# So why haven't aliens destroyed the Universe yet? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 9, 2014, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001 "2014-09-09T19:28:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/41 "2014-09-10T15:31:59Z")
When you think about all the incredibly nasty stuff the universe is capable of, aren’t you grateful that it is so damn large and that the speed of light is so damn slow? ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/42 "2014-09-10T16:18:31Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > When you think about all the incredibly nasty stuff the universe is capable of, aren’t you grateful that it is so damn large and that the speed of light is so damn slow? You need to stop watching reality TV. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/43 "2014-09-10T16:27:33Z")
Since the universe was created last Thursday I don’t think there’s been enough time yet. ---
**Author:** ![Revtim](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/revtim/32/1042_2.png) [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/44 "2014-09-10T16:52:00Z")
There’s so many ways for the universe to kill us, and the ones that kill the whole universe are just a drop in the bucket. No sense worrying about it, it’s vastly more likely we’ll all die in stupid common Earth ways, like falling into a sewer and drowning in shit. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/45 "2014-09-10T18:06:12Z")
Well…the real answer is because: They (or us) haven’t. As Czarcasm says or infers above, perhaps the universe can only last as long as it takes for one species to advance enough to discover some means of changing some universal constant and then the whole thing collapses until another big bang. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/46 "2014-09-10T18:28:00Z")
The anthropic principle prevents us from living in a universe that has been destroyed. Even the weak version. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/47 "2014-09-10T20:52:33Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > It’s got nothing to do with inflation, it’s a feature of bog-standard big bang cosmology: if the universe expands at a constant rate, then whatever’s two times as far away from us recedes two times as quickly, and at some point, that’ll simply increase beyond the speed of light. It’s often said that this is allowed because it’s ‘space itself’ moving that fast, not the stuff in space, but really, it’s more accurate to say that velocity in general relativity is a local notion, so the bound of c simply doesn’t apply in this case. > > There are, in fact, galaxies that we can observe which are travelling away from us at a speed faster than c (which we can observe because their light was emitted way in the past). See the discussion in the [‘faster than light’-article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Universal_expansion) on wikipedia. Ah! Got it. I was thinking of the runaway inflation model – which is pretty, to be sure, but apparently still only speculative. I hadn’t known that the observed universe was large enough that the most distant objects would be moving away at such very high speeds that the total added up to more than c. Somehow, I had thought that the highest Hubble velocities were only around .1 c. Cool to learn otherwise. Thank you! ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/48 "2014-09-10T23:06:33Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > You need to stop watching reality TV. > > Regards, > Shodan Thats a bizarre thing to say to a reasonable post. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2014, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/49 "2014-09-10T23:22:18Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > What Hawking’s talking about is a vacuum metastability event, . . . Is that anything like a Charged Vacuum Emboitment? ---
**Author:** ![Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blue_blistering_barnacle/32/3386_2.png) [@Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blue_Blistering_Barnacle)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/50 "2014-09-11T19:23:15Z")
In an article I saw a comment about (maybe) needing an Earth-sized particle collider to (maybe) cause this catastrophe. Sounds energetic. What lower limits do common physical and astrophysical events place on the energy required? A-bomb? H-bomb? Solar core? Blue giant core? Supernova? Neutron star? Black hole? Quasar (great big greedy black hole)? Neutron star merger? Black hole merger? Quantum black hole evaporation? Celebrity wedding? Maybe my guesstimator is malfunctioning, but I have trouble imagining that a collider the size of this puny earth might be anything but small potatoes compared with all the stuff happening in and around exploding/imploding stars and their remnants. That suggests to me that we are not in this situation. The notion of a universe with multiple bubbles of vaccum metastability (Der Trihs) 'slowly" eting it away has its own poetic pathos. (Very emo.) ---
**Author:** ![mandala](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mandala/32/95_2.png) [@mandala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mandala)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2014, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/51 "2014-09-11T19:55:33Z")
There are quasars that radiate quadrillions of solar luminosities, where gas is heated to bazillions of degrees, and subatomic particles accelerated to energies commonly encountered in the macro-scale, such as the OMG proton that had the energy of a baseball. If phenomenon of such energies exist and the universe chugs along without much ado, it is unlikely we humans can do anything to hurt it. Unless we can invent something that can achieve close to Planck-scale energies, the universe should be pretty much safe from our machinations. The Earth, not so much, maybe. ---
**Author:** ![Rusalka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecd19e/32.png) [@Rusalka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rusalka)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001/52 "2014-09-14T05:13:22Z")
> [@mandala](#): > > There are quasars that radiate quadrillions of solar luminosities, where gas is heated to bazillions of degrees, and subatomic particles accelerated to energies commonly encountered in the macro-scale, such as the OMG proton that had the energy of a baseball. > > If phenomenon of such energies exist and the universe chugs along without much ado, it is unlikely we humans can do anything to hurt it. Unless we can invent something that can achieve close to Planck-scale energies, the universe should be pretty much safe from our machinations. The Earth, not so much, maybe. This is what I always thought, but it seems so simple and logical, why wouldn’t a scientist like Hawking come to the same conclusion? Is there something very unique and artificial about a particle accelerator, that creates conditions that can’t have happened naturally, somewhere, sometime before? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-havent-aliens-destroyed-the-universe-yet/698001.md?page=2)