The Real Meaning of Life

life is hard I bought a new pair of shoes the other day walked outside into the rain and ended up stepping into some mud now they're ruined and I'm bitter but then I took a step back not literally of course but I really thought about it and I came to the conclusion that nothing in life really matters here's why the earth has been around for four-and-a-half billion years one day humans became a thing and we became conscious this world seemed perfect for us it wasn't scorching hot it wasn't deathly cold we fit right in the

middle the gravity on earth was perfect it allowed us to move and run and catch animals that conveniently existed for us humans to eat there was water to drink there was oxygen to breathe it's as if we were put here for a reason we began creating things we begin working together as a species building empires covering the planet and fighting each other for whatever reason fast-forward a couple million years and here we are today computers rockets Elon Musk they are all here somewhere along the line we also in a way created something out of nothing

it's called time we've laid out definitions of time seconds minutes hours years but it doesn't really matter we've made those for our own use time is nothing more than a way to measure the passing of events but we've only really set up these units of time based off of ourselves a day is how long it takes the earth to spin around once a month is about how long it takes the moon to orbit the Earth and also spin around once a year is how long it takes the earth to orbit the Sun once you get

about 78 earth revolutions around the Sun in this journey called life as poetic as that sounds there's not much scale to these things once we pass a human lifetime sure we can judge how long a thousand or maybe even ten thousand years are but after that the timescales of things are just too much for our brains to handle as much as you think you understand the 13.8 billion year life span of the universe you really can't put that into an imaginable scale on the scale of a human life the universe is unbelievably old but in

terms of the universe's lifespan pretty much nothing has happened yet it's barely even started we can make predictions about the next hundreds of trillions of years of the universe's life we can figure out how when when our Sun is going to blow up we can figure out when our galaxy is going to collide with another we can come up with theories that describe why the universe we've been put into is expanding faster than anything else physically possible but yet we have zero idea what happened in the fraction of a second between when there was nothing

and when there was something for some reason as far as we can tell we're the only conscious beings to have ever existed but we don't even know what being conscious is we developed consciousness only to be aware of the fact that nothing else is their growth so aware of our surroundings that the smarter we get the smaller we become as this thing we call time goes on we begin to realize things things that prove that the universe probably wasn't made just for us you are most likely born in a hospital if not props to you

for making it this far back then you were your parents entire world for a small time which is cute but you aren't everything 360 thousand people are born each day of all of those people with the same birthday some are going to do big things and change the world others are just gonna die that just happens but earth is just one planet in our solar system there's eight or nine of those for now for life as we know it to exist it's kind of hard to believe that there might be other life out there it

takes so much to happen for us to be able to exist we've discovered over 4000 exoplanets to date planets that don't revolve around our Sun and we found multiple examples of earth-like planets roughly the same shape size temperature but yet there's nothing there from what we can tell so if there are so many planets that could have life why haven't we seen it yet why are there no signs well we're just one solar system in an entire galaxy there's over 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone but that's just one galaxy we're a part of

the local group which is a collection of 30 galaxies near our own Andromeda is one of them that's the one that's gonna collide with our galaxy in about four-and-a-half billion years by then you'll be long gone and soon after that so will the earth the Sun at this point will be reaching the end of its life it's going to expand in size and by the end it will completely consume the earth shining over 3,000 times brighter than it does today but even though our home planet will be gone the rest of the galaxy wouldn't even

notice billions of years on a multi trillion year time scale is truly nothing but even so there are some things that we're observing in the universe's infancy today that will drastically influence the far future to keep it short the universe is expanding this is nothing new a lot of people know this but what many people don't know is that this expansion is speeding up now we don't know why but we have an idea of what's causing it dark energy I made an entire video about this so go watch that after this dark energy is stretching

the fabric of space-time we don't know what it's made from we know it's there we observe its results but we don't know exactly what it is or what it's going to do dark energy at least according to our current calculations will eventually stretch the space-time between galaxies faster than the speed of light the light emitting from our neighboring galaxies will travel towards us at the fastest speed possible but even this won't be enough the light will never reach us because the space between it is stretching faster than the light that is traveling through it it

will spread the universe so thin with galaxies that when we look out to observe what's around us we won't see anything we're going to end up all alone could find whatever galaxy we end up in but in the end even our galaxy will start to go dark the fate of the Sun is the same as it is for all stars in the universe eventually trillions of years down the road these lights in the sky are going to begin turning off one by one by one without any new stars to keep things running the universe is

going to get a bit colder depending on their size these dying stars begin to turn into white dwarfs or neutron stars providing the last glimmers of light in a cold and dark universe this is the very last hope for any surviving life forms in the universe but eventually trillions of more years after the last stars like our Sun die even these white dwarfs will begin to dim out some of these neutron stars roaming throughout the universe may collide by chance resulting in the brightest known events in the entire universe supernova [Music] but once these supernovae

conclude the universes again plunged into darkness all matter that used to make up the galaxies that we see today will begin to fall into the black holes that kept things held together for so long the Big Bang that created the highest temperatures ever known to physics ultimately results in the most dormant dark and cold configuration possible from a universe teeming with light and beauty to a cold barren wasteland a universe dominated by black holes but even now the universe has just begun these black holes are going to be around for a while and the things

we used to call galaxies with stars and planets and life are now just going to be full of black holes black holes and more black holes this is how the universe is going to spend most of its time cold dark and alone we're no longer talking about millions of years here the timescales are now on quadrillions of years but even these black holes won't last forever through Hawking radiation these black holes will slowly very slowly begin to evaporate away one subatomic particle at a time until eventually after all the black holes fade out of existence

there is nothing left in the universe a universe where nothing changes where time becomes pointless there's nothing the nothingness of space though will continue to expand because of dark energy a force that accounts for 70% of our universe that we don't even completely understand yet matter as we know it today the things that make up everything you see only accounts for barely 4% of the stuff in the universe so maybe just maybe we're a fluke we were never supposed to make it to the end but we still have a role to play out today we

are one species on one planet in one galaxy in an almost indistinguishable part of the universe whether or not we came to exist not much would be different every day we matter a little less and a little less until eventually we realize that in the grand scheme of things we don't matter at all our galaxy could just disappear it wouldn't really change much we came to exist in such a weird time but it's also pretty unique we know we're just the beginning a blip in the universe's potential but the only way to fulfill that potential

is to start making progress today it's not a stretch to say that there won't be others like us random spurts of intelligent life spread throughout trillions of trillions of years but now we're at one of those stages where life is possible and probably the easiest is ever going to be you get one life to do whatever you want there are some things you can avoid like school lower taxes but other than that you're free to do mostly whatever you'd like if we can't figure out our purpose for coming to exist on this planet if we

can't figure out why or how the universe came into being then our purpose is whatever we want it to be if you want to sit around and play games all day there are people doing that if you want to build a multi-billion dollar company that's going to help propel humanity to other worlds there are people doing that as well anything you want to be or do can be done and should be done like I said our own purpose is whatever we want right now if good things are happening to you if bad things are happening

to you it's actually not gonna last forever you have zero idea what the future holds for you and the most random of experiences can reroute your future in an instant everyone was still to hand in life that we honestly just didn't ask for some people's hands are better than others but we all have to play with the cars we've been given in the best way we can there's a chance that we humans may never figure out why everything in the universe acts the way it does is there life anywhere else or are we the exception

for every answer a hundred new questions pop up there's infinite possibilities as to how we came to exist but there's infinitely just as many things to do while we're figuring that out there's dogs to feed there's people to meet there's science to be done so whatever you do while we figure out our spot in the universe this universe at least just try to enjoy it because no matter what happens to you no matter how many times you mess up no matter how far humanity ventures out into the unknown in the end it doesn't even matter

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