Have you went down any internet rabbit holes only to come out with a deep set existential crisis? If so, what are they?
The universe. The Big bang, time, quantum mechanics. Is our universe infinite? Is it the only universe? Did the Big bang start ours and will it end with a big crunch and will that collapse just cause a big bang that repeats and if so what iteration of that cycle do you suppose we are in? And does each universe behave the same, similar laws and physics and such? Stars, planets, etc?
Deconstructing from religion. It was a lot. I'm better now, but being stuck in it all was overwhelming and was like being in an existential crisis every day until it ended. I just went along with it and kept it all inside for decades and it wasn't fun.
Consciousness and our sense of self. Is consciousness an illusion? What even is "me"? It includes all the gut bacteria and mitochondria with different DNA than us and our brains are these amazing pattern recognition machines that also have abysmal memory storage and recall, but can notice the tiniest of nuance sometimes, but also can't remember where we put the thing we were just holding 2 minutes ago. And all the while our brain is confidently telling us "I am me" and is processing all the inputs like sights and sounds and interpreting all that into what we think we see and what we think we heard. But did we? How would we know if upon seeing the color red our brain interprets that as blue and we confidently declare we see red.
In the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, there was mention of a Shawken Device which, if operable, could destroy the universe.
This has led me to conclude that the universe probably isn't infinite.
In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time. This would necessarily mean that someone invented a device/mechanism/reaction that could destroy the universe, and successfully activated it, thus ending the universe.
There are only two possible conclusions that I can draw from this thought experiment, which are not mutually exclusive:
- The universe is not infinite, and/or
- It is not possible to destroy the universe.
Relativity proved that time isn't a constant thing where all things occur at "the present". You can have situations where person 1 sees an event happen as A B and person 2 sees that same event happen as B A.
That means time isn't some absolute framework that reality exists in, but something more like a property of matter or space or something.
Also the speed of light seems to be applicable here. Or more accurately, the speed at which events propagate through space. If you pushed a button to end the universe wouldn't that event only go at light speed out in all directions? So maybe the button has been pushed (maybe an infinite number of times too) and all the shockwaves just haven't gotten here yet.
In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time
Misunderstanding of infinity.
E.g.: 1.101100111000... is an infinitely long number, yet it will never be bigger than 1.2 nor smaller than 1.1, it does not contain all digits, nor does it contain all possible combinations of 0s and 1s.
The Dark Forest Hypothesis. A very compelling answer to the Fermi paradox: If the universe is this vast and life surely must have developed over and over all around us, how come we never found anyone?
If two civilizations ever met, chances are incredibly slim that they were comparably or even similarly developed at this exact moment in time. Think about a modern army traveling back in time 400 years and fighting a group of swordmen with horses; the medieval people would be so overwhelmed it would barely classify as a fight, and that's just with a few hundred years of difference in technological progress. The random difference between species from different planets and systems would be far, far greater. So if two of them would meet, one of them would very likely be to the other as a god to an ant.
The universe might be brimming with life, but everyone who gets this far must be aware that half of them could wipe you out like ants, the other half could be as indomitable as a god. Cue the dark forest metaphor: There's prey and there's predators. We don't know which one we are in each instance, or how many of each are out there. But how could a first contact protocoll look like in such a competetive (and very likely deadly unfair) environment?
In the dark forest only two types of species can survive: Those that attack. And those who hide.
I just think:
how many living species have been on earth? Millions probably
How many of those species are intelligent? 1
How long have this intelligent species been around? Nothing at a cosmic timescale.
How many of this intelligent species have become "interstellar"? 0
I don't think those numbers can be extrapolate, even to the observable universe, to ensure that there are any species capable of interestellar travel around. Living species and even intelligent ones? Maybe. But a long lasting inteligent and interestellar species? We are not an example of that, so we have 0 examples to extrapolate. Only our wishful thinking that humanity will last longer and keep progressing, but that is just a hope, not real yet.
Well there is plenty of intelligent species on the planets, but having the correct evolutionary features of being intelligent and having the capacity to manipulate the environment to an extreme degree is the rare combo. Kinda nit picky but I think its an important one
I never understood why Fermi should be a paradox.
Space is mind-bogglingly big. Insanely huge. And almost everything is empty. Primitive life (bacteria, fungus,...) might evolve on every other planet, but even mammal like life is probably not that common. Maybe 1 in 10k solar systems has them?
And now my sad hypothesis: FTL drives are simply not possible.
Also, did I mention space is huge? Sending radio signals to a planet 10k ly away is very non trivial. Unless they point a huge dish exactly at us and we point a huce dish exactly to them, we won't hear each other.
The idea that extraterrestials will watch our TV in 100k years is absurd. (Sorry Lrrrr)
Well obviously our reality isn't actually paradoxical. We call it that way because it seems like our estimates and conclusions don't fit our observed reality:
Based on mathematical estimations (e.g. the Drake equation) it's pretty unlikely that we're the only intelligent species in our galaxy. So where is everyone?
Every answer to that question tries to resolve the seeming paradox. And your answer specifically isn't unheard of either, it's called the economic explanation. Throwing satellites out is obviously possible, we've done it and Voyager 1 will reach another solar system in roughly 30,000 years. So it's technically possible, just very uneconomic.
Roko's Basilisk / Pascal's Wager scared me for a little while. Then I realized it was stupid.
Also you can invert Pascal's Wager and argue that god could not want to be worshipped, and worshipping a god result in punishment due to celebrating ignorance and blind faith.
Tri-omni God problem. The God that we are told is worthy of worship is
- Omniscient, and
- Omnipresent, and
- Omni-benevolent.
The presence of evil in the world demonstrates that no more than two out of those 3 can possibly be true at the same time. Thus if God does exist, he's not all that and a bag of gummy bears.
The "solutions" to this are called theodicy and are definitely a fascinating rabbit hole. They're all unsatisfying, but philosophically interesting
Omnipotent, not just omnipresent (which would be entailed by the combination of omnipotence and omniscience).
Otherwise the problem has a very obvious and unsatisfactory solution (god has no power to make a difference).
Just the big ones, most days. What is consciousness, why are we here, what's the point, how does one reconcile the importance of love with an uncaring nightmare universe where almost everything must kill to survive, etc
I'm sure my very existence has left behind such a rabbit hole. I've always been left in constant self-reflection because people for some still-mysterious reason genuinely lay on me bigger burdens and less benefits that they lay on other people or that which fit in with their way of doing things outside of interactions with me. In all spheres of life, aside from a sense of reflection, all interactions are set up in such a way as to be able to be cited later, with or without hopes to shatter this barrier, and in return there's just demoralization. If anyone were to remember a certain idea I had that is complained about for poor manifestation each time, people were harassing me everywhere for weeks about "communication" even though even AI said I was fine, this being the kind of thing some of us will attest affects outlook. And if you were to investigate context for everything I mentioned experiencing, with a lot of it leading to it, I would bet any mind flexible enough to understand would melt under the sheer chaos.
