Adam Brown

They will be strongly incentivized to do it if they can, because otherwise we're doomed to a heat death.

How would they bleed this away?

Oh, okay.

This obviously depends on physics that we're not totally sure about yet.

But it seems pretty consistent with the known laws of physics that the cosmological constant, what we perceive it as being a constant, this dark energy quantity that's pushing the universe apart from each other,

In many very natural extensions of the known laws of physics, that is something that we have the ability to change.

In fact, it can change, can take different values.

It is not just totally fixed once and for all.

That in fact, you have what's called different vacuum, different regions of parameter space that you can transition between in which the cosmological constant can take different values.

And if that's true, then, well, you could either sort of wait around and hope to get lucky, hope that the universe just sort of spontaneously moves from one of these vacuums to another, one with a lower cosmological constant tending towards zero asymptotically, or you could take matters into your own hand, or you could imagine our descendants deciding that

They're not going to just suffer the heat death.

They're going to try and trigger a vacuum decay event to get us from one vacuum we're in to another vacuum with a lower cosmological constant.

And our distance ascendance will...

forced to basically to do that if they don't want to suffer a heat death yeah proceed with caution but definitely definitely proceed with caution you know in these theories where there's lots and lots of vacuums out there uh and uh most of those vacuums are incredibly inhospitable to life as we know it in fact seemingly they're just completely inhospitable to all forms of intelligence uh so you really really don't want to end up in them however

Again, if our best theories are correct, it seems as though there should be some of them that are much like our own in many ways, but have a lower value of the cosmological constant.

And so what we'd want to do is engineer that we end up in one of those vacuums.

Sorry, what is a vacuum?

Ah, great question.

A vacuum is like a possible, well, what we would perceive as a possible set of laws of physics as we see them.

So what it really is is a minima in some high-dimensional abstract laws of physics space in which you can find yourself in a minima.