4 ways physics could end the world

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, do you enjoy watching disaster movies? You mean, do I like watching billions of people parish on screen? Now you're making me feel bad about enjoying Titanic, But I guess I mean, do you like the physics of those disaster movies? So? Do you feel like it's always implausible or impossible? Well? I feel like the solution in those movies is always either nuke it or send Bruce Willis. What's wrong with sending Bruce Willis? Is that physically impossible? He's basically the human nuke. What about a cosmic space bananas? Suddenly Korean stots Earth and crashes into our planet. Well, I think then we have to send Bruce Willis with a nuke to blow that thing up to make a cosmics smoothie. Well, okay, So if you were in Hollywood and you were pitching physics space disaster movie, what would you pitch? Oh? Man, we have so many good ways to end the world with physics. That doesn't make me feel good. Hi am horror had made cartoonists and the creator of PhD commist. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think about how the world might end. He's an optimist, folks, I'm a planner. Is there such a thing as an optimist physicist or are they all pretty pretty down at the end of the university. No, we're all optimistic because, you know, we're relying on society to fund our abstract thinking about the nature of reality, the universe and stuff. So you gotta believe in a sort of educated, optimistic, forward thinking society for physics to even be a thing. Always believe in other people's money. Yes, you're optimistic. Model. If the world ends or society crumbles, there's not going to be a lot of openings for physics fessors in the end days. All right, Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, in which we talk about all the amazing and crazy and silly and bonkers things space cheetos and giants, space bananas and talk about it in a way that we hope you understand and enjoy. And Bruce Willis, let's not forget Bruce Willis. He's in the category of giantspace bananas, right, He's a kind of banana. Yeah, we talked about all the amazing things we know and all the amazing things we don't know about the universe, including some of the things we covered in our book We Have No Idea A Guide to the Unknown Universe, Yeah, in which we talk about all the crazy open questions of the universe, basic stuff that we should know about our cosmic neighborhood and our place in the universe, but physics still hasn't figured out. Yeah. It's a book that, too, I think, up until recently, has not been translated to over twenty languages. So those of you out there listening across the world, I'm sure there is a book version of this book in your languae. Have you read it in any of the other languages. I've read them on in all the different languages. I don't understanding of it, but I think I had a pretty good idea of what we wrote. I just wonder how all of our bad puns were translated, like to Korean. Seems to me like an impossible tath does yeah does graphical puns? I think that's what you mean. No, it's a fun book, and it talks about all the things that we don't know about the universe and the ways we might figure them out. One thing we didn't talk about in the book, though, is how humanity might end. That's what we talked a bit about, how the universe might end. But there's a lot that can happen before the universe ends. You're thinking they're not the same thing. You don't think humans are gonna make it all the way. I'm thinking that when we end, the universe ends for us, because we're going to cause the end of the universe, nothing else matters. That's right. I wouldn't put it past physicists to sort of converge to those two things. I knew you were going to paint it on physicists. You know, if somebody's going to cause the end of the universe, I'm gonna blame politicians, not physicists, really not physicists. It's not going to be a physicist pressing that big red button you know that launches the death device, the doomsday device that creates the cosmic instability that you know, ruins the structure of space, time or whatever. Yeah, you're right, I'll give you that. It's probably going to be the physicist grad student prescent accidentally putting their coffee down on the button. Oops, what was that? But yeah, today's podcast, we'll be getting into a topic that a little bit dark about the outlook for humanity. Yeah, we pay attention to our listeners and we read everything you guys write to us on email and on Twitter. So if you have a question about the universe or how humanity might end, or something you heard about you didn't understand, please send it to us. But this episode is in response to a very specific question that came in from listeners about different ways that physics might kill you, and not just from boredom, right, not just from just kidding. No, physics is very exciting, and Jason had a very interest think question here because he envisions four ways in which physics could possibly end the world as we know it and possibly the universe. Do you think or just just the Earth? I think probably just the Earth or just humanity. I think in all these four scenarios, the universe will truck on even if humanity is extinguished. And what do you think Jason is thinking here? Do you think he's worried about these things happening? Do you think he is trying to cause these things to happen? Perhaps hopefully not. Yeah, this is a similar quanity. Um, I'm not sure if in answering his question, we are enabling a super villain who's making plans to sort of ring humanity, or maybe somebody who's like planning to protect humanity against the coming of potential supervillains. This classic question in philosophy. You know, by creating technology and spreading knowledge, are you enabling war or preventing it? Do you think Jason might be the Bruce Willis of Twitter or he might be the lex Luthor right, one of those two. Either way, we're gonna answer your question, Jason and Hope for the best and so to be. On the podcast, we'll be asking the question, what are four ways which physics could end the world? And we've got more than four ways, we only have time, right, we're under we're only explaining four of them today. That's right. This is the top four of a very very long list of ways to kill everybody on Earth using physics. These are the top just because these are the ones Jason picked. Or do you do you think Jason nailed the four most concerning ways that physics could end the world. Oh, I think it's like a thousand way tie for first place. But these are the four of the Jason thought about. I guess I guess if it ends the world, it's they're all equally bad, right, right, We're equally good for somebody, not us. No, but these are four very creative ways to potentially kill off humanity, and they probe sort of an understanding of the nature of matter and gravity and electron on and all that stuff. So I thought it would be a lot of fun to go through them and really think about the physics of what would happen in each scenario. So this is what Jason wrote in his tweet. He wrote, rate these events from most catastrophic to least. Number one, gravity turns off for three seconds and then back on. Number two, the Earth suddenly starts spinning backwards. Number three, every electron within one light year of Earth suddenly disappears. Number four the Sun shuts down for two weeks, and then he later clarified that it's still there, but it's just sort of turned off and went dark. It winks for two weeks. That's a long week, man, it's very specific to two weeks. It's like, you know, not you know, three weeks, not you know, sixteen days. He's like, it sounds like he's planning for this. Yeah, he's making some specific plans. These are not just arbitrary numbers, you know. I think he's really tuned. These catastrophic events makes me wonder about how much planning he's done. Well. I think it's pretty cool that one of our listeners sort of sat around, you know, and thought of all these all the things that could happen in the universe, and wondered what how these things were possible and how they would affect us. Yeah, and I think a lot of these have sort of physics implications that you might not think of when you first hear it. There's an initial idea and then there's some subtlety to each one. So they're awesome not just because they might cause the death of billions of people, but they might along the way teach those billions of people something about physics. They all sound pretty I'm not sure how to say this, were you gonna say plausible? That sounds uh, It sort of sounds like the plot of a of a spy movie or a disaster movie, you know. Yeah, a lot of these movies start off with some catastrophic event or some dramatic event that makes you wonder like, oh, how did that happen? Or how did the aliens get control of gravity, or you know, who's who's deleting all these electrons from the universe or something. But most of these movies end up unsatisfying, and they're like, Oh, it's the infinitely folding proton, they can do anything or something. Oh I see or dark matter. Always go with dark matter or quantum realm. That's matter. Oh man, don't get me started on the science fiction novels that lean on dark matter. You go to a dark place, do I recently read Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, and it basically has nothing to do with dark matter. You think he just meant like matters that are dark. I don't know what he meant. It's really more about the quantum multiverse. It's like the many worlds theory. So dark matter. I think it was just like random clickbait physics title. Maybe we should. This is not fair though, for me to criticize him. Blake Crouch, if you're a listener, please come on the podcast and argue with me about the science in your novel. Invitation extended today, we'll uh it's going to be a little bit of a different episodes, so we're going to tackle each of these possible scenarios that Jason came up with, and we're going to ask people on the street what they think of it, and we're going to try to explain what would happen if these things actually happened. That's right. So I had the hilarious and enjoyable task and walking around campus that use the irvine and asking people what they thought would happen in these catastrophic scenarios. And the people look at you with a fear in their eyes, or were they amuse they run away. They didn't look at me the way we sort of mentally looked at Jason for posing these questions. They weren't worried that I was planning to enact any of these scenarios. Um. I think they enjoyed thinking about them. Yeah. All right, well let's tackle these one at a time. And so we'll start with Jason's number one on the Liz, which is what would happen if gravity turns off for three seconds and then it turns back on. Here's what people had to say, what do you think would happen if a gravity just shut off for like three seconds? People, I think would be flying up the buildings. I think like if their foundations are strong enough, they would stay here on the Earth. But the people would like fly up for a little bit and then when the gravity is back on, they'll fall down. If there's no gravities, that means the Earth cannot held us everyone. Maybe we'll just fly to the sky and three seconds and after Suicidon gras back, we will just about what do you think it's pretty realistic with people envision. Yeah. Mostly I think people think about the immediate thing that they are being held to the Earth, and then that would stop if gravity was turned off, And then they're worried about, you know, like how high up are you going to get? And how catastrophic would it be a gravity turned back on. Well, this is an interesting scenario, I guess. I guess we all sort of wonder what would happen if gravity didn't exist. But I think he's he's asking what would happen if it's suddenly turned off, Like one second we have gravity and the next millisecond we don't have gravity. Yeah, because we wouldn't even be here without gravity, right. Gravity is the reason why we have the Earth. It's the reason why we have any sort of structure anything going on. Without gravity, stuff would still be floating out their dilute in space. So you need gravity to make the Earth and people and the Sun and all that stuff. And this question is about what happened if somebody like bumped against the gravity light switch accidentally in the Universe control room. That's right, God, she she accidentally, you know, leaned against the wall, hit the switch. Yeah, you put her coffee down on the wrong spot or something. Right. A lot of people said that you would fly up right, and you know, gravity is holding us down. That's certainly true. But if gravity disappeared, you wouldn't immediately fly up. Oh interesting, Well, I guess my first question before we get into the effects, is this even possible? Could gravity just tron off for three seconds and then back on? Not that I'm aware of. I mean, we have no way to manipulate gravity or understand the structure of spacetime. We don't even really know what gravity is, you know, Is it just like the way that space is bent by having mass and energy around? Is it a force like the other ones? Um? But of course we don't have an understanding of the quantum nature of it, so we don't really understand what gravity is and how it works. So we definitely don't know how to turn it on and off. We even talked on a podcast about like anti gravity devices. Yeah, I guess. I mean, do you know of any situation in physics in the universe in which gravity doesn't work? You know, like we talked once about like anti gravity particles. Maybe could we somehow some suddenly be washed over by anti gravity particles or you know, is it even possible for gravity to suddenly not work? I don't think you could turn off gravity. The thing you might be able to do is counteracted. Like if you ranked up dark energy. Right here at the Earth, dark energy is basically doing the opposite of gravity, right It's stretching space and moving things further apart. So if you somehow we're able to manipulate dark energy in a way to like expand space to change its curvature locally, then you could effectively have the opposite effective gravity, canceling it out, so you might be able to balance. I mean, this is really a stretch. We don't even know what dark energy is. But if I had to go somewhere, I would instead of turning off gravity, I would try to balance it with dark energy. But that's maybe with a maybe with a maybe on top of it. So, if I was writing the Tom Hanks down Brown novel, I would have the evil Zelad create a dark energy bomb a dark gable. Yeah, that's somehow I'm just I'm just bit balling here. Uh and and there's not a suggestion for anyone out there. Um, but in the movie, you might create a bomb that suddenly, uh you know, gives off a lot of dark energy which cancels gravity for three seconds. Here, and what do you think would have the most sort of first weekend ticket sales? A dark energy bomb or a dark energy laser or dark energy gun. As long as it's called dark energy, I think the name will totally just sell it. Then the title of Blake Crouch's next novel that has nothing to do with dark energy. All right, Well, it sounds like, you know there, it's not impossible. There there's you know that you could envision a movie using this plot device, and like now you call it not impossible, which makes it sort of we sort of suggest that maybe it's possible, but like in the same way, like it's not impossible that we could be the number one podcast in the world. Wait, we're not. It could happen we need the dark podcast bomb to go off for that to happen. It's right, and boost boost our ratings. At least in my universe, we're number one, Daniel, We're the number one podcast that I listened to. All right, so let's get into what would happen if you actually turned off gravity for three seconds and then turn it back on. First, let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, walk us through this scenario. So paint us the picture if I turned off gravity for three seconds, what would happen? Well, the first thing would happen is that you would fly off the Earth, but not straight up. Well, I can't fly down. Um, I'm guessing you mean like I would fly in the direction that i'm the Earth is rotating. Yeah, you can think of yourself as sort of orbiting the Earth just above the surface. Think about what would happen to the moon if gravity turned off? The Moon would not fly straight away from the Earth. It would keep going the direction it's going. It would shoot off in a line tangent to the circle it's moving in, right, because what gravity is doing is it sort of bending it in a circle. So gravity disappears, the Moon shoots off sort of sideways. So if you're like a little moon of the Earth, everybody is their own little tiny moon. Then what happens is that you shoot off sort of at an angle to the surface. Oh, I see, like it's tangent to the circle to right. Yeah, precisely, it's tangent. Just keep going. It would no longer be reined into an orbital circle. I would just it's like you cut the string that is tying it to the Earth. Yeah, and remember, when gravity turns off, there's nothing like pushing you away from the Earth. It's not like you're getting forced away. I've seen a lot of science fiction movies, you know that when gravity, when you get into space or whatever, things sort of automatically float away from you. They don't necessarily unless you give them a push. But in this case, you're already moving away from the Earth, and it's gravity that keeps you on the Earth. So when you turn that off and you sort of keep going in the direction you were going, so everybody would float up. Yeah you wouldn't. I guess you wouldn't float technically away from the Earth. But to us here on Earth where I'm standing, it would seem like I'm floating up because the Earth is rotating under you, right, Yeah, Like the house will keep moving around the Earth, but I am sort of now going tangent to the Earth, but it's also moving with me. So it will seem like I'm floating up. Yeah, it will. But eventually, if it's for long enough, then the Earth will curve away from you, and you no longer be directly above your house or your garden or wherever you stood. Like if you painted an X under you and then gravity turned off, the X would seem to be under you for a little while, but then it would no longer be right under you because the curve of the Earth. So would this happened suddenly or slowly? You know, like let's say, boom, I turned off gravity. Am I now like falling up? Or am I? You know, be like, wait, what what's going on? Would it be slow or fast? It wouldn't be too fast. You'd be floating up because the curverage of the Earth is pretty small and so you're mostly already going in the right direction. Oh I see. It wouldn't be like I was falling up. It would be more like detaching from the Earth. Yeah, and the Earth would continue to curve sort of away under you, and you keep going in the same direction, and so the distance would increase a sort of a nonlinear rate. But the very first few seconds you wouldn't get that high. How high would you actually get if if gravity turned off for three seconds and I started floating up, how high do you think I would would I get? It's a great question. I actually had to sit down and do this calculation because I wasn't sure. And the way to think about it is that the Earth is sort of rotating out from under you. Remember you're still moving in the straight line, and the Earth is rotating out from under you. I'm now heading straight to the Moon or something. Yeah, you're being shot out into space. It's a massive slingshot, you know, or like to think about the Earth is a big merry go round and you suddenly let go and then getting flung out into space. But the Earth is really big and really round, and the curvature, as you know, is not that easy to spot. So the only reason you're leaving the surface of the Earth is because of that curvature. And so in three seconds you would actually only float up about fourteen centimeters. So if Garty turned off for three seconds, I would me, elephants, girafbs, cars out there would float for about fourteen centimeters and then come back down. Yeah, so it's like you take a little hop, right. It's big enough for you to notice, but not big enough to really be dangerous. But I would feel it, right like, probably a lot of a lot of people would throw up that feeling of free fall for three seconds if you suddenly floated a foot into the air. Yes, I'm pretty sure you would notice that. And if it continued, you know, if like the person who turned off gravity was sort of like fumbling for the switch and it took longer, then he gets more dramatic pretty quickly. After thirty seconds, you'd be like fourteen meters above the ground. Oh that's not good. That's not that one. You don't recover from easily. No, unless you're wearing a lot of protective gear. All right, So, and so I would fly. That doesn't sound too bad. It sounds at least before the world ends. I want to get to fulfill my dream of flying and floating in space. Um, and so what else would happen besides me floating? Well, he talked about gravity turning off, and he didn't limit it to Earth's gravity. He was just like gravity period in the universe, whole universe, universe. And most importantly, that means that like all the Earth's gravity is gone and the Sun's gravity is gone, and that has some consequences, like if we would shoot off into space, Yeah, just like we would float off of the Earth's orbit, the Earth would fall out of its orbit and keep going for three seconds out of its orbit. Oh, and then when it turns back on, we would be in a totally different orbit. Yeah, and we might have the wrong trajectory. We might not any longer be in a stable orbit, and so we might sort of get kicked out of the Solar System. That doesn't sound good. It does not sound good. There's lots of ways to move around the Sun, and only a few of them are a stable orbit. And so if you just sort of all of a sudden drift out to a larger radius, but you haven't picked up any speed, then you're not in a stable orbit anymore. With the Earth crack or anything like that, like with our atmosphere suddenly proof away, what are some of the things physically that would happen to our planet. Yeah, the atmosphere also is held to the Earth by gravity, and so the atmosphere would float away from the Earth the same way because it's spinning. Just dissipate. Yeah, it would just dissipate out into space um. But you know three seconds is not that long, so you wouldn't lose a whole lot of atmosphere. Oh, I see three seconds? Okay, got it. Got It would dissipate a little, but then it might come back. Now, but by then we will will be in a different orbit, will be in the wrong orbit, and then the Earth, you know, it will get sucked back by the Earth Sun's gravity when it turns back on. But it might then get sucked into something that's not a stable orbit. It could like whizz around closer to the Sun and then get thrown into interstellar space. But that's not even the worst part. Okay, what's the worst? What's the worst that could happen? The biggest deal, the cataclysmic end to your Michael Bay movie is that. Remember that gravity plays a really important role in holding the Sun together. It's the only reason it's a ball of fire, right otherwise, I mean it's a constant explosion being held by gravity. Yes, it's being pinned down by gravity. And so if you turn gravity off, then it like unleashes the Sun's fury for three seconds, and the Sun would basically explode. I mean, it's a huge meal in your bomb being held together by gravity. In three seconds, that would be enough to to explode the Sun. It would definitely explode. What would happen when you turned it back on, I don't know, like could he gather it back together. It would definitely change the dynamics of the Sun, And so it might be a very different star when you turn it back on. It might be burning at a different temperature, or have a different radius or a different opacity. You know. Oh, I see, it's like the stable little um cycle. And you will be totally disrupting that. Yeah, you like kick the fire, you know, and then you gotta try to get it going again, and it might, you know, sputter out or flame up, or do something totally crazy. So for three seconds, we would see the Sun suddenly get bigger for three seconds, and then gravity turns back on, and then it something else will happen. Something else will happen, and it's not easy to figure out what you know, we don't understand the way a lot of these stars work anyway, So you know, nobody has done this kind of simulation. To figure out, like in detail what would happen. You need to run a massive simulation of of the sort of hydrodynamics of inside the star, and nobody has done that calculation. It's not something you can sit down and do with a pencil and paper. And in those three seconds, is it possible where the sun grows, is possible that it will fry us? Or you know, like if it sort of explodes for three seconds, is that, you know, a shower of energy going to fry the planet? Probably not. Remember that the Sun is light minutes from the Earth, so really far away from the Sun, and so three seconds is a tiny fraction of that. And you know there might be like a pulse of energy which gets shot out. But then remember gravity turns back on and so any of that plasma is going to get slowed down and dragged back into the Sun. I bet you get like an enhanced solar wind. But we still have a magnetic field to protect us from that solar wind. All right, So I think that paints, uh are not a great picture, which is that you know, we might get kicked out of the solar system. We might ruin the sun um but here on Earth will will float for three seconds and then come back down. So a lot of cars maybe you know, might float and then crash back down. That wouldn't be too bad, But the worst is that we might get kicked out or the Sun would explode. The overall pretty bad. I rate this on the on the badness scale as pretty bad scenario pretty bad. Especially the range of your scale here does it go from pretty bad too utterly terrible, or from don't worry about it to keep listening because some of the scenarios get pretty nasty. All right, Let's get into the second one here. Jason writes what would happen if the Earth suddenly starts spinning backwards? So I walked around campus again and I asked people this insane question, what do you think it would be like on Earth if there if the Earth suddenly started rotating the other direction? I think everything would go insane, Like the probably seats would just in the way to go the opposite direction, and tsunamis would happen, and probably storms. I've never thought about it because I just haven't really come with I mean, you just hear how it goes and like, okay, what does what it does? But I've never thought what happens, Well, it does opposite so much say, alright, bad stuff, bad stuff. None of this was supposed to be sort of cozy scenarios. It's supposed to make anybody smile and cuttle up with a book and a cup of tea or anything. Uh do you think he means like if you you know, the Earth is spinning right now and we're all very comfortable, but suddenly the spinning in Earth, what do you think he means, Like it stops and then it starts spinning the other way. Yeah, it's a critical difference because if you could sort of snap your fingers and all of a sudden everything is going in the other direction, that's not actually that big a deal. I mean in that scenario, like, yeah, the sun is like everything, like the oceans. You mean, if we're you know, suddenly we're spinning moving the other way, not much would happen. Not much would happen. Yeah, and the sun would rise and set on the other side. Right. Um, But but a lot of things about the Earth are pretty symmetric. Would it change, like the magnetic poles? It certainly might It might flip the magnetic field, you know, because the magnetic field is generated by what's going on inside the Earth, the rotation of like that that hot magnetic liquid inside the Earth, And so if you're flipping that, then you're flipping the magnetic field. But that just makes north into south. Right, things still work. You still have a magnetic field to protect you from solar flares, um and cosmic radiation. Everything still sort of holds together. Doesn't mean break everything. It just sort of puts a minus one in front of a lot of stuff. Okay, I think, I think I get it. I think if you define the Earth as the brock and everything on it, including us and the satellites, then not much what happened, and the atmosphere yeah, and the atmosphere not much with Heaven. But if you maybe define the Earth is just the ball of rock, then things might get bad. Right. Oh man, if just the Earth started going in the other direction and we were still going this way, yeah, that would be very bad because how fast How fast am I technically going sitting here on Earth? Yeah, you're going pretty fast. I mean, the Earth's circumference is what miles and it does that in a day, and so it's a thousand miles per hour is the Earth's surface is moving. So if all of a sudden it's moving the other way basically two thousand miles per hour, that would be pretty bad. That's like going in a car at a two thousand miles per hour and then suddenly the car stopped, were crashing to a wall, right, Yeah, not not recommended. Not We would all just get smushed or we would get you know, if you're outside, you would just certainly be flung at two thousand miles per hour. Yeah, and also be crazy winds, right, because the atmosphere is also rotating with the Earth, So just the Earth started going to the other direction, basically all the air and Earth would have a wind speed of two thousand miles per hour. That's like much stronger than any hurricane. So it would basically flatten every city, right, but me included would also be going at two thousand miles per hours, So I would m I guess I would get thrown if I was outside. This is the best case scenario. I'm outside, the Earth changes direction, You're wearing a lot of protective gear. I hope I'm wearing a lot of an insulated lab coats. Yeah, I get flung off into the sky two thousand miles part, but the wind is also going with me at two miles per hour, So I think for a few short seconds I would be flying again until you hit something, until I hit something right, like the Earth or your house or something. Oh, I see, all right, But there's another scenario. When I read this, I thought of something else. I thought, what does it take to to flip the Earth to go the other way? I thought, you know, maybe you like stop that, you slow down the Earth and get it going the other way, and you do that in a very short amount of time, You like actually apply the brakes and then give it a push the other direction. Because you know, in physics, nothing gets accomplished instantaneously. You can't be going a hundred miles an hour in one direction and then instantly the other direction. Right, that's an acceleration, that's a change of velocity, and that only happens with a huge force. Can it happen with the giant dark energy bomb? I think it'd be more a dark energy laser, you know, you fire at the surface. I'll make a note, But that's an even worse scenario because if you apply an enormous acceleration to the whole earth, that would break a lot of stuff. Well, it's kind of like, um, the opposite. It's just a milder version of the instantaneous flip of the rock. Right. The instantaneous flip is actually easier because you don't have to go through the transition. You don't have to feel the acceleration. Acceleration is what's really bad. It's like if you're in a fighter jet, going at zero miles per hour is no big deal. Going at five thousand miles per hour also not that big a deal because velocity is not an issue. But the acceleration from zero to five thousand, those g's you would feel them. It would like pulverize your insides. Humans can't survive more than a few gees liquefying our organs. So it sort of depends on a lot of things. It depends on whether Jason meant the ball of rock or everything on it, and also how quickly this operation happens. Yeah, because if you actually do it physically correctly and accelerate the earth the other direction to get it spinning that way, then you have to be really careful. If you don't include the oceans, for example, then you're gonna get like ridiculous tsunamis like miles high waves slashing around. You gotta do it carefully because you gotta get every everything on board. If you're change a direction. Yeah, chaos. Do you ever feel just like a pan of water and try to walk it across your kitchen? It's almost impossible to not have that water like slosh around and splash on your toes. Now, imagine you have like oceans on the Earth and you're spitting it the other way. You are going to drown Tokyo and everything else. Oh man, alright, So then how would you rate this potential physics disaster? Is this? Is it too dependent on the specifics or do you think we should it's clearly bad in any case, Um, I'd say it's less catastrophic than turning off gravity. I'm pretty worried about the Sun being unleashed for three seconds and being kicked out into a different orbit. So if I had to pick, I would say gravity turning off is more catastrophic. That's the champion so far. Okay, So what's below pretty bad? Pretty bad, but not as bad A bad idea not recommended. Is there physics rating system like you know, G good to go PG physics good not recommended without the supervision of a physicist, especially with the supervision physicists. Don't offer this option to any physicists, you know, they can resist pushing the button Candy. Whenever I'm in front of a big red button, my fingers just crawl on it. I'm gonna touch it, Like, what does I feel like depressing? What would happen? I'm gonna create a button, Daniel that transfer transfers all your money to my bank account, and I'm going to leave it into your front door. No, that's my personal Twilight Zone episode. It's like your nighmer as a house full of red buttons? Is that what it is? That's your twilight Zone episode? And one of them kills everybody on earth. Oh that is a good plot idea. Oh man, we are pitching so many good movies today. I know it's like Saw, but for physics. There we go. All right, let's get into the last two scenarios that Jason imagine that the Livy came up with. But first let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel, we have two more potentially catastrophic scenarios for Earth and humanity and potentially the universe that one of our listeners here, Jason, came up with, and so we we need to rate them, we need to explain them and see how bad they are. So the third idea that Jason had was, Yeah, he asked, what would happen if every electron within one light year of Earth disappeared? Is it for three seconds you think? Or forever? It just says gone, Yeah, we're not getting these electrons back, you know, they have just been deleted from the universe. Could we survive? But but only within one light year? He's very specific. He's at one point zero. Like I think he's trying to include like our entire cosmic neighborhood, you know, the sun planets that may be word cloud, but not the whole universe. He's not building to speck here. He's just curious, right, I hope not alright. So the scenario is that every electron that we know that's inside of my body, the Earth, the Sun, the planet, all the need I guess nearby solar system right now. The nearest star is three light years away, three or four light years away, so there are no other stars involved. So basically just our solars and every electron suddenly disappear in the solar system. And so let's preface this by reminding people sort of how important and ubiquitous electrons are. Okay, They're not just something in batteries, right there, not just the thing that you juice up your iPhone with. Everything you know, everything you see, everything you have ever eaten, everything you are made of has electrons in it and needs those electrons, right, And in a way, it's almost they're almost um it's like one third of all matter, isn't it technically kind of yeah, Like you take an atom and it has protons and neutrons and electrons. Now, the electrons are very very light where they don't have a lot of mass, but they are responsible for balancing the electric charge of the atom. You know, there's the positive proton and then there's the negative electron, and so it's pretty key. I'm thinking this is not good. But let's see what people had to say on the street. Yeah, so I walked around and I asked people what they thought. Here's what they had to say. What do you think would happen if all of the electrons, like within a light year just suddenly disappeared. I don't think that'd be good or bad. It was simply destroyed out, So kind of considering an electrical engineer, that'd be probably pretty bad. I like like this last one, that last one where the engineer is worried about his career. That's his main procopation. I know. I was like, dude, you're gonna have to become a proton engineer instead of electron engineer. That's what I was thinking. How would you what would any career be called pro protonical engineer, per tonical engineer? Yeah, I suppose so, although you know, if this happens, we're not going to be around to be hiring anybody. Okay, So you think it's pretty catastrophic if all electrons suddenly disappear. Yeah, Every atom, all of a sudden gets a positive charge. Right, you have a hydrogen atom, you delete it to electron. You got a proton. And if you had a gas of hydrogen atoms, which we do in lots of places like the Sun, then you deleted all those electrons. All of a sudden. You have all these positive protons, and they're not gonna be happy just hanging out. They're gonna push against each other. Oh, I see. If I have a canister of hydrogen and I take away the electrons, suddenly have I just have protons? Yeah, and those protons feel a very powerful force against each other, are they? Is it my canister going to explode or is it just gonna feel pressure? It's gonna explode. Your canister also used to have electrons in it. It doesn't anymore. You used to have electrons and it doesn't anymore. That's what I'm talking about. Like, electrons are everywhere we are. We are made of electrons. The sun, Earth is made of electrons. So you delete electrons all of a sudden, every atom you know within a light year hates every other atom and wants to be really far away from me. Do you think maybe Jason would just think, like, hey, what if we didn't have electricity for a little while. I don't know what you're thinking, but Jason, please do not do this. Everything would explode. The Earth would explode, the Sun would explode. You would explode, My brain would explode, Your career would explode. I sensed real fear in your voice here, Daniel. I feel like you're we're actually touching something that makes you afraid. At a very core level. Yeah. Also, I take this one a bit personally. I mean, I'm a particle physicist. I feel something for particles. You can't just delete electrons, man, I mean it's so cruel, like they've been doing so much for you for years orout anythings, and then you're just gonna raise them literally erased them from the universe. It's like, don't cancel, don't cancel the election. This cancel culture has gone too far people. If you're canceling particles now, people want to cancel the electron, And how come nobody ever wants to cancel proton? So it's always the electrons right right. It sounds like you're you're pretty afraid of this scenario, like it would be bad. There's no recovering from it, right. If you have no electrons, then there's no way to balance the charges. I mean, there are other particles in the universe that have negative charges, like the W minus and some quirks have fractional negative charges. So you might be able to assemble some other hadrons to give you negative charges and make really weird chemistry. You know, you can make like an a mega minus particle to balance a proton and make a whole new kind of atom. But who knows what kind of thing you could build out of that, certainly not me or you or anything you're familiar with. So it's like you're rewriting the laws of the universe. It would be totally catastrophic. One second would be sitting here talking. In the next second, we're just exploding, flying through space and this massive protons floating out there in the universe. Yeah, exactly. We'd be a plasma of protons pushing away from each other really really hard. Because remember, electromagnetism is a powerful force and it has an infinite extent, and so everything within our light year would become a dilute gas of protons eventually. All right, so I think you would rate this is not just pretty bad, but like maybe ultimately bad. This is this is up there, This is up there. This is sort of like saturate the scale, you know, this like red lines at it as maximum e catastrophic Like this one terrifies me. I see, this is the stuff physicist nightmares are made up. That and red buttons, rooms with red buttons. One of these buttons will delete electrons and the other might transfer all your funds to Horne. Alright, so I'm pressed that Jason saturated your disaster scale, Like you don't you would any want to see this movie? No? I mean, what's going to happen? Everything blows up in the first moment, boom would be over, Like there's no drama there, just building anything. All right, Well, let's get into his fourth scenario here, maybe that will have a little bit more drama. So Jason writes, what would happen if the Sun shuts down for two weeks but the mass is still there. He's very cautious about that. It's just he's saying, like, what if it's stuff stops giving off light for two weeks? Right, Yeah, the Sun basically goes dark or winks at us in you know, technical terms, m But it's still there. It's still making the planets go around. Um, but it's just not giving off any light or particles. Like imagine if the Sun became a black hole. It's effectively, what would happen for two weeks? For two weeks, but then it came then it comes back from vacation. Yeah. So I walked around and I asked folks, were they worried about the sun shutting down? And what do they think would happen in that scenario? What do you think would be like on Earth? If the sun shut down for like two weeks? I don't think there would be life, But they're like, we'd all die in within two weeks. I think so, plus like then there'd be like no gravity. I don't know, It's like, I don't think there would be life at all. So what happened and the only one person was willing to talk to you at this point? Everyone else right away? After you ask people about electrons disappearing and all sorts of stuff. Um, yeah, they sort of like I had somewhere else to be. Do you made them rethink their lives and what they're doing with their precious time that we have here? Yeah, I hope they ran off at to tell all their loved ones how important they are to them. He's envisioning what would happen to if the sun suddenly turned off, and but I guess physically we wouldn't feel it right. Things would just go dark. Yeah. First of all, the sun would keep burning for eight minutes, apparently in the sky, because remember it takes time for light to get here from the sun. So in the first eight minutes or so this two week hiatus, things would seem normal and then all of a sudden, boom, the sun would go black and it's basically like nighttime for two weeks. Astronomers would be very excited. They can actually work for two weeks to weeks straight without sleeping. Do you think they would be excited. They're brewing a big pot of coffee and anticipation. Astronomers basically lose half of their observing time because of the Sun. It just blots out everything in the sky. So we would get great views of the stars, right, and it sort of blocks telescopes also, just from like light pollution to right. It's not just the direct sunlight. It's also just like light in our solar system. Yeah, and the heats of the atmosphere and makes it wiggly, and so it makes it harder to see that starlight that's sort of limped across the universe for billions of years and finally gotten here has to go through a wiggly atmosphere gets all smeared out, and so the Sun is sort of the enemy of astronomy. It's not particle physicists, it's the sun. Particle physicists always beat astronomy. So we don't even think I think we do bring an astronomy here to have an arm wrestling fight with you here, intellectual arm wrestling. No. We we love astronomers, and we feel a kinship of course with all of physics, but especially with astronomers and cosmologists, because we're all wondering about the big questions of the universe. All right, well, it doesn't sound too catastrophic. It sounds like we just get a too night, a two week night, which sounds great to me because I can sleep the whole catchup of my sleep, your sleep, you mostly work on that. I get emails from you like three in the morning, so you would get so much done if the sound disappeared for two weeks, if me and thistronomers would die from exhaustion, assuming your kids sleep for two weeks, right, yeah, it'd be pretty hard though. You know, I don't think it's very fun to endure two weeks of night. But you know they're parts of the early that don't see the sun for weeks and months at a time, right, yeah. People are like near the North Pole. The sun sets you know in whatever October November, depending where you are, and then it just doesn't come up again in February until February one. Depending on when it happens, some people might not even notice. In the wintertime, folks would be like, what are you talking about the sun? Is the sun turned off? There's no sun anyway? Yeah, and it would be more than just two weeks of night because we rely on sort of the reheating of daytime, and so eventually the earth we get pretty chilly. And the thing I wonder about is like plants. You know, could plants go for two weeks without any sun and then just sort of like snap back into health two weeks later? Right? Yeah, I can't plants. Would plants just kind of go into hibernation or something? Yeah, it might like kill off agriculture for a whole cycle, so we might all be hungry for a year. Um. But you know, that's a sort of for biologists, like if you shut down sunlight the plants for two weeks, would they die or they come back? I'm I'm guessing would all die, but you get definitely reduced yields, so you have less food for that next winter. Oh boy, so our culture or society might collapse. Yeah, you know, I like reading science fiction novels that highlight the sensitivity of our entire civilization. You know, like we are all three days away from total riots. Like if the trucks stopped driving and the supermarket shells were no longer filled with food, were like three days away from total chaos. Better stuck up on those lentils. It's right, lentils exactly. Everybody should have lentils in their basement. Yeah, all right, But then you're saying that the earth might get colder, Like how much colder? Would we suddenly be thrown into like a two week winter, or would it we see it sort of slowly get chillier. It would be sort of like a two week winter because you get the dips for a nighttime, and then you wouldn't come back up again during the day, and so you just keep cooling off and getting colder and colder and colder, and eventually if the sun was out for months or weeks or years, and then you get a new ice age and the earth would really frost over. On the plus iby would solve global warming. On the negative side, society might collapse. You forgot to add more astronomy and cartoons to the plus est, right, more creativity for nighttime artist. That's another I think that. I think that justifies the rest. To be honest, maybe we should think about actually doing this. Yeah, maybe Jason already thought about it, and that's why he's asking. Jason's like using the other scenarios to make this one sound reasonable. Right, He's worked it all out. He just wants to make sure. I was thinking he was more of the Calvin and Hobbs strategy, you know, the like, hey mom, can I have a flamethrower? No? Well can I have a cookie? Sure? He's like, can I turn off all the electrons? No, don't do that. Can I just turn off the sun for two weeks? All right? That seems reasonable? Well, he I guess he has my permission. If his options are trying to disappear electrons or turn off the sun for two weeks, I would say, um, turn off the sun. Yeah. So my vote for most catastrophic would be turn off the electrons, then probably turning off gravity, then the Earth spinning backwards, and then shutting off the sun for two weeks. That would be the least catastrophic in my book. All right, And that's that covers the range from not so bad too ultimately bad too. Please please please don't even think about this. Don't start doing research on it, but don't imagine what would be like or how much fun it would be. Let's just avoid the topic. Wow, this really you don't even want to talk about it, Daniel, let's wrap up the podcast. I'm not Let's just thank you. This is triggering you. I feel in ways that are making you uncomfortable. You know, every time somebody has a crazy sounding idea that seems impossible, somebody out there starts thinking about it and maybe that isn't impossible. I have a few ideas, and that's how research gets started. Man oh man, all right, let's let's end the podcast then, before we before we go too far, it might already be too late. All right, Well, I think thinking about these scenarios is pretty interesting because, first of all, it makes you think about how precious we life is and here on earth. And also it kind of makes you think about how at the whim of these physical laws were you know, if if things change, we might not be here. Yeah, we are in a delicate balance, and the universe is this way which allows for our life and our and our loves and everything we enjoy about the universe, but if it was slightly different, then we wouldn't be able to survive. And one of the deepest questions in physics is could it be slightly different? Why is it this way? Is this the only way that the universe could be so we are a natural consequence? Or are there billions of ways to have universes and we just happen to be in this one. We don't know the answer to that really basic question about our own existence. And I like these questions because they sort of make you think about all of those issues. Yeah, the big question, like what would happen if we didn't have Bruce willis who would go and nket that cosmic banana if you couldn't call Bruce? All right, thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you enjoyed that. And if you have a question you'd like to hear us talk about in a silly manner, please send it to us at Questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. See you next time. Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio from More podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.