you referenced joe Rogan. lost me right there.

Unfortunately, the universe was opaque for a bit after the big bang, meaning we can't see what happened. If we look back far enough, our telescopes his a wall of microwave radiation known as the cosmic microwave background.

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Your argumentation isn't logically sound because you're missing one very important part: it "goes black" for YOU. If you died now absolutely nothing would stop for me, so your basic assumption that everything stops is already wrong.

If your argumentation was true, then this would also be true for any device with any form of sensory input.

A laptop being shut down and never turned on again also makes "everything go black" from the perspective of the laptop itself. Does that now mean that the laptop in question was the only true being in the universe? Obviously it doesn't.

And you as a human aren't special in any way shape or form either. Your singular experience ceases to exist, nothing less, nothing more. Same goes for any experiencing being that ever existed.

Everything "went black" for every single person that came and went before you.

Also it doesn't really go black. It goes nothing. Your experience is gone, thus you couldn't experience black either. Everything, including the perception of time, stops for you, thus nothing ever can happen - from your no longer existing perspective.

Now to make it interesting again: Your basic idea of being the only true being may still be true.

Scientifically speaking there is no way to prove or disprove that you aren't hallucinating everything, including me. Even if I lay out the perfect reasoning of why I exist to you, you could've just as well imagined it. From my perspective this obviously means that I may very well just explain to a hallucination of mine how I could be a hallucination of it.

This goes for every single statement that is outside of science though. God may exist, you may be a Boltzmann Brain imagining reality, this may be a simulation, this may be a single version of a multiverse like a decision tree - all these "fun to imagine" scenarios are outside the realm of science. Thus they may very well be true (or false), but we will never know.

Which is also why science never states absolute certainty and only models what agrees with observation.

I would imagine that the answer is yes since light is just a phenomena that traverses space and time. Light can’t be impacted separate from the space time it travels through as I understand it.

Also, I could be super wrong and have no idea what I’m talking about, math is hard and I am dumb.

Can it really be so unlikely to be 2 seperate events, or 3, or are they 100% certain that this theory is correct?

But if we didn't see this one, we'd see the next one. This has happened so many times it's almost impossible for it to not be happening when we're looking

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Space sometimes makes me feel like we’re suspended in a thin gel that can warp and bend.

Sorry but this is pretty nonsensical. First of all it shouldn't be this very far-fetched concept after we die according to atheism. We already have not existed for billions of years before we were born. It's just a matter of returning to the state of non existence we were in previously.

So if that whole concept of death is true then you were the only real being in the universe? I can kind of see what you're trying to convey but those are a poor choice of words. I think a better choice of words is that you're simply literally the main character. Which lots of people have already made that point before. There's a good Joe Rogan motivation clip that makes that point. But just because each person is the main character of their lives doesn't mean that everybody else isn't real.

But yeah it's kind of obvious that everybody should be the most important person for themselves. The typical exception is parent's love for their children. I will give you an interesting example of a thought i had that lines up with all of this quite perfectly. Back when i lived in Israel when i was younger i gave myself this thought experiment if i had to sacrifice myself to save the entire country of Israel and the answer i gave was that i wouldn't. It's because military is mandatory over there and that's why i was thinking about it. Because i so didn't care about protecting Israel i managed to get out of serving in the military though that's no easy feat. (had to convince them i was seriously suicidal)

The concept is far far older than Weir’s story.

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I've always enjoyed that short story

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Does gravitational lensing of light and time occur at a 1:1 ratio?

I find this concept interesting:

If I die and everything just goes black forever, as is purposed by atheism, then I was THE ONLY real being in the universe. If I'm the only thing keeping the lights on, then I'm actually uniquely special. Because reality ceases to exist - all other life forms are not co-equal 'viewing windows' of the universe. If my individual view of the universe stops when I die, then there really isn't anybody else out there. You're all just constructs of my brain.

It seems odd to think that everything stops when I stop. I don't think that's how it goes, though.

what I find amazing is that it's been 3.2 billion years since the supernova event, yet we just happen to be paying attention to a particular 3 yr period. quite the co-inkydink.

Freakin James Webb! That robot needs to chill before it discovers the answers we are not ready to accept! ;)

Getting stoned gets me thinking that I could be having a better life or could have had a better past life, and now my future seems dark and twisted and it scares me. Actually, that's why I stopped smoking weed. Instead of relaxing me, it put my brain into overdrive and I end up stressed and exhausted, at the very edge of an existencial crisis. Yeah, picture me at the edge of a cliff, and the existencial crisis is waiting for me at the bottom of that chasm. I do crosswords or sudokus to get out of it

The universe is sick, it's amazing to study and all these photos of the cosmos leave so many unanswered questions and a pit in my chest. I can only hope to be alive to see any signs of intelligence. I long for that so bad.

Most people don't understand how mirrors or magnifying glasses work. A rudimentary understanding of physics is preventing them from understanding even the explanation for what they're seeing in pictures from astronomy. Maybe they don't teach that stuff in primary education anymore, idk. My upbringing was much different.

I feel like it's simple to understand, but no more simple than how magnifying glasses or mirrors work, and many people don't really understand how those work unless they've taken university physics. Gravity curving space doesn't make sense as an analogy if you don't understand refraction or how a magnifying glass works.

Gravitational lensing is the key. Aim right, get one photo. Aim left get a different picture of the same thing. Bonus, look around the lensing and find hidden universes.