The Hidden Worlds | The Scariest Part of Three Body Problem

0:17 Hi guys, Quinn here. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like button. It's the best way to get the YouTube algorithm to take notice of my YouTube channel. Thanks so much, guys. How wonderful would it be to decipher the very oldest of a deceased person's memories? Ones that he himself had forgotten.

0:39 None of us can remember much more than a hundred years in the past. And written records, accounts that we ourselves inscribed, but have scant memory of doing so, extend only a few hundred years before that. How many years did we live before the beginning of written history? Where did we come from? When humans think about conquering the cosmos, expanding into the galaxy, and one day encountering civilizations far greater than our own, we tend to think about the future as if there is always more of it.

1:20 More space, more resources, more time. Even many of science fiction's biggest stories operate on this assumption. In the Z Lee sequence, the universe may be ending, but there are attempts to escape it. In the three-body problem, existence continues through unimaginable transformations and into new universes.

1:44 The future stretches onward. We persist. But what if that's not the reality we're living in? What if the universe is already dying? What if existence itself is slowly winding down toward a state of equilibrium, spending a finite reserve that can never be replaced? And what if there is no escape waiting at the end?

2:10 Because the process has already begun and has always been. Exhalation by Ted Ching is a short story about life forms not unlike us, but quite different at the same time. They live in a sealed mechanical universe, surrounded by metal walls, breathing not the way we breathe, but by replacing the lungs in their chest with full containers of air.

2:37 Their entire universe is powered based on one single principle. There is a difference between high pressure air and low pressure air. And the movement between one state and the other is what drives everything. Their bodies, their machines, their civilization, their thoughts, everything depends on that flow.

3:03 The story is narrated by one individual of their civilization, an explorer, a scientist, an anatomist, who has traveled farther than most, all the way to the edge of their world. There he has seen the solid chromium wall that surrounds their universe, rising up from the ground into what appears to be an infinite sky.

3:26 Individuals of this world replace their lungs the way we might refill a tank or charge a battery, and the filling stations where they do this are central to everyday life. They are places where different individuals communicate and share knowledge, trade rumors, and pass news from one district to another.

3:47 And it is through one of these filling stations that the first hint of something wrong begins to spread. A public crier notices that a clock strikes the hour before he has finished a recital that should always exactly take one hour. At first it seems like a small thing, maybe just a problem with the clock, but then the same thing is reported in other districts, with other clocks, even clocks that work by completely different mechanisms.

4:18 But the clocks are not speeding up. Something much worse is happening. The narrator doesn't immediately understand what this means, but he is exactly the kind of person who cannot let the problem go. As an anatomist, he is already obsessed with one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of his world, the nature of memory and thought.

4:43 Their brains are incredibly delicate mechanisms made of gold, so delicate that when a skull is breached in an accident, the brain erupts into useless fragments, leaving anatomist with almost nothing to study. For years many believed that memory must be engraved somewhere inside the brain, written onto sheets of gold foil, but the narrator doubts this.

5:09 If every memory is truly inscribed somewhere permanent, why do they forget? Why do old memories vanish? Why does a person revived after running out of air return almost mindless, as if the self itself has been erased? This is a strange detail hanging over this world. Their bodies are durable, accidents serious enough to kill them are rare, but even with lives that stretch far beyond ours, their memories only reach back so far, and their written records only extend a little further.

5:48 Beyond that, there is a blankness where history should be. They do not know how long they have existed. They do not know where they came from. Their civilization might be ancient, but to them, its beginning is already lost. So, when the clock anomaly spreads, the narrator begins to connect it to a much deeper question.

6:15 Maybe the clocks aren't the problem at all. Maybe something is changing inside the people themselves. And when he hears the same problem has happened in a distant district with a completely different kind of clock, a clock that measures time by the flow of mercury, he decides to test the only thing that could truly answer the question: his own brain.

6:42 The narrator constructs a device that will allow him to dissect himself while remaining conscious. He sets up four prisms so that light reflects around him and gives him a clearer view of the back of his own head. He builds an elaborate system of rods so that his hands can control instruments behind him.

7:02 He attaches a microscope, precision manipulators, and enough full lungs to keep himself alive for days. He removes the faceplate from the backsides of his head and looks inside of his own exposed brain. At first he sees a structure more intricate than anything his civilization has ever built. A set of sub-assemblies arranged around a central engine of thought.

7:28 But to truly examine it, he has to start moving pieces of his own brain while they are still working. One by one he disconnects tiny hoses and replaces them with longer ones, making sure each part continues to receive air. He gradually pulls the entire sections of his brain out of their normal position and suspends them around him, until his own mind is opened up like a machine mid-explosion, still functioning while spread out beyond the boundaries of his skull.

8:00 And what he discovers here changes the course of his entire civilization. Memory is not engraved onto solid sheets. Thought is not simply gears turning in a fixed engine. His brain is made of tiny pathways of air, and gold leaves delicate little pieces suspended and moved by currents of pressure. His memories exist as patterns of airflow.

8:29 His consciousness exists as a constantly shifting motion of air. In other words, air is the medium of thought itself. The clocks aren't running fast, their brains are running slow. Their minds depend on air moving through these delicate inner structures. And if that air begins to move with less force, thought itself slows down.

8:55 The outside world seems to speed up because consciousness is losing its tempo. And the only reason that could be happening everywhere, in every district, to every person, is that the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere is rising. The narrator realizes that their universe is not open. The sky above is not infinite.

9:19 The chromium walls must curve somewhere overhead, forming a sealed chamber. This is a closed system. All the air that has been used, all the air released from their bodies and machines, has been accumulating in that chamber. Their civilization has not been consuming air at all. They've only been converting high-pressure air to low pressure air, and thus slowly eliminating the difference that makes life possible.

9:50 Every action, every journey, every conversation, every thought contributes to this equalization of pressure in their universe. And once that difference is gone completely, there will still be air, but it will be useless. Nothing will move. Nothing will think. Everything will become still. So for the first time, for the narrator and for their civilization, death becomes a certain fact.

10:23 It is the final destination of their entire universe. Panic spreads through their civilization. There is blame spread from individual to individual, people accusing other people of wasting air, as if individual carelessness were responsible for the death of the universe itself. Some demand that activity be restricted, that movement and machinery and unnecessary effort be curtailed, and there are even brawls and deaths.

10:57 Eventually, a group known as the Reversalists appear. Their goal is exactly what their name suggests to reverse the equalization of pressure, to find some way of taking the used low-pressure air around them and compressing it back into the high-pressure air that can sustain life. One sect has dedicated itself to the goal of reversing the equalization of pressure and found many adherents.

11:27 The mechanicians among them constructed an engine that takes air from our atmosphere and forces it into a smaller volume, a process called compression. Their engine restores air to the pressure it originally had in the reservoir. And these reversalists excitedly announced that it would form the basis of a new kind of filling station.

11:51 One that would, with each lung it refilled, revitalize not only individuals, but the universe itself. Ultimately, their proposed filling stations failed because the compressors themselves needed power to work. They could force low-pressure air back into smaller high-pressure volume, but the machines consumed even more pressure difference than they restored.

12:18 So instead of reversing the decay of the universe, each attempt only accelerated it. Spending more of the finite reserve they were trying to save. The end of their universe will not all happen at once. It is much slower and much more terrifying than some sudden cosmic disaster. The pressure difference that powers everything will continue to fade.

12:46 And as it fades, life will continue to go on, but in a diminished form. Their scientists may find a way to keep their minds operating for longer, adjusting the pressure inside their brains so that thought can continue even as the surrounding atmosphere grows thicker. But this does not save them. Eventually their bodies will begin to fail before their minds do.

13:13 Their limbs will weaken, their movements will become sluggish, the physical world around them will seem to move faster and faster, not because the world is actually accelerating, but because their own bodies and thoughts are falling out of rhythm with it. Clocks will seem to speed along frantically, falling objects will strike the ground with unnatural speed.

13:37 Motions that once felt ordinary will become violent and sudden, because their own experience of time is slowing as the universe loses the force that made experience possible. At some point, even movement will become impossible. The narrator imagines a final stage where people may still be conscious, but frozen in place, unable to walk, unable to reach the filling stations, unable to do anything but think.

14:09 Their civilization would become a world of living statues, minds flickering inside motionless bodies. They may still be able to speak for a while, because speech requires less pressure than movement, but even that becomes a terrible choice. Every word would spend air that could have sustained thought.

14:34 To speak would be to shorten consciousness. To remain silent would be to live a little longer, alone inside your own mind. A very few might try to survive to the absolute end by connecting themselves directly to the great reservoir, replacing their individual lung with the mighty lung of the world. They would become the last witness, the final thinking beings in a universe running out of usable difference.

15:04 And in the end, the last remaining pressure would not power a city, lift a body, move a machine. It would be spent on a single conscious thought. And then even that would stop. After that, the universe reaches perfect equilibrium, perfect stillness, perfect balance. You may have heard of this idea as the heat death of the universe.

15:33 This is a real scientific possibility, though it's not something that scientists can say is absolutely confirmed in every detail. It comes from the laws of thermodynamics and the idea that energy over time tends to become less usable. The universe does not have to explode or vanish for this to happen.

15:56 It could simply reach a state where energy is spread out so evenly that nothing can really happen anymore. This is what exhalation is really about. More specifically, it is about the second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms, the second law says that in a closed system, entropy tends to increase.

16:19 Entropy is often described as disorder, but for this purpose, it's better to think of it as energy becoming less useful. Heat moves from hot places to cold places, pressure moves from high pressure to low pressure, differences even out. And once those differences are gone, there is no longer a source of work.

16:41 I think the idea of the heat death of the universe is terrifying. In the end, the universe becomes a tomb. All matter perfectly spaced out, gravity having no ability to affect anything. All knowledge, all history lost. The heat death of our own universe is actually worse than the idea presented in this short story.

17:07 In the end, the narrator imagines greater beings from another universe penetrating the chromium walls of their universe, creating a bridge, and discovering the frozen remnants of his civilization. Beings from another realm of existence, another universe would look in upon our universe after heat death and see nothing but darkness, no remnants of ancient civilizations, just nothingness.