“In a 2005 paper published in Nature, as part of their investigation into global catastrophic risks, MIT physicist Max Tegmark and Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom calculate the natural risks of the destruction of the Earth at less than 1/109 per year from all natural (i.e. non-anthropogenic) events, including a transition to a lower vacuum state. They argue that due to observer selection effects, we might underestimate the chances of being destroyed by vacuum decay because any information about this event would reach us only at the instant when we too were destroyed.”
Wouldn’t vacuum decay become permanently localized because it only travels at the speed of light?
The expansion of the universe happens everywhere all at once. So, once objects become far enough apart, the space between two objects can grow faster than the speed of light.
So, what’s to happen if a vacuum decay begins so far away that—even at the speed of light—it’ll never catch up to us?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
Good read
“In a 2005 paper published in Nature, as part of their investigation into global catastrophic risks, MIT physicist Max Tegmark and Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom calculate the natural risks of the destruction of the Earth at less than 1/109 per year from all natural (i.e. non-anthropogenic) events, including a transition to a lower vacuum state. They argue that due to observer selection effects, we might underestimate the chances of being destroyed by vacuum decay because any information about this event would reach us only at the instant when we too were destroyed.”
Wouldn’t vacuum decay become permanently localized because it only travels at the speed of light?
The expansion of the universe happens everywhere all at once. So, once objects become far enough apart, the space between two objects can grow faster than the speed of light.
So, what’s to happen if a vacuum decay begins so far away that—even at the speed of light—it’ll never catch up to us?