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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

If you're into worrying about catastrophic existential threats, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Vacuum Instability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_instability#Vacuum_metas... ...especially worrying because the recently confirmed mass of the Higgs puts us firmly in the realm of "well, it could happen".

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It is worth noting, however, that a region of lower vacuum energy does not actually expand at lightspeed- merely near the speed of light (and exactly how near depends on the details of the vacuum inside the bubble), due to the fact that domain walls have mass-energy. So, if it happens sufficiently far away, we could in theory actually notice it happening before it killed us, unlike a gamma-ray burst.

... "Welp, all of existence will be totally annihilated in 2 years".

Yeah, that's not better.

Yes, but unlike a gamma-ray burst, there is literally no hope of survival. With a gamma-ray burst one could, in theory, survive given an ultra-shielded structure with full life support (to offset the lack of atmosphere and any other life on the surface once the burst passed). If a region of lower vacuum energy were headed our way, it would completely change the very physics we know of down to the sub-subatomic level. Ain't nothin' standing in the way of that...

So supposing it happened a billion light-years away, based on our best guess at the relevant physics, how much warning would we have and what would that warning look like? (Not that it would do us any good in any event, of course. I'm just asking out of morbid curiosity.)

I thought I recognised that from the Stephen Baxter/Arthur C. Clarke book "Time" - well worth reading.

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