Everything in the Universe Will Die One Day w/Brian Greene | Joe Rogan

That the fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant, that like what is the point, is sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with, right? Yeah, right. That's something that you touch upon really early on, that this thing that makes us unique is that we know that we're going to die. Yeah, yeah. That to me is the vital distinguishing feature of our species. We can reflect on the past. We can think about the future and recognize that we're not going to be here in the future, at least for some period of time. And it's an idea and it's powerful motivating influence as one that has been explored throughout the ages. Otto Ronck, who's one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do. And then when I was, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've ever heard of this book. No. It was big in the 70s and won actually the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s. And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do. And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today, until the end of time, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting, because it's not just we that are going to die, it's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time. Our best theory suggests to us that even protons, the very heart of matter, there are quantum processes that in the far future will ensure that every proton disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles. And at that point, there's no complex matter around at all. What timeline are we talking about here? Pretty big long timeline. In fact, I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved. I like to use the Empire State Building. And imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times that of the previous floor. So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor, 10 years, second floor, 100, and so forth. So you're going exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building. And in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years. And as you go forward, you are looking at things very far in the future. And to answer your question, we think, and I underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas, protons will decay roughly and say by the 38th floor. So 10 to the 38 years into the future. So we can relax for a little bit. You can relax for a little bit. But here's the thing. The amazing thing obviously is it sounds trite, but time is relative, right? So any duration that seems long, it's only long by comparison to another duration. And on say the scale of the entire Empire State Building up to say 10 to the 100 years into the future, which is what the peak would represent, 10 to the 38 years is like less than a blink of an eye. I mean, it's nothing on those scales. So you sort of have to be careful with your intuition if you're willing to entertain the kind of fantastically long time scales that you necessarily need to if you're going to think about the very far future. Trevor Burrus Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist? John Kerry Yeah. We anticipate that all complex structure will fall apart. So if there are any stars left over, we believe that by the 14th floor, most stars will have used up their nuclear fuel. There'll be dark embers just sort of, you know, smoky out there in the cosmos. But if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor, they will all just dissipate into their particular ingredients. So it's hard to imagine past say floor 38, that there's going to be any life or any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe. So the window within which the universe as we know it exists, is kind of small when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline. So impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long, but yet so small, like in the human mind. John Kerry Yeah. It's very hard to hold these durations in mind. I mean, I don't feel like I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I don't feel like I have an intuition for the durations that we are talking about. In fact, the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps me to sort of give some relative sense of when things of interest will happen in the universe. But, you know, we're good at understanding days, weeks, months, years, the times of, you know, conventional experience. We have no basis for understanding the universe over these scales that we've never experienced. You know, and that's true not only for time, it's also for space, right? I mean, we have very good intuition about everyday phenomena. I mean, if I have to take this bottle of water and I throw it at you, you'd catch it. You know where to put your hand. You wouldn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going. But if I was to do the same thing with electrons, you don't have, and neither do I, a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how a particle like an electron behaves. And that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics. And because of that, our intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave. In fact, I like to say those of our forebears wandering around the African savannah who started to think about electrons and quantum mechanics, they got eaten, right? They're the ones whose genes didn't propagate onward. And therefore, those of us who are the beneficiaries of the survival of our ancestors, we're good at understanding Newtonian physics, but we're not good at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the world. Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever is next after human beings will be able to understand these concepts? Because if you stop and think about what a human is, we've only really been this for X amount, 100,000 years. That's right. And it's a good question. And it's a tough one. I like to imagine that as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality or whatever augmented reality, whatever version of that kind of technology takes us over in the far future, we might be able to experience these distinct realms in such a powerful way that our innate intuition may begin to shift to change so that we grasp the quantum realm, the way we grasp Newtonian physics, I can at least imagine that as a possibility. What it would take to actually get there and whether our species will ever last long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't know. But it's all about experience and survival. We have been programmed by evolution, not to understand the true nature of the world. We've been programmed by evolution to survive. And those are two radically different propositions because you don't need to know the true nature of reality to survive. It's a distinct attribute and one that is not necessarily one that has any survival value to understand black holes or the Big Bang or general relativity or quantum mechanics or entropy or thermodynamics. These qualities we develop as we go forward and try to understand the world, go beyond mere survival and figure out things that excite us. But it's not something which obviously has any survival value. But it may someday. It may.