Name: Are You A Dream Of The Universe?
Uploaded: 2026-01-01T15:12:47.000Z
Duration: 10 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Absolutely everything you think about yourself and the universe could be an illusion.

Basic passive voice

As far as you know, you are real and exist in a universe that was born 14 billion years ago and that gave rise to galaxies, stars, the Earth, and

You may actually not exist for real, but be the dream of a dead universe.

Crazy as it sounds, this may be an unavoidable consequence of our best scientific theories about the universe.

We need to understand three concepts for this idea to make sense.

What distinguishes the past from the future?

Put a drop of red ink into a glass of water, and

you see the ink spread until it fills the container, but

never the opposite colored water, where ink spontaneously concentrates and becomes a drop at the surface.

Again, time always seems to flow in the direction in which the ink spreads.

But if you take a microscope, all you will see will be a swarm of molecules colliding at random.

There are no rules, no forwards and backwards.

Every individual motion that happens can occur in reverse.

But we perceive a sort of arrow of time that makes things happen in one direction.

Well, this arrow of time is not actually fundamental, but a matter of probability.

When ink molecules spread to fill a glass, there are many different slots of space they can occupy and therefore many different possibilities to combine them.

And just like your chances of winning the lottery grow the more tickets you have, the probability that ink molecules will end up filling the glass is much higher than the probability that they'll concentrate in just one spot.

So it's not that the ink forming a drop again is forbidden by the laws of physics.

You'd have to wait about 10 to the power of 100 sextillion years, a 1 followed by 100 sextillion zeros.

If you had this much time to spare, eventually, by pure random chance, you'd see a red blob form again.

Actually, with enough time, you could see any shape forming, like, for example, a small, red, soggy brain.

Our Universe was born 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang.

It expanded and evolved to give rise to the myriads of galaxies and things.

In other words, the universe is kind of a glass of water with a lot of ink doing stuff.

It seems to be getting bigger at an ever increasing speed because of Dark energy.

Basically everything in it is getting more and more diluted.

In about 100 trillion years, the last star will die.

Then few interesting things will happen for the next few decillions, vantillions and googols of years.

Eventually, the universe will be a dark place fully dominated by dark energy.

A rapidly expanding ball of pure space almost devoid of matter.

You might think that this would lead to the ultimate death of everything.

But dark energy has one last surprise for you.

In a universe dominated by dark energy, space expands so dramatically that it creates a cosmic horizon around you.

A border beyond which nothing will ever be able to reach you, not even light.

So for every practical purpose, the universe has become a glass of finite size, about 36 billion light years wide, surrounded by an impassable cosmic horizon.

Such a universe glass is basically a giant black hole turned inside out.

We know that due to quantum effects, all black holes emit a tiny amount of particles, a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation.

In the end, this radiation will fill the universe glass with particles again.

At this point so far in the future, that giving you a number has no more meaning.

The universe has now become a closed box full of particles at an extremely low but finite temperature.

And since they have a temperature, they undergo random motions.

Or in other words, a glass filled with water and ink.

Things are about to become interesting again.

So now even the most extremely unlikely things can happen.

The fluctuating particles are bumping into each other over and over and over again, creating every combination of particles that's possible.

They're like a monkey typing at random on a typewriter.

Almost all of the time, it types gibberish.

But with enough time, eventually it will write the first acts of Hamlet.

And with even more time, the complete works of M and M.

If ink in our universe glass generates any random arrangements of particles, what could they be?

Well, a spontaneous fluctuation could give rise to a planet or to a galaxy, or even to a lot of them.

So maybe our universe has already ended and all we see around us is a pop up universe.

Not a universe that evolved from a big Bang, but

one that fluctuated into existence by pure chance and that, like the drop of ink, will only exist for a while before dissolving.

Being random, pop up universes could be similar to ours, but with funny glitches.

In some of these universes, dinosaurs are riding snails in Another stars are made of blueberries.

Scientists in such universes wouldn't understand those glitches.

So maybe the greatest mysteries of physics are just nonsense bugs of our pop up universe.

But not all possible fluctuations of our dead universe have the same probability of occurring.

Smaller fluctuations are much more probable than bigger ones.

But you know what's even way more likely?

You think, therefore you exist, but what else do you truly know?

In the end, your brain is just interpreting signals from your senses and creating a world that you experience.

So technically, you could be just your brain that thinks the world is real.

And if we follow the logic of the Incan universe class in particular, you could be a disembodied brain that just by chance emerged in a dead universe with your complete set of knowledge and memories.

This is a pretty bizarre idea, but if we do the maths, it's kind of pretty solid.

Let's compare the number of brains inside bodies in a living universe with the number of naked brains in a dead universe.

Let's go really big and imagine that a total of 1000-000000-00000 humans will live around Earth, and

that the same amount of people will live around every star in the universe.

If we add this together, we get about 10 to the power of 41 brains inside bodies that will exist.

However, in a dead universe that has had enough time to explore all possible fluctuations, and

that will exist forever, the number of naked brains that would emerge is, well, infinite.

So the probability that you're a floating brain is not only vastly larger than the probability that you're a real human, it's so inconceivably larger that we can't even meaningfully quantify the difference.

So are you a floating brain that exists for one moment in time, then basically forever passes, and

then you exist for another moment in time?

Maybe your life happens backwards and you just don't notice.