6 ms·

The remarkable emptiness of existence

108 points by origgm 4y ago

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
This is not incidental. Space between atoms is also huge. And the space between electrons and core relative to core density. The world as a whole is largely empty at microscopic and macroscopic level. And in fact when it's in balance, it looks like that at every level. So when some wise guy tells you "well so what if we're 8 billion, Earth has plenty of land for more people" think about that. We're not in balance, and reality has a way of getting back to balance one way or another. If not through wisdom and intelligence, then through brute force. Emptiness is an abundance of environment. It's all it is. Then you have the freedom to play. If your environment is scarce, your resources are scarce, then existence becomes an increasingly desperate play in which no one wins. BTW when looking for "aether"... consider the stupidity of a water wave... looking for and not finding the water it's a wave of. It's all I'll say, if you need more, ask me.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I'm sitting in the middle of one of the densest metropolises in the hemisphere and yet there are probably only three other people within 10m of me. This space is also mostly "empty" of people even when dense with them in relative terms. This framing of "balance" and "reality" has some unsettling undertones imo, in a world where resources are plentiful enough in raw terms but there are other barriers to people accessing them. What's your suggested path back to "balance?"
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    For instance, consider how the average dissipated energy density by a human being is roughly an order of magnitude larger than by the Sun !
  - russdill 4y ago
    We are getting so far off the path here, but to give you an idea of how much of the earth human activity is taking up, wild mammals account for a mere 4% of mammal biomass. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Distribution-of-earths-mammals.png/1920px-Distribution-of-earths-mammals.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Di... The Earth is big, really big, but 8 billion humans and their livestock are also a really big number.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      You might think it’s a long way to the chemist, but that’s peanuts to space.
      - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        I wish I could grab a towel and go explore it.
    - cal85 4y ago
      That diagram is illuminating. But where are all the domestic chickens? Surely they make up more biomass than e.g. pets?
      - bloak 4y ago
        The diagram only shows mammals.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    What I was trying to say is that a human habitat is a vastly more complex network of relationships than merely the land we occupy, in which we feel relatively by ourselves within 10m of each other. For example how much forest should there be between two cities, to produce the oxygen you're breathing right now? Many magnitudes higher than those 10m. I'm still barely scratching the surface. As for suggestions... I don't even feel like going there today, I'm merely acknowledging my observations about realities that I believe are not up to our opinions. Reality is hugely empty, and when it's not, it's turbulent, vicious, and violent, like the center of our Sun. A neutron star. A black hole. These are concepts of "density" and properties of the resulting system, which we can apply not only in physical context, but also biological, and social. All systems are alike in some basic fundamental ways.
    - XorNot 4y ago
      70% of the oxygen on Earth comes from algae in the sea, not forests - which notably, also aren't really "carbon sinks" either since trees breath O2 and emit CO2 as well sometimes. But it's also weird to say that you'd need more forest then that, as though it's mutually exclusive. Our suburbs can be extremely green filled, as can our cities, but probably more notably is the simply wrong element of it: the Earth is at no risk of running out of oxygen due to "too many human beings". PS: Of note [1] it's not a super reliable source, but this eyeballs that you'd probably need about 10,000 leaves or 700 house plants[2] (keeping in mind a houseplant is very small, so a large tree probably does substantially better). [1] https://gizmodo.com/how-many-plants-would-you-need-to-generate-oxygen-for-y-5955071 https://gizmodo.com/how-many-plants-would-you-need-to-genera... [2] https://medium.com/@candidegardening/how-many-plants-would-it-take-to-produce-enough-oxygen-for-one-person-7312743ed70b https://medium.com/@candidegardening/how-many-plants-would-i...
      - jlawson 4y ago
        The point is not about literal forests, it's about the fact that just because there is 10m between people doesn't mean that you can therefore tile the world with humans 10m apart (or even closer). You need empty space, huge amounts of it, to make life not horrific. Whether that space is forests or ocean isn't the important aspect. What's important is that just because there is 'empty' space doesn't mean that filling it with more people won't have an impact on how people live.
- deleted 4y ago
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sublinear 4y ago
... as opposed to what? I do enjoy some of the popular science articles from this source, but this headline begs a silly question.
- russdill 4y ago
  Dunno, to me it says something a bit anthropic about the ability to extract entropy from stars.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
origgm 4y ago
"But I stress that the universe is mainly made of nothing, that something is the exception. Nothing is the rule. That darkness is a commonplace; it is light that is the rarity." - Carl Sagan
- deleted 4y ago
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jmyeet 4y ago
> It appears as a repulsive gravitational force, and we’ve named it dark energy. That's actually not true. Space is actually expanding, meaning new space is coming into existence and no one really knows what that looks like at a quantum level. Then again, we don't know how gravity works at a quantum level either. The quoted figure is 72km/s/MPsc (+/-5). That means if two objects are 1 megaparsec apart (3.26 million light years) then space itself is expanding between them at the rate of ~72km/s. Dark energy is really the fudge for all this. The idea is that creating new space takes energy. That has to come from somewhere and dark energy is our fudge factor for that. No one really knows what dark energy is or looks like just like we don't know what creating new space looks like. It just solves a conservation problem. This isn't gravitational repulsion. It's why the universe is ~13.8 billion years old but we can see the light of objects that we now estimate to be >40 billion light years away. Space itself has expanded. It's not gravitational repulsion. > In our most advanced quantum theories, we can calculate the energy contained in the vacuum, and it’s infinite. As in, suffusing every cubic centimeter of space and time is an infinite amount of energy, the combined efforts of all those countless but effervescent particles. That's not true either. The calculation of vacuum energy by QFT isn't infinite. It's just really, really large. This is one of the largest errors between theory and observation in all of physics because the measured energy of a vacuum is ~120 orders of magnitude less. This is a well-known (and open) problem known as the vacuum catastrophe [1]. Lastly, on empty space, it's well-known that atmos are mostly empty space (as the article notes). I mean this is why neutron stars can be so dense. But it's worse than that. The nucleus itself (already a tiny portion of an atom's volume) is mostly empty space. Nucleons are made up three quarks and those quarks are tiny compared to the nucleon's size. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Could energy decay (by fusion or chemical reaction) of glowing matter towards iron create space as byproduct? I find the idea quite funny, of dark matter being a sort of invisible smoke bubbling from light reactions and this "byproducts" bubbling along gravity wells towards "flat" space were they surface creating new space. But that idea could be tested, the more flat the space becomes, the more "positional" push-back by the bubbling space a space faring object would experience.
ergonaught 4y ago
Articles reflect reality, too, I suppose. This kind of article is one of the reasons I recently cancelled my subscription. I don't know whether their quality actually did degrade over time or if it was always fluffy and I only just started noticing it last year.
- waynecochran 4y ago
  The casual use of the word "infinity" is a tell tale sign of a lack of rigor. People think of infinity as just an incredibly large value, but Cantor and others have shown is more. Just take aleph-naught infinity -- the "smallest" infinity. I could count every particle in the universe and square it a million times and you are nowhere near any bound to aleph-naught infinity. Then jump up the aleph-one and now you are dealing with uncountable sets -- far "denser" that the simple countably infinite sets. Of course you can keep going to aleph-n for you favorite n. There are no actual infinities in terms of something measurable in the universe -- only potential infinities -- things that you can add on to indefinitely -- but you never reach any actual infinite quantity of anything. You can't even truly divide space an infinite numbers of times -- you will eventually reach the Planck length were anything smaller does not make any real sense in terms of actual existence.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bondarchuk 4y ago
  Nautil.us is on the payroll of the Templeton foundation, it is ostensibly a science magazine but its actual agenda is to promote religion.
infradig 4y ago
Ok, the HN pedants are out in force. The guy is an astrophysicist and knows what he's talking talking. He's not saying dark energy is a repulsive gravitational force, he's saying it appears to us as such because we just see the macro effect of objects moving apart.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
braindead_in 4y ago
I was expecting an article on Buddhism.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Will you settle for ecstatic metaphysics? Nothing contains all things. It is more precious than gold, without beginning and end, more joyous than the perception of bountiful light, more noble than the blood of kings, comparable to the heavens, higher than the stars, more powerful than a stroke of lightening, perfect and blessed in every way. - Otto von Guericke
  - daseiner1 4y ago
    real "did you even read the article?" test right here
8bitsrule 4y ago
>In our most advanced quantum theories, we can calculate the energy contained in the vacuum, and it’s infinite. That might in handy, if only we could tap into it.
- coremoff 4y ago
  in my opinion this is a little disingenious (the quoted line) - we know that our physics is incomplete; the discrepancy between observed and calculated vacuum energy is vast - it's sort of like our ancesters wondering if we'd be able to mine the cheese in the moon (but with a slightly stronger reason for believing that the moon could be made of cheese).
- captainbland 4y ago
  There's quite a few people here who seem to think that, well, no it isn't: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/709135/does-the-vacuum-really-have-infinite-energy-density https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/709135/does-the-...
Keysh 4y ago
From the article: > In December 2022, an international team of astronomers released the results of their latest survey of galaxies, and their work has confirmed that the vacuum of spacetime is wreaking havoc across the cosmos. They found that matter makes up only a minority contribution to the energy budget of the universe. The linked paper -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11319.pdf -- isn't about measuring dark energy at all. (It's using data from a study meant to do that, but it's looking at something else.) Also, > This phenomenon has various names: the quantum foam, the spacetime foam, vacuum fluctuations. This confuses two different phenomena. The vacuum fluctuation of known quantum fields (electromagnetic, electron, Higgs, etc.) is what is thought to give rise to the cosmological constant/dark energy, and is what this article is about. (A limited version of it involving the electromagnetic field produces the Casimir effect, which has been measured.) "Spacetime/quantum foam" is the hypothetical fluctuation of spacetime itself, assuming a quantum theory of gravity. It has nothing to do with dark energy.

108 points by origgm 4y ago

This is not incidental. Space between atoms is also huge. And the space between electrons and core relative to core density. The world as a whole is largely empty at microscopic and macroscopic level. And in fact when it's in balance, it looks like that at every level. So when some wise guy tells you "well so what if we're 8 billion, Earth has plenty of land for more people" think about that. We're not in balance, and reality has a way of getting back to balance one way or another. If not through wisdom and intelligence, then through brute force. Emptiness is an abundance of environment. It's all it is. Then you have the freedom to play. If your environment is scarce, your resources are scarce, then existence becomes an increasingly desperate play in which no one wins. BTW when looking for "aether"... consider the stupidity of a water wave... looking for and not finding the water it's a wave of. It's all I'll say, if you need more, ask me.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I'm sitting in the middle of one of the densest metropolises in the hemisphere and yet there are probably only three other people within 10m of me. This space is also mostly "empty" of people even when dense with them in relative terms. This framing of "balance" and "reality" has some unsettling undertones imo, in a world where resources are plentiful enough in raw terms but there are other barriers to people accessing them. What's your suggested path back to "balance?"
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  For instance, consider how the average dissipated energy density by a human being is roughly an order of magnitude larger than by the Sun !
- russdill 4y ago
  We are getting so far off the path here, but to give you an idea of how much of the earth human activity is taking up, wild mammals account for a mere 4% of mammal biomass. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Distribution-of-earths-mammals.png/1920px-Distribution-of-earths-mammals.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Di... The Earth is big, really big, but 8 billion humans and their livestock are also a really big number.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    You might think it’s a long way to the chemist, but that’s peanuts to space.
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      I wish I could grab a towel and go explore it.
  - cal85 4y ago
    That diagram is illuminating. But where are all the domestic chickens? Surely they make up more biomass than e.g. pets?
    - bloak 4y ago
      The diagram only shows mammals.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  What I was trying to say is that a human habitat is a vastly more complex network of relationships than merely the land we occupy, in which we feel relatively by ourselves within 10m of each other. For example how much forest should there be between two cities, to produce the oxygen you're breathing right now? Many magnitudes higher than those 10m. I'm still barely scratching the surface. As for suggestions... I don't even feel like going there today, I'm merely acknowledging my observations about realities that I believe are not up to our opinions. Reality is hugely empty, and when it's not, it's turbulent, vicious, and violent, like the center of our Sun. A neutron star. A black hole. These are concepts of "density" and properties of the resulting system, which we can apply not only in physical context, but also biological, and social. All systems are alike in some basic fundamental ways.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    70% of the oxygen on Earth comes from algae in the sea, not forests - which notably, also aren't really "carbon sinks" either since trees breath O2 and emit CO2 as well sometimes. But it's also weird to say that you'd need more forest then that, as though it's mutually exclusive. Our suburbs can be extremely green filled, as can our cities, but probably more notably is the simply wrong element of it: the Earth is at no risk of running out of oxygen due to "too many human beings". PS: Of note [1] it's not a super reliable source, but this eyeballs that you'd probably need about 10,000 leaves or 700 house plants[2] (keeping in mind a houseplant is very small, so a large tree probably does substantially better). [1] https://gizmodo.com/how-many-plants-would-you-need-to-generate-oxygen-for-y-5955071 https://gizmodo.com/how-many-plants-would-you-need-to-genera... [2] https://medium.com/@candidegardening/how-many-plants-would-it-take-to-produce-enough-oxygen-for-one-person-7312743ed70b https://medium.com/@candidegardening/how-many-plants-would-i...
    - jlawson 4y ago
      The point is not about literal forests, it's about the fact that just because there is 10m between people doesn't mean that you can therefore tile the world with humans 10m apart (or even closer). You need empty space, huge amounts of it, to make life not horrific. Whether that space is forests or ocean isn't the important aspect. What's important is that just because there is 'empty' space doesn't mean that filling it with more people won't have an impact on how people live.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sublinear 4y ago

... as opposed to what? I do enjoy some of the popular science articles from this source, but this headline begs a silly question.

russdill 4y ago
Dunno, to me it says something a bit anthropic about the ability to extract entropy from stars.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

origgm 4y ago

"But I stress that the universe is mainly made of nothing, that something is the exception. Nothing is the rule. That darkness is a commonplace; it is light that is the rarity." - Carl Sagan

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jmyeet 4y ago

> It appears as a repulsive gravitational force, and we’ve named it dark energy. That's actually not true. Space is actually expanding, meaning new space is coming into existence and no one really knows what that looks like at a quantum level. Then again, we don't know how gravity works at a quantum level either. The quoted figure is 72km/s/MPsc (+/-5). That means if two objects are 1 megaparsec apart (3.26 million light years) then space itself is expanding between them at the rate of ~72km/s. Dark energy is really the fudge for all this. The idea is that creating new space takes energy. That has to come from somewhere and dark energy is our fudge factor for that. No one really knows what dark energy is or looks like just like we don't know what creating new space looks like. It just solves a conservation problem. This isn't gravitational repulsion. It's why the universe is ~13.8 billion years old but we can see the light of objects that we now estimate to be >40 billion light years away. Space itself has expanded. It's not gravitational repulsion. > In our most advanced quantum theories, we can calculate the energy contained in the vacuum, and it’s infinite. As in, suffusing every cubic centimeter of space and time is an infinite amount of energy, the combined efforts of all those countless but effervescent particles. That's not true either. The calculation of vacuum energy by QFT isn't infinite. It's just really, really large. This is one of the largest errors between theory and observation in all of physics because the measured energy of a vacuum is ~120 orders of magnitude less. This is a well-known (and open) problem known as the vacuum catastrophe [1]. Lastly, on empty space, it's well-known that atmos are mostly empty space (as the article notes). I mean this is why neutron stars can be so dense. But it's worse than that. The nucleus itself (already a tiny portion of an atom's volume) is mostly empty space. Nucleons are made up three quarks and those quarks are tiny compared to the nucleon's size. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Could energy decay (by fusion or chemical reaction) of glowing matter towards iron create space as byproduct? I find the idea quite funny, of dark matter being a sort of invisible smoke bubbling from light reactions and this "byproducts" bubbling along gravity wells towards "flat" space were they surface creating new space. But that idea could be tested, the more flat the space becomes, the more "positional" push-back by the bubbling space a space faring object would experience.

ergonaught 4y ago

Articles reflect reality, too, I suppose. This kind of article is one of the reasons I recently cancelled my subscription. I don't know whether their quality actually did degrade over time or if it was always fluffy and I only just started noticing it last year.

waynecochran 4y ago
The casual use of the word "infinity" is a tell tale sign of a lack of rigor. People think of infinity as just an incredibly large value, but Cantor and others have shown is more. Just take aleph-naught infinity -- the "smallest" infinity. I could count every particle in the universe and square it a million times and you are nowhere near any bound to aleph-naught infinity. Then jump up the aleph-one and now you are dealing with uncountable sets -- far "denser" that the simple countably infinite sets. Of course you can keep going to aleph-n for you favorite n. There are no actual infinities in terms of something measurable in the universe -- only potential infinities -- things that you can add on to indefinitely -- but you never reach any actual infinite quantity of anything. You can't even truly divide space an infinite numbers of times -- you will eventually reach the Planck length were anything smaller does not make any real sense in terms of actual existence.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bondarchuk 4y ago
Nautil.us is on the payroll of the Templeton foundation, it is ostensibly a science magazine but its actual agenda is to promote religion.

infradig 4y ago

Ok, the HN pedants are out in force. The guy is an astrophysicist and knows what he's talking talking. He's not saying dark energy is a repulsive gravitational force, he's saying it appears to us as such because we just see the macro effect of objects moving apart.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

braindead_in 4y ago

I was expecting an article on Buddhism.

eternalban 4y ago
Will you settle for ecstatic metaphysics? Nothing contains all things. It is more precious than gold, without beginning and end, more joyous than the perception of bountiful light, more noble than the blood of kings, comparable to the heavens, higher than the stars, more powerful than a stroke of lightening, perfect and blessed in every way. - Otto von Guericke
- daseiner1 4y ago
  real "did you even read the article?" test right here

8bitsrule 4y ago

>In our most advanced quantum theories, we can calculate the energy contained in the vacuum, and it’s infinite. That might in handy, if only we could tap into it.

coremoff 4y ago
in my opinion this is a little disingenious (the quoted line) - we know that our physics is incomplete; the discrepancy between observed and calculated vacuum energy is vast - it's sort of like our ancesters wondering if we'd be able to mine the cheese in the moon (but with a slightly stronger reason for believing that the moon could be made of cheese).
captainbland 4y ago
There's quite a few people here who seem to think that, well, no it isn't: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/709135/does-the-vacuum-really-have-infinite-energy-density https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/709135/does-the-...

Keysh 4y ago

From the article: > In December 2022, an international team of astronomers released the results of their latest survey of galaxies, and their work has confirmed that the vacuum of spacetime is wreaking havoc across the cosmos. They found that matter makes up only a minority contribution to the energy budget of the universe. The linked paper -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11319.pdf -- isn't about measuring dark energy at all. (It's using data from a study meant to do that, but it's looking at something else.) Also, > This phenomenon has various names: the quantum foam, the spacetime foam, vacuum fluctuations. This confuses two different phenomena. The vacuum fluctuation of known quantum fields (electromagnetic, electron, Higgs, etc.) is what is thought to give rise to the cosmological constant/dark energy, and is what this article is about. (A limited version of it involving the electromagnetic field produces the Casimir effect, which has been measured.) "Spacetime/quantum foam" is the hypothetical fluctuation of spacetime itself, assuming a quantum theory of gravity. It has nothing to do with dark energy.