Space Exploration and Colonization

If you’re ever having a bad day, remember that we could suddenly be blinked out of existence by an advanced alien civilization’s science experiment gone wrong.

That’s according to former Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb — notorious for insisting that various space phenomena is evidence of alien life — who wrote in a new Scientific American op-ed that a gigantic, advanced particle accelerator could create a dark energy explosion capable of burning everything in the galaxy at the speed of light. If we want to survive, he says, we’d engage in some interstellar diplomacy as soon as possible.

Triggering vacuum decay in a sufficiently large bubble at the collider location would produce an expanding burning front, a so-called “domain wall,” behind which the vacuum energy density will be converted into heat—just as a detonation wave burns through an explosive material. This spherical burning front will move outward at the speed of light and release an unprecedented amount of energy into space, heating everything along its path. If all the dark energy is converted to heat, it would bring an unlimited volume swept up by the burning front to a temperature of 30 degrees above absolute zero, 10 times hotter and 10,000 times denser in energy than the radiation of the cosmic microwave background, left over from the hot big bang.

Would such a heat wave be a reason for concern? The bad news is that we would not receive any advance warning before this cosmic disaster hit us in the face because no precursor signal can move faster than light to alert us to the risk. But perhaps this is also good news, since it implies that any resulting devastation would occur instantly and be as surprising as the Chicxulub impactor was for the dinosaurs. We would never know what hit us.