Hi, I’m Emily Graslie, and welcome to season
two of Crash Course Big History.
In the first 10 episodes of Big History, we
followed the history of the Universe from
the Big Bang into the Deep Future.
The theme of this season is “Why Does This
Matter?”
As fascinating as the tale of 13.8 billion
years is – from the vast cosmos to ancient
life on Earth – one has to wonder why learning
about this history is relevant to our own
fleeting lives in this world.
You don’t exactly need to know about the
Big Bang to fill out your tax returns.
But the reason we learn big history is the
same reason we learn any history at all.
History matures us, seasons our attitudes,
and enriches our perspectives.
If we read enough human history, going back
thousands of years, we live a thousand lives.
If we don’t read history, we live only one.
Let’s take that thought one step further.
Never mind the past 5,000 years of written
history, or even the past 250,000 years that
human beings have existed on the planet.
By traversing the crash and thunder of the
cosmos, to the tooth and claw of the evolutionary
epic, we are transported across billions of
years.
In a world that has learned so much about
the cosmos, and a humanity that grows ever
more closely interwoven in the 21st century,
it pays to know the history of the Universe
and our planet as well as we know, say, the
past 200 years of our national histories.
Learn about Big History, and hopefully the
world around you will appear as one long continuum
to which you belong, indivisible and unbroken
since the Big Bang, with an underlying pattern
that unites it all.
Human to human, and humanity to the Universe.
It is a great leap forward into a wider world.
INTRO
In the Big Bang episode of Crash Course Big
History, we learned about how our view of
the Universe evolved in the early 20th century,
leading into how our view of the Universe
continues to evolve with every fascinating
theory and new discovery.
One such theory is cosmic inflation, a theory
about what happened a split second after the
Big Bang.
It was originally devised in the 1980s by
Alan Guth, to explain why the early Universe
was so smooth and stable.
At approximately 10 to the power of negative
35 to negative 32 seconds, the Universe expanded
rapidly from being about the size of a quantum
particle, to the size of a grapefruit.
This is stupendously fast.
Even though the Universe is expanding fast
today, it’s still way slower than it was.
If a grapefruit-sized universe expanded at
the same speed as during cosmic inflation,
in another split second, it would be the size
of our current Universe, about 93 billion
light years across.
If the early Universe had expanded at its
slower, present day rate, gravity would have
been too strong and sucked more clumps of
matter and energy together, and the Universe
would not be as evenly distributed.
There would be huge inequalities, enormous
heavy chunks of energy that are billions of
light years across.
But the Universe expanded so fast during cosmic
inflation that it was smoothed out, with no
huge chunks of matter and energy anywhere.
Instead we see a largely homogenous Universe
with just a smattering of tiny unequal wrinkles
that created stars.
And that’s another reason why cosmic inflation
was so important.
When the Universe was still very, very small,
at the quantum scale, tiny fluctuations were
popping in and out of existence.
These tiny blips of energy usually don’t
affect the physics of the larger world.
But, during inflation, they were suddenly
clear when the Universe became big, causing
slight inequalities in matter and energy.
These wrinkles created all the complexity
that was to follow.
Without these unequal distributions of energy,
there wouldn’t have been enough energy for
stars to burn, for supernovae to explode,
for planets to form, for life to exist, and
for us to be here.
We are the children of those tiny wrinkles,
and the events that happened during cosmic
inflation were the bedrock of the next 13.8
billion years.
Know this part of the story, and you know
where you came from, in the most extreme sense
of the phrase.
A second theory holds that cosmic inflation
may imply something curious about our Universe
that has become known as the eternal inflation
hypothesis, originally developed by Paul Steinhardt.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
According to eternal inflation,
the cosmic inflation that happened in a tiny,
tiny sliver of a second may still be going
on, for billions and billions of years, elsewhere
in the Universe.
Our cosmic bubble, which is 93 billion light
years across, is no longer in a state of eternal
inflation.
The Universe continues to expand, and even
accelerate in that expansion, but not quite
at the breakneck speed of inflation.
The eternal inflation hypothesis implies that,
within the sea of eternal inflation, new bubbles
are popping up all the time.
Other universes in a multiverse!
Our fundamental laws of physics formed during
inflation.
It is highly conceivable that other sets of
fundamental laws would govern these other
universes, and these laws and rules would
be completely foreign to our own.
And there is a staggering number of possible
sets of physical laws, about 10 to the power
of 500.
That’s a 1 with 500 zeros.
And that’s not the number of other universes
in a multiverse, but the possible set of rules
on which an almost infinite number of universes
could operate.
Even when the cosmic bubbles that come into
existence in that vast inflationary sea operate
on the same rules, they can have completely
different outcomes.
It’s possible the outcomes are similar,
but slightly different to ours.
1.
A universe out there may exist where you watch
this video approximately 30 seconds later.
2.
Or a universe out there may exist where I
was never born.
3.
A universe may exist where everything is made
out of diamonds or pizza or something completely
different from atoms.
4.
And many universes would exist without any
stars or forms of complexity at all.
Dead universes, where… everything is dead.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So, from here, physicists have postulated
that the behaviour of Universes may operate
under some form of “natural selection”
like species do in nature - but for the cosmos.
By some variable or another, some universes
make it into existence, and some do not.
Or, more mind-bogglingly, that certain universes
give rise to forms of extremely complex, intelligent,
and powerful life that over time gain the
ability to create and shape new universes,
in a form of cosmic artificial selection.
Sort of like how we breed different kinds
of dogs or pigeons.
All of this is truly “out there” but that’s
how our view of the Universe continues to
evolve.
The Big Bang theory might have seemed preposterous
to most scientists 150 years ago.
Give us another 1000 years of scientific advancement,
and who knows what our picture of the Universe
may look like.
As it is, eternal inflation implies that our
cosmic bubble, already a massive 93 billion
light years across, may actually be a very
tiny bubble indeed, in a giant cosmic ocean
known as the multiverse that is just teeming
with other bubbles.
As furiously as scientists are working at
unravelling the beginnings of our Universe,
it has remained a very curious question about
how the Universe will “end” -- whatever
end means when you’re talking about something
infinite.
For a long time, the most intuitive and prevailing
theory was the Big Bounce.
That is, the expansion of the Universe continues
to be slowed down by the force of gravity.
Eventually, many billions upon billions of
years from now, the Universe begins to contract.
Gravity sucks everything, all matter, all
energy, back into the singularity from which
it sprang.
The immense pressure that forms that singularity
forces everything out again in yet another
Big Bang.
And the whole cycle begins anew.
Expanding, contracting, over and over and
over.
Hence the name: Big Bounce.
And it makes logical sense, right?
After all, what goes up, must come down.
And there is another appeal to the theory.
That of birth, death, and rebirth.
A circle of life, not just for nature and
the characters of the Lion King, but one for
the entire Universe.
This is by far the most cheerful and pleasing
scenario for the end of the Universe.
And, alas, now the least likely one.
The Big Bounce presumes that eventually the
expansion of the Universe will slow down.
But, we now know it’s not slowing down.
It’s accelerating.
There are many hypotheses about why, one of
the most prominent being the influence of
the mysterious force of dark energy.
So, there are two more likely scenarios.
The first is the Big Rip.
If the expansion of the Universe continues
to accelerate at an insanely fast rate, then
the distances between things would become
virtually infinite.
This means the forces that hold the Universe
together would be destroyed.
The gravity that holds the stars in the galaxy
together would be too weak and the Milky Way
would fly apart.
The planets would be ripped away from the
Sun.
Eventually the strong and weak nuclear forces
that hold together atoms would be shorn apart
as well.
The scariest part of this scenario is how
soon it could happen.
Even within 10 or 20 billion years, which
implies the Universe is roughly middle-aged.
The final scenario, and currently the most
likely, is one that we covered in episode
10 of season one of Crash Course Big History:
Heat Death or the Big Freeze.
In this scenario, the Universe continues to
expand for trillions upon trillions of years
till all forms of complexity exhaust themselves
and break down.
Stars flicker out, matter dissolves back into
energy, and the Universe becomes an evenly
distributed weak ball of energy.
The inequalities in energy created during
inflation finally disappear.
While not the most cheerful end to our story,
it is decidedly less violent than the Big
Rip.
And it gives complexity in the Universe a
great deal more time to exist - on the scale
of trillions of years.
Time and more research will tell whether the
Big Rip or the Big Freeze is more likely.
Keep your eye on the experts as they continue
to update you on the Universe’s most terrifying
weather forecast.
Cloudy with a chance of absolute zero, or
windy with a possibility of a vicious atom
shredding later in the afternoon?
Finally, a last theory asks if the Universe
is even real, or is it a simulation that our
minds are inhabiting?
This is actually the subject of some very
interesting speculations by scientists and
philosophers, like Nick Bostrom.
Just think about how far video games have
come since the 1980s.
Extend that rate of progress another 500 years.
A simulated Universe isn’t so fanciful on
that scale.
According to Bostrom, one of the following
statements must be true:
* Either such total simulations are impossible
to create.
* Or, it is possible to create them but such
an advanced society would put that computational
power to better use.
* Or, they are possible to create, advanced
societies do create them, and as a result
there is a high likelihood we are currently
living in a simulation rather than a base
reality.
Why?
Because, as Elon Musk puts it, given the rapid
rate of technological advancements in virtual
reality, if we are one day going to create
those simulations anyway, the odds of us existing
in the base reality that produces them really
low.
But does a simulation reflect the outside
Universe that created it?
Or is the simulation a made-up, sort of fantasy
reality?
If it is the latter it would explain why physical
laws only make sense to a certain point and
why, when we get down to the scale of quantum
physics, things seem so much more unpredictable.
In a way, the pixels “blur” when we look
that closely at the screen.
However this may just be a convenient explanation
to otherwise much more puzzling questions
about quantum physics.
It is, perhaps, a bit too convenient.
But intriguing all the same.
In the 21st century, science has advanced
by leaps and bounds.
Humanity meanwhile is becoming more interdependent
and in need of a common story.
Our evolving view of the Universe continues
to form the bedrock of that story, and as
that view changes, so too will the view of
ourselves as a part of the grand unfolding
tale of 13.8 billion years.
Thanks for watching, see you next time.
