It was to be the final experiment for all time.

The temptation of absolute power had overrun the wisdom of a prescient collective conscience. Judgment day was at hand. 

The experiment had only been intended to produce a small change in the laws of physics, in a local region of space and time in the laboratory. Such a possibility had been considered by the Russians, and in the 1970's Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb, warned that such research should be forbidden.

In the military industrial complex, there was no constraint on forbidden research, and in the black hidden sector of the mighty economic machine, theory became reality, and a device was completed. The intention of the experiment was to test the laws of physics in a infinitesimally small location within the device, and to observe changes in the emitted radiation. Unfortunately, the experiment failed to deliver the goods. Instead, the device accidentally blew a hole right through the wall of the universe, at a point where the laws of physics had been safely encoded in the false vacuum. An opening was created through the domain wall, spilling into the void of the true vacuum.

The sudden phase transition in the previously meta-stable vacuum supporting the universe was catastrophic. An immense wave of absolute destruction spread out from the source of the experiment, moving uniformly at the speed of light. In less than a twentieth of a second, the entire planet had been engulfed by the expanding vacuum bubble, an all-destroying nothingness, and was no more. A little more than a second later, had clocks remained near the origin of the destruction, the bubble had reached the moon orbiting the planet, and it too was gone. Roughly eight minutes later, the star that had preserved living creatures for some four billion planetary orbital cycles was consumed by the bubble, and within a few short hours most of the star system had been destroyed. No one was left to mourn the loss of their children.

Four years and a few months later, an observer probe stationed in orbit around a nearby star system suddenly went dead without warning, and ceased broadcasting to the home world. There was no warning. Just an awful silence that could never be detected. The silence and the wave of destruction were one and the same.

A few hundred thousand years had passed, and the entire galaxy surrounding the star system disappeared into the void. Hundreds of billions of stars had given up their existence. The life sustained by countless child-worlds had been lost as sacrificial slaughter to intellectual fallibility and pride. The void continued to expand, passing through the deep space between the galaxies. An observer gazing through a telescope looked up into the night sky, and wondered about the beautiful spiral arms of the closest galactic neighbor, some two and a half million light years distant. There was no way for the observer to know that the billions of star systems were no longer there. The observer had no means of receiving information about his own impending destruction.

A small clandestine group within government on the observer's world knew better. They had developed strange, weird paraphysical phenomenology for the purpose of spying on their enemies. Known as remote viewing, it defied all attempts at scientific understanding. Somehow, it seemed that space and time became transparent in some fashion and the opaque veil imposed by the universal limit, the speed of light, fell away from their mental gaze. They had tapped into the cosmic internet, a database outside of the understanding of mere mortal beings.

For the moment our tale must end. We leave the observer safely nestled within the blue and living planet Earth, with a lesson and a warning for any reckless soul willing to play with the fabric of space and time. Time is distance in the vastness of space, and the time we have remaining may be determined by how far we are from the phase transition of the vacuum. We may have billions of years ahead of us, or perhaps only fractions of a second. 

Recently cosmologist Max Tegmark and philosopher Nick Bostrom took a new look at the possibility of catastrophic destruction of our world and our universe. They noted that "One might think that since life here on Earth has survived for nearly 4 Gyr (Gigayears), such catastrophic events must be extremely rare. Unfortunately, such an argument is flawed, giving us a false sense of security. It fails to take into account the observation selection effect that precludes any observer from observing anything other than that their own species has survived up to the point where they make the observation."

If someone out in the depths of space has already punched through the wall, we will never know about it. Since the reaction spreads outward at the speed of light, it is impossible for a signal to arrive ahead of the reaction in order to warn us of our impending doom. In any case, according to the latest multiverse theory, there are an infinite number of copies of all of us in the megaverse, so if we are destroyed, we will all continue on somewhere else.

You might not take much comfort from that last statement. 

Part Four: 'Avian' Virus Invades Washington, D.C.

Starstream Research provides an informal survey of exotic physics and consciousness concepts related to the survival or otherwise of the human race. For additional information please visit the Starstream Research web site.

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