10 Scariest theories known to man.

False vacuum.

This is, in short, a scientific hypothesis that our universe is in a false phase state as part of a larger universe, like if it were a temporary thing ( Think the real universe is like a pot of boiling water and we are just within a bubble forming at the bottom of the pot ). However that false vacuum has to pop. Even after billions of years in this false state, and we and everything we know in our visible universe will disappear in an instant with no warning. And there is nothing you can do about it.

The Great Filter.

It's a theory about why the universe is so full of potential for life and yet we haven't found it. It states that somewhere between pre-life and advanced civilisation capable of colonizing the stars, there's a great filter that stops them and ends all life.This means that humans fit into one of three scenario's. ONE: We've passed the great filter, TWO: We're the first, meaning conditions in the universe are now friendly enough for civilisations to form or THREE: We haven't hit the filter yet. Which means we're fucked. If we find life on Mars, that would be a sure sign that the filter is either behind us or just in front of us.

Brain In A Vat

The brain in a vat is an element used in a variety of though experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning. It assumes the following: ONE: That the brain is the origin of all consciousness. TWO: The brain operates on electrical impulses. THREE: external stimuli can affect how the brain operates. The point is, you could be a brain in a jar right now and your entire life is a hallucination of your brain being manipulated by external electrical stimuli while in a vat.

Higher Dimensional Beings.

Imagine if there was a 2D person, if you stare at them in a certain way, they can't see you. If you looked at them from the top, they could never see you. Now imagine a 4D being. They could be looking at you from a 4 dimensional angle, an angle which you will never understand. They could be right beside them and you would never know, they could be right above you and you would never know. We could never interact with them as long as they don't want us to.

Fermi Paradox

You may have heard of this one. Let's say there is an ant hill in the middle of a forest, right next to that, is the construction site for a ten lane super-highway, will the ants ever understand what the highway is for ?. So it's not that we can't pick up signals from planet X using our technology, it's that we don't even understand what the beings in Planet X are or what these signals may be for. It's so beyond us that if they were to explain it to us, it would be like trying to teach an ant how to use the internet. When Pizzaro made his way to Peru, did he stop by any ant hills on the way there, did he try and communicate with the ants on the ant hills, did he try to explain the reason for his journey to the ants ? That's the situation we have here.

Roko's Basilisk

Roko's Basilisk is a proposition that states that an all powerful artificial intelligence form the future may retroactively punish those who did not assist in bringing about in it's existence. It resembles a futuristic version of Pascal's wager; An argument that states that we should take into account all singularitarian ideas when faced with a decision, i.e If you commit a crime due to peer pressure, such as smoking on school grounds, and you get caught, you know who is responsible for you predicament.

Terror Management

Everything that humanity has ever accomplished beyond basic survival has been motivated by an indestructible and irreducible fear of non-existence. Our conceptin of self and self-existence generally is simply a buffer against the anxiety that comes with recognizing that we will cease to be. Culture is just a massive shared delusion to mitigate our fear of the unknown and ultimately of death. We take comfort in our values system and the structures that arise from them, whether that's through conception of biological kinship / nationality / political identity / religious faith. etc. This includes the inherent value of ensuring the future of humanity through scientific progress. Indeed much of modern western life is devoted to the avoidance of death, the various euphemisms and stock phrases, the entire funeral home industry that serves to remove death from the ordinary course of life, from the home and onto the embalming table or into the crematorium. We build up the artifice to avoid the brutal reality. In short, everything that we've ever done and will ever do is motivated by our nothing more than our existential terror in facing death.

Quantum Suicide / Quantum Immortality.

A man sits before a gun. which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the machine measures the spin of the quantum particle - the quark - Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire, if it is counter clockwise, the gun won't fire. There is only one click, nervously the man pulls the trigger. The gun clicks, he pulls the trigger agin, the gun clicks agin. He tries this a few more times, again and again, all the way to eternity. Although the gun is properly loaded and functioning properly, it will never fire, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, this way, the man has gained immortality. Let's go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time and the particle spins counter clockwise, the gun fires and the man is dead. But wait, the man already pulled the trigger an infinite number of times before we restarted the experiment, how can he be dead. In this way, the man is thought to be both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, another universe is created. Thus he is in a state of both life and death. This is called Quantum Suicide.

Transcension Hypothesis.

By far my favourite. This hypothesis states that once civilisations saturate their local region of space with their intelligence, reach microscopic technological singularity, create a black hole and leave our visible macroscopic universe in order to continue exponential growth of complexity and intelligence and disappear from this universe, thus explaining the Fermi Paradox. Developments in Astrobiology make this hypothesis somewhat testable. It proposes space, time, energy and matter compression as a driver of accelerating change, which must lead cosmic intelligence to a future of highly miniaturized, accelerated and local " transcension" to extra universal domains rather than space-faring expansion with our existing universe.

Sixth Mass Extinction.

We are currently living through what many scientists and biologists consider to be the sixth mass extinction that the world has ever seen. This is going to be an interesting puzzle for the species that comes after us. It wasn't until the year 1800 that humanity reached a population of 1 billion after thousands and thousands of years. In the 216 years since then, the population has increased to 7.406 billion. That exponential growth has very long lasting, very noticeable negative effects on our planet until we reach carrying capacity or die off.