planet. What they also do is flip orientation completely. It goes without saying that without the Earth’s magnetic field there would be no life on our planet. Combined with the Ozone Layer, it protects the surface of the planet from gamma rays and high energy particles that can collide with the DNA inside your cells and damage the information contained. An Earth with no field and no ozone would be equivalent to building a home inside the Chernobyl reactor after meltdown. A large body of research shows that the poles do this reorientation quite frequently in geological terms. When it does occur the process can be as short as 450 years and as long as 10,000. During these reversals, the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field can be reduced to 5% of its normal strength. There has been some speculation on a link between these magnetic reversals and extinction events due to the increased exposure to radiation on the surface but nothing concrete has been shown. It is safe to conclude though that this is not an existential threat. Life has been going boom since the Cambrian Explosion about 500 million years ago and here we stand. Yet, combine this weakened magnetic field with the Coronal Mass Ejection we just discussed and the impact to our technological infrastructure could be far greater.

We stay on the surface of planet Earth for the next threat to human existence: Supervolcanoes. If you have ever been to Yellowstone National Park, lucky you. This wonder of the US National Park system is so because of the blown top of a caldera. The breathtaking meadows and stunning mountains that surround them are the result of three different eruptions that occurred between 2.1 million and 640,000 years ago. This type of eruption is not the same as the routine kind we associate with a volcano (as routine as a volcanic eruption can be that is). Instead of the classical funnel at the top of a mountain, the diameter of the Yellowstone Caldera is 45 miles wide. There are six known and active supervolcanoes in the world and the inevitable eruption of one of them will do more than affect the people in the surrounding areas. The amount of superheated rock ejected into the sky could cover the ground with several inches of ash as far away as Los Angeles and Chicago. The vast amount of particulate matter sent into the atmosphere would reflect sunlight away from the Earth and can send us into an ice age. The superheated particles in the air can disrupt satellite communications. The Permian Mass Extinction event that took place 250 million years ago resulted in the loss of 85% of all life on the Earth at the time. The scale of volcanic activity at the time makes super volcanoes sound like firecrackers but it shouldn’t detract from the power that geological activity has on this planet. The real takeaway is that since an extinction event occurred like that before, it most certainly can happen again.

Since life is still flourishing today all over the world and millions of species have soldiered on after previous supervolcanoes, this won’t threaten most life on planet Earth or even the survival of human beings. But it is a threat to our technological society. It could be one of the triggers that sends our modern world into chaos. Slowing human progress when we need to continually strive for a way off this hunk of rock as you shall see.

Next on the list of doomsday devices is one we are all familiar with: Comets and Asteroids. These harbingers of doom and destruction are the reason why humans are the dominant species on the planet. The asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs (a span of 150 million years) was 300 miles wide and changed the face of our planet for millions of years. (how many of you just glossed over the effects lasted millions of years?) The aftermath of the impact is almost unfathomable. Megatsunamis spanned across the globe, shock waves rippled out from the impact triggering earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, a cloud of superheated ash, literally not figuratively, set the atmosphere on fire. Let’s not forget to throw in some acid rain. To boot, the sudden production of immense amounts of carbon dioxide lead to a runaway greenhouse effect in the centuries that followed. Over a longer period, the amount of dust particles left in the atmosphere blocked out the Sun and lead to an ice age. You get the point. It obliterates all complex forms of life on the planet. A cruel fate for those poor non avian dinosaurs and millions of other species whose existence was ended by being burned alive, lying on the ground suffocating, inhaling acid rain, or if you made it through all that eventually starvation or hypothermia.

There is a period in the development of our Solar System called the Late Heavy Bombardment. This phase in the evolution of the Solar System occurred after the formation of the planets. During which, asteroids and comets rained down on the stellar residents unendingly. You can see the evidence of this period in the endless amounts of craters covering the surface of the moon. This ended about 3.8 billion years ago and the solar system entered into a more tranquil phase. The Earth and every other planet is still hit with projectiles of all sorts all the time, about 100 tons per day, but are nothing to fear. Another asteroid like the Chicxulub Impactor, the rock that killed the dinosaurs, come along a lot less frequently since the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. You might be asking yourself; well how frequently? Astronomers and geologists teamed up to give you the answer: around every 60 to 100 million years. The impactor that killed dinosaurs, and allowed for you and I to be discussing it, happened 66 million years ago. So we are due. Of course 30 million years is a long time and we may have even blew this joint by then but the point is it can come any day from now until it inevitably does. And that ladies and gentleman is all she wrote. Maybe with enough warning we could build underground cities to save us until it’s safe to come back to the surface but come now a 300 mile wide hunk of rock travelling at 45,000 miles an hour would be hard to prepare for.

There is hope to avert this threat though and it’s actually remarkably simple. With enough time in advance you would not need to send a ragtag group of space crusaders to try to blow up an unwanted visitor (which is a horrible idea by the way). You would simply send a satellite of sufficient size to the impactor and have it orbit around the far-flung mountain of rock. The micro gravity from the orbit of the tiny satellite over time would be enough to alter the course of that civilization killer to a point where it would no longer intersect with the Earth. The Rosetta spacecraft and its companion Philae lander were sent to comet 67P and arrived in November 2014. The European Space Agency was not only capable of getting a satellite to meet up with this comet in its orbit around the Sun, but also land a spacecraft on it. So the technology is there. The only caveat to this is that there are millions of bodies in the Asteroid Belt, millions in the Kuiper Belt, and ever billions more objects that make up the Oort Cloud. It would be hard to create a system that could monitor that many potential impactors. So good luck future generations of humanity, you are going to need it.

We are now getting into the some of the more mind-blowing ways in which the Universe is out to get us. This next one is about as likely as you winning the powerball jackpot for three years running but it is still an actual possibility: Rogue Planets. Before there is a solar system there is just a giant cloud of dust and gas. After so much matter is condensed into so “small” a space nuclear fusion ignites in a stellar birth. The resultant explosion sends incredible amounts of energy into all the dust and gas surrounding our newly formed star. As this superheated expanse of dust and gas begin to orbit around the star, they form planets from the size of Pluto to gas giants that make Jupiter look like a marble. If you keep up with the news, you would know that a substantial set of data and observations reveals that way, way out in our solar system there is new planet whose orbit around the sun is 15,000 years. How did it get out there? Well, most likely it was tugged out into a distant orbit by the interaction of all the other giant orbiting planets.

Supercomputers have been a boon to astronomical study. Observing the current orbits of all the objects in our solar system you can wind the clock back all the way to the birth of our Sun 4.5 billion years ago. This kind of massive computational simulation requires a supercomputer that makes Deep Blue look like Teddy Ruckspin. Simulations that try and rewind the history of our solar system observe some predictable results but it never quite matches the way things are today. Planets end up in different orbits than they currently inhabit and it does not match what we observe. One likely solution to this conundrum is that our solar system harbored another planet, if not more, before it was ejected into the void by the gravitational interactions of all the other bodies orbiting the Sun. We call these planets Rogue Planets or interstellar bodies. There are at least a 100 billion solar systems in the Milky Way and it is not a leap to say that there are therefore countless billions of Rogue planets wandering the galaxy. Some estimates propose that there are 100,000 times more interstellar bodies than there are stars in our Galaxy. Wow. The chance of one coming along and bumping into Earth is as improbable as it gets, but not impossible. One would not even have to hit us. If a massive gas planet many times the size of jupiter were to make its way through our solar system, its gravitational tug could pull us along with it, cast off into the abyss. It sounds almost poetic, actually.

Planets are not the only things that go rogue. Stars can as well. All stars in the Milky Way orbit around a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. I dearly hope you already knew that. The closer a star is to the center of the galaxy the more speed it has. We reside about two-thirds of the way out from the center in a nice quiet suburban neighborhood. The reason the milky way is so milky is because the density of stars increases as you travel inward towards our supermassive black hole Sagittarius A. Just as the interaction of gas giants can fling planets from their host star, the interaction of stars in the center of the Milky Way can fling stars towards the outer galaxy. In fact, 70,000 years ago a red dwarf star, called Scholz’s star, passed through the boundary of the Oort cloud. Two more stars are known to be heading towards us in the next 1.3 million years. The more we learn about our reality the more unrealistic it sounds. There is even a chance that a star could be heading towards us while it’s timer is ticking towards an eventual supernova explosion. Which brings me to our next possible brush with extermination: Supernovas.

If you know some basic astronomy you know about supernovas. A star many times the mass of our sun burns bright for millions of years but is too massive to sustain its own existence. When the core of the star has depleted its hydrogen and helium supply, it must continue to combine heavier atomic nuclei as its repulsive force against the contracting force of gravity. The immense gravity inside an immense star can continue to combine nuclei until they reach the size of iron. After that there is no more fuel to burn and therefore no explosive energy to keep gravity at bay. All of the matter from the boundary of the star inward collapses almost instantly in astronomical terms. This sudden condensing of matter results in a supernova explosion. These events are stunningly beautiful. The remnants of these events comprise some of the most spectacular images produced by the Hubble Space telescope. Without the billions of supernova events over the history of the Universe we would not exist today. They produced most, but not all (which we will get to next), of the elements that are beyond iron on the periodic table and make biological life possible. The theory that elucidated this process is called nucleosynthesis.

These cataclysmic events also produce what are called Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB), with a significant amount of X-rays to boot. When these rays interact with a living thing, the strands of DNA inside each cell absorb the energy. This can create new bonds along the strands of and render the information stored on them unreadable. A supernova explosion that is too close to us could strip the Earth of its ozone layer, ionize the nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere to produce toxic nitrous oxide, and would very well lead to a mass extinction. A ten second exposure to a GRB event could result in the loss of 25% of the ozone layer and leave most of life exposed to too much radiation to survive. The real alarming fact is that an event like this can be 30 light years away and still lead to the demise of our species. That is 176.34 trillion miles from our solar system.

This mechanism for extinction has been proposed as one of the possible explanations for the Fermi paradox, the juxtaposition of the mathematical likelihood of other intelligent civilizations existing in the Universe and the complete lack of evidence for their existence (for another time), and we have just gotten lucky so far.

I indicated that supernovae are responsible for the production of many of the elements heavier than iron but not all of them. Sidebar the astronomer Fred Hoyle who theorized the formation of heavy elements inside stellar factories, nucleosynthesis mentioned earlier, also coined the phrase “Big Bang”. He intended it as a pejorative because he was a fan of the steady state universe we know now not to exist. Just shows you can be incredibly brilliant and still resistant to the truth.

The physics of supernova explosions are astounding. The immense gravity overcoming electromagnetism to engage the strong nuclear force to form heavier nuclei. Whatever that even means… Yet the math indicates that gravity under these conditions is not immense enough to create the heaviest elements that we know to exist throughout the Universe. So how did they come to be? The answer had escaped physics and chemistry for decades. They found the solution in binary star systems. It is estimated that 5 to 10% of all stars are a part of a binary or multinary star system, meaning they are gravitationally bound. More often than not they involve stars that are much more massive than our Goldilocks Sun. Supernova explosions can result in several outcomes. Black holes, white dwarfs, and our next civilization killer neutron stars. The outcome of a supernova is dependent on the size of the star after it was first formed. If two stars in a binary system of the same size both go supernova and both result in a neutron star then you have two wonders of the Universe on an eventual collision course. From a stellar body many times the size of the Sun, all that remains is a stellar body with a radius of 7 miles. Famously, a spoonful of a neutron star weighs more than Mt Everest here on Earth. Hard to grasp, again, what that even actually means but hey they empirically exist.

When two neutron stars collide they produce Gamma Ray Bursts that contain as much energy as all the stars in the Milky Way (about 120-150 billion) produce in an Earth year. All in about two seconds. Let us pause for a moment and let that sink in… The name they came up with for these events is… Kilonovas. Their namesake could make for a cool band name, but far beyond that these events produced the heaviest elements flowing through my body and yours, integrated into your computer allowing us to communicate these ideas digitally.

A Kilonova event as far away as 50 light years can spell the end of life on Earth in the same way a supernova that is too close. It is a colossal irony that phenomena like supernovae, kilonovas, and perfectly timed asteroids are necessary for human existence but could also lead to it’s demise. Clearly, the Universe giveth and the Universe taketh away.

If luck is on our side, we might escape the fate of a Gamma Ray burst, a random asteroid, global pandemic or otherwise, but this cosmic threat to our existence is final concerning consciousness on planet Earth; the evolution of our sun from its stable form into a Red Giant. We have already covered so much about the inner workings of stars that you can just take my word for it that our Sun will grow ever larger in diameter to where its surface might expand past the orbit of Earth, or at least really close. The end result is that all complex life on Earth will be unable to continue after all the water on the surface will have been boiled off. The good news is that recently NASA confirmed that we will be getting an extra 1.5 billion years of liquid water on Earth than previously calculated. Regardless of this stay of execution, we know with 100% certitude that the incredible history of life on Earth will come to a close in the distant future. There is hope that the moons of Jupiter or Saturn could turn into quite nice places to reside after our Sun’s expansion should we make it off this rock, but after our Sun becomes a white dwarf, just go with it, it will be too cold for complex life to continue in our Solar system. Thanks Universe.

Finally, (and thanks for sticking with me) the most egregious case of Indian giving is found in the ultimate fate of the Universe. The Universe, having come into existence and led to all consciousness, has a very unromantic and uninspiring final chapter to be written. In the 1920’s, the famous astronomer Edwin Hubble made, at the time, a Universe shattering discovery: not all the little points of light in the sky were of distant stars, but some were of distant galaxies. Our Universe went from consisting only of the Milky Way, to upwards of 150 billion Milky Ways. (Having just learned this past week that there are actually 2 Trillion) After this startling realization, he began to track the direction and speed at which the galaxies are moving. This is made possible by something most are familiar with, the Doppler Effect. Waves, whether they be light or sound, get compressed when coming towards you and elongated moving away. Every child who plays with toy cars mimics this effect pushing them around his or her room. The same goes for galaxies. As light moves away from us, the more it shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. Using this simple technique, he discovered, as if the billions of other galaxies wasn’t enough, that all of those galaxies were moving away from our Milky Way (minus andromeda but for another day). The data also indicated that the further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is travelling. There are two major takeaways from this feat of human ingenuity: that the space between us and any given galaxy is expanding, and expansion is accelerating. The implications of this have sealed the fate of the Universe.

After many thousand words already, I will skip an explanation of Dark Matter and Energy, the Hubble constant, and everything pertinent to the ultimate in impending doom’s. The most important part is that over an unfathomable amount of time, stars will cease to be born (of which 95% have already been created) and all that will remain will be black holes in a completely dark expanse. Beyond that the black holes will slowly decay through Hawking Radiation (again for another time) leaving only detached particles flying about aimlessly in the void. The Universe will eventually reach maximum entropy and all the information kept intact by the organization of particles will be lost. Every thought, idea, person, place, and thing will cease to exist and there will be no memory of it having ever existed. I think at this time it is important to really dwell on that thought in your own mind for a second… It is really quite tragic that not even the memories will remain. It is the Universe’s final endorsement of a nihilistic way of thinking.

I hope you are feeling thoroughly exhausted with the subject of our imminent demise. I intended it to be that way. There are so many stupefying, incomprehensible, and sometimes horrific ways in which consciousness in the Universe will cease to be that it points to some sort of cosmic joke. Our biological computers turned on only to inevitably cease to function, and with that, whatever person was created by its operation. That brings me onto the last, more personal doom that I want to touch on, mine and yours.

There is no end to my life that I am not going to find incredibly inconvenient. Whether it be right now as I am typing this sentence from a brain aneurysm or old and decrepit surrounded by loved ones, I am going to be pissed. Being fully aware that having ceased to exist I will lack the ability to be angry about it, it does not mean that I can not let the embers burn until that day. I quite like existence and the fact that you have not blown your brains out or jumped off the nearest high-rise means that you like it enough to stick around as well. Take that and the fact that whatever it is we call existence will eventually end and all memory of it lost in the void leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Being of the opinion that consciousness arises from the brain and is a purely a physical phenomena I am left with no other determination.

If you are reading this and jumping up and down inside because you have concluded that there is some afterlife to be had or that the Universe does have meaning then please do tell, what is the point of this whole exercise then? Cosmic Energy? Being one with God? Love? Truth? Nirvana? Quantum consciousness? “We are the Universe experiencing itself”? ? Please… Zip. Pa. Dee. Doo. Daaaaaa. Any and all of the explanations concocted by humankind up to this point are completely unsatisfactory. For all of human history until this very day, many have peddled these as answers to the big questions but the fact is that they just fall so short of any satisfaction that the only answer left is that there is none. To me these answers are unworthy of the grandeur of existence. What the Universe is… is the Universe. Nothing else. It has no answers to why and before we know it will lack the beings to beg the question. So many out there have this impression that the Universe is this living, breathing entity with a heart of gold that just wants to see its creation succeed. From the astrologers, psychics, and new age peddlers, to those spouting canonical prophecy, they have all got it wrong. The Universe is out to destroy as many times as it creates. Unthinking, uncaring, destined to end up as nothing from whence it came.

Far from leaving us downtrodden, it is a truth to celebrate. Free from the shackles of some cosmic purpose, we are let loose to do as we please. For the uninitiated, the first impulse is to insist that this will lead to avarice, murder in the streets, and anarchy. The problem with thinking this way is that it ignores the simple fact that we all still live in a society. If you practice wanton selfishness and constantly infringe upon the rights of your fellow human beings, your time on this Earth will be short and unpleasant. The ultimate demise of us and any evidence of us having ever existed will not alter the basic self-interest of human beings.

Having caught existence at a time when we can answer so many of the questions that have been nagging at us for recorded history, I feel extremely lucky. Further, we are at the cusp of discovering so much more about our cosmic happenstance. Yet, when it comes to the question of why we are here, the answer is decidedly no reason at all. And that, my friends, should make life for us mere humans a whole lot easier to bear.