Have you ever "played" Space Engine? Zooming around the universe with a speed approaching megaparsecs always induces a sinking feeling in my stomach and a sense of insignificance, and it's a little bit what I'd imagine the Total Perspective Vortex from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe would feel like.

To me it feels like home. I'd love to be a particle zooming across the vast cosmos at light speed. Some of the best dreams I've ever seen.

Unfortunately if you were moving light speed you wouldn't experience time, so it would be rather less eventful than you imagine. If you kicked it down just below light speed existence would be a bright white/blue spot in front of you.

With lightspeed you are going pretty much nowhere. If you are flying through intergalactic space zipping past galaxies you are probably at least going trillions or quadrillions times the speed of light. Even just crossing the Milkyway would take you a hundred thousand years.

>> Even just crossing the Milkyway would take you a hundred thousand years.

except due to time dilation, you would just experience it as the blink of an eye (and that's assuming that you're not quite at full light speed, full light speed and it's nothing)...

We are talking about Space Engine, there you are essentially a stationary observer. If you would actually make the trip with a very fast conventional space ship, then you obviously could not reach the speed of light but I think it would be fair for an outside observer to say that you are essentially travelling at lightspeed when you are travelling at 0.99c in which case it would still take you 14,000 years. You would have to get really close to lightspeed to make it in the blink of an eye.

Can you explain the reason for anxiety? I read through first few paragraphs where author talked about vacuum. "Nothing" about it is anxiety inducing. But then, I grew up in the subcontinent where the ancients postulated that everything came from Shunyata (nothingness).

More accurately, that everything comes from and is shunyata (emptiness). Emptiness is also not nothingness, which is a different thing. Emptiness (of svabhava: "self existence") means infinite potentiality, since it is what makes anything possible. Nagarjuna proved that if something is not empty of self existence then it would annihilate itself and be unable to have any impact on our reality. The only reason that things can (seem to) exist is because nothing exists in itself, so it is impossible to distinguish between say, an apple, and the entire universe.

I think it’s just imagining how big the universe is…and then imagining that, but multiplied with space in between. The possible collapse of it all is a fun bonus.

A kind of megalophobia? Mixed with what cosmic horror invokes, the feeling that you are nothing in an indifferent universe. Knowing just enough about the universe to know you are nothing.

Universe is not exactly indifferent. Neither indifferent nor not-indifferent. David Deutsch offered some consolation to me, because when you take in account multiple dimensions there is also a vast quantity of Earths out there "somewhere".

The idea that there are multiple parallel earths is fun to think about, but know that it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis and arguable is outside the realm of science (and close to the realm of meta-physics).

Is this knowledge particularly useful in some way in this case? Does it prompt any particular action in response?

If you could figure out the distribution of universes, somehow, and figure out the distribution intelligences across them to a high enough fidelity to predict their actions (for example, by crunching numbers with a star-sized-computer, predicting what modal source code of some universe-spanning AI in a parallel universe looks like, and running it), you could in principle bargain in a cross-universe manner that leads to both parties/universes gaining value. Say you highly value diamond, and want to turn all matter in your lightcone to diamond; you've got 99% of it, but the last 1% is extremely expensive. Your counterparty values happy sentient life, and has dismantled 99% of the stars in their light-cone to make very long-lasting artificial habitable worlds, but the last 1% is the hardest to use- but would be easier to turn into diamonds than your last 1% of usable matter, and your last 1% of usable matter is easier to turn into living things than diamond. If you could somehow both predict with high confidence that a universe containing your counterparty exists, you could both gain value by using that last 1% to help the other, in a prisoner's dilemna sort-of-way.

(One possible avenue against defection is that if I can simulate you well enough, I know by definition whether you'll defect or not.)

This whole process is called 'timeless acausal trade', and it's pretty interesting.

It's the damn truth (the only true "true") at the bottom of everything. But the anxiety goes away after a while.

Not being an American, and watching the events in America and American politics has helped me realize there is some things i have Absolutely no control over.. and if I have no input or control over it then there is no reason for me to get stressed about it.

Physics is one of those things. its too big and far away for me to stress about it. If its gonna kill me I cant stop it.. I might as well enjoy what I do have control over.

Physics does indeed kill all of us

Biology kills us first, and in a manner that's contingent, not necessary; there are universes with physics similar to ours where life could continue forever. (Just add some rare non-energy-conserving interactions to be exploited).

Eventually, over 10^100 years of operation you get into interesting problems with the number of possible states a mind of a given size has being finite; but if you can continually add more matter via non-energy-conserving interactions, you could add more memory/processing up to fundamental physical limits: you can only fit so much information in a given volume before it collapses into a black hole; you can only communicate at c, so if you make your mind bigger, it has to parallelize or slow down; Given the expansion of space, at some scale, light signals from one end of your mind can't reach the other (the space inbetween expands faster than C), which would be the the fundamental limit... except that gravity counteracts the expansion of space, and I'm not sure what the expansion properties of a visible-universe-filled volume of just-barely-black-hole-subcritical computronium is. I imagine you're in a big crunch regime at that point, except... Isn't that the same thing as a black hole collapse? Nonetheless, there's presumably some balancing density that perfectly avoids both expansion and contraction, though it's presumably unstable. Ignoring the instability-difficulties, though, that means you can continue growing the amount of memory you have by slowing down your processing speed to one clock cycle every ~2*the diameter of your mind in light-years years. I'm not sure what the ultimate limiting factor is here, given infinite time; does the amount of computation of this system in infinite time go to infinity as your scale goes to infinity, or does it asymptotically approach some finite upper bound?

nah, physics just describes processes from reality.

It's the universe that kills us.

reading the selfish gene also does this - “you can’t handle the truth” applies to all of us!