At a sufficiently sophisticated technological level, vacuum decay actually becomes worthwhile, as it increases the total amount of available free energy. The problem is ensuring any sort of civilizational continuity before and after the vacuum decay—though, like any other physical process, vacuum decay shouldn’t destroy information, so theoretically if you understood the mechanics well enough you should be able to engineer whatever outcome you wanted on the other side.
Even more importantly, assuming you can change the vacuum constants, one of the best constants to change is Planck’s constant, because assuming the Planck constant is 0, computing power is infinite, not arbitrarily large, but infinity is your limit.
Assuming information isn’t destroyed, this bodes well for uploads and simulations, since their bodies are purely informational, though any physical entity would have to be scanned first.
This is kind of a detail, but if we already assume methods which would allow for unbounded value in the absence of vacuum decay, it should not be certain that the presence of vacuum collapse creates a bound. I would expect that it basically creates a finite (expected) lifetime to any single causally connected bubble of the universe, but this could be counteracted by sufficient rates of inflation creating and disconnecting ever more bubbles at a higher rate.
This point aside, I had not realized that there actually are theoretical expectations for the Higgs ground state(s). I only learned about the toy models in my lectures and never looked up how they related to the full standard model. Thanks!
Are there considerations on whether naturally occurring things would have triggered decay already if it were (sufficiently) “easy to trigger”?
My expectation would be that e.g. neutron star+black hole merging events create quite extreme conditions and might rule out some possible ways/parameter regimes of vacuum decay?
At a sufficiently sophisticated technological level, vacuum decay actually becomes worthwhile, as it increases the total amount of available free energy. The problem is ensuring any sort of civilizational continuity before and after the vacuum decay—though, like any other physical process, vacuum decay shouldn’t destroy information, so theoretically if you understood the mechanics well enough you should be able to engineer whatever outcome you wanted on the other side.
Even more importantly, assuming you can change the vacuum constants, one of the best constants to change is Planck’s constant, because assuming the Planck constant is 0, computing power is infinite, not arbitrarily large, but infinity is your limit.
Assuming information isn’t destroyed, this bodes well for uploads and simulations, since their bodies are purely informational, though any physical entity would have to be scanned first.
This is kind of a detail, but if we already assume methods which would allow for unbounded value in the absence of vacuum decay, it should not be certain that the presence of vacuum collapse creates a bound.
I would expect that it basically creates a finite (expected) lifetime to any single causally connected bubble of the universe, but this could be counteracted by sufficient rates of inflation creating and disconnecting ever more bubbles at a higher rate.
This point aside, I had not realized that there actually are theoretical expectations for the Higgs ground state(s). I only learned about the toy models in my lectures and never looked up how they related to the full standard model.
Thanks!
Are there considerations on whether naturally occurring things would have triggered decay already if it were (sufficiently) “easy to trigger”?
My expectation would be that e.g. neutron star+black hole merging events create quite extreme conditions and might rule out some possible ways/parameter regimes of vacuum decay?