Everything in the Universe Will Die One Day w/Brian Greene | Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan's experience that the fear of death and the attitude of finite life are insignificant and similar, what is the point of this type of existential angst that many of us struggle with? What makes us unique is that we know that we are going to die, yes, yes, that for me is the vital distinctive feature of our species. You know, we can reflect on the past, we can think about the future and recognize who we are. It is not going to be here in the future for some period of time and it is an idea and its powerful motivating influences that have been explored over the centuries.

Auto Ronk, one of Freud's early disciples who eventually broke with Freud, developed this. thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the factors that drive what we do and then when I was, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Death Denial. Have you ever heard of this book? It was very important in the '70s and in fact it won the Pulitzer Prize in the '70s and it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why humans do what we do and in many ways in my own book, which it's actually coming out today, until the end of time, it's um, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in the denial of death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting because it's not just us who are going to die, but every structure in the

universe

is going to disintegrate over time our best theory suggests that even protons, the very heart of matter, there are quantum processes that in the distant future

will

ensure that each proton decays, disintegrates into its constituent particles and at that point there is no It is a complex matter what the timeline would be.

Are we talking about a pretty long timeline right? In fact, I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you an idea of ​​the time involved. I like to use the Empire State Building and Imagine that each floor of the Empire State Building represents worship ten times more than the floor before it, so the ground floor is like a year, the first floor, ten, the second floor, 100 and so on. successively, so that you advance exponentially in time as you go up. to the Empire State Building and in that scheme of things, from the Big Bang to today, you're on about the tenth floor, ten to ten billion years and as you go, you look at things very far into the future and To answer to your question, we think and I emphasize think because we are now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas, the protons

will

decay at about and let's say on the 38th floor, 10 to 38 years in the future so we can relax a little.

You can relax a little, but here's the surprising thing, obviously, it sounds trite, but the timing is relatively correct, so any duration that seems long is only long in comparison to another duration and, say, the scale of the entire Empire building. State. to say ten to one hundred years in the future, which is what would represent the peak, from 10 to 38 years is like less than the blink of an eye. I mean, it's nothing on those scales, so you have to be careful if it's your intuition whether you're willing to consider the kind of incredibly long time scales that you necessarily need if you're going to think very far into the future?

Is there speculation about what will happen when protons cease to exist? Yes, we anticipate. that every complex structure will fall apart, so if there are any stars left, we think that by the 14th floor most stars will have exhausted their nuclear fuel, there will be dark embers like, you know, smoke in the cosmos, but if they are still hanging around By the 38th floor, they will all simply dissipate into their particular ingredients, so it is difficult to imagine beyond the 38th floor there will surely be life for any mind or complex astronomical structures in the

universe

, so the window within which the universe such how it exists us is a little bit small when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline, so it's impossible to understand its actual duration because it's so long but at the same time as small as yes in the human mind, yes.

It is very difficult to take these durations into account, yes. I mean, no. I don't feel like I've been thinking about these things for a long time. I don't feel like I have an intuition about the durations we're talking about. In fact, about the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps me give a relative idea of ​​when things of interest will happen in the universe, but you know we're good at understanding the days, weeks, months, and years of conventional experience. I have no basis for understanding the universe on these scales that we've never experienced, you know, and that's true not only for time but for space as well.

I mean, we have very good intuition about everyday phenomena. I mean, if I have to take this bottle of water, I throw it at you, you would catch it, you know where to put your hand, you didn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to know where the water goes, but if I had to do the same with the electrons, you would not do that. I also do not have a quantum intuition about the wave functions and probabilities that govern how a particle like an electron behaves and that is simply because unfortunately or fortunately we were born as large creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics and because of that our Intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave.

In fact, I like to say that those of our ancestors who roamed the African savanna and who started thinking about electrons in quantum mechanics ate them, are the ones whose genes didn't. propagate forward and therefore those of us who are the beneficiaries of our ancestors' survival were good at understanding Newtonian physics, but we are not good at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the world. Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever that may be? Next, human beings will be able to understand these concepts because if you stop and think about what a human being is, we've really only been like that for X hundred thousand years, that's right and that's a good question and it's a difficult one.

I would like to imagine that as we get better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality or any augmented reality, whatever version of that type of technology takes on in the far future, we will be able to experience these different realms in such a powerful way. that our innate intuition can begin to change so that we can understand the quantum realm in the same way we understand Newtonian physics. I can at least imagine that as a possibility, what it would take to get there and whether our species will ever last long enough to have it. that kind of impact on our intuition, I don't know, but it's about experience and survival.

We have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the world. We have been programmed by evolution to survive and those are two radically different ones. propositions because it is not necessary to know the true nature of reality to survive, it is a distinct attribute and not necessarily one that has any survival value to understanding black holes or the Big Bang or general relativity or quantum mechanics or entropy or thermodynamics. These qualities that we develop as we move forward and try to understand the world go beyond mere survival and discover things that excite us, but it is not something that obviously has any survival value; one day it may be MA.