[surgical_fire]

> scales of these things make me feel a deep sense of existential dread

Perhaps ironically, what instills in me this sense of existential dread are supervoids, more than any massively destructive structure.

I can't really explain why, but something about the idea of a incomprehensibly vast nothingness really rubs me in the wrong way.

[montjoy]

I used to feel this way too. It’s not really nothing if that helps. It still has 3 dimensions. Light and gravity pass through it. It has “vacuum energy” and virtual particles. There are still atoms, albeit further apart.

[surgical_fire]

I know, but it is still a pretty dreadful thing to think about.

I mean, the radius of Boötes Void is 330M light years across. I can't fathom that amount of nothing. A photon enters the Boötes void, and if it travels through its center it will take more than half a billion years to reach the other side.

In a sense it's the same thing when I think of the end of the universe. There's a comfort in thinking of a great collapse. A sense of finality, like a board game being put back in the box. In the other hand, the possibility of a heat death is absolutely dreadful. Just a never ending lingering darkness with white dwarfs slowly fading into black. No ending, no great boom, no blaze of glory.

[montjoy]

Cheer up! If the universe is really inside a black hole from a parent universe eventually it may evaporate via hawking radiation if the same laws of physics hold. :) Maybe heat death is just the flip side of Hawking radiation?

[surgical_fire]

That would be much nicer indeed. A cozy universe.