Speaker A
Day 1. A great white shark bites down on you. It loses three teeth. Then it tries your best friend, Nick.
Two friends, Nick and you, become unkillable and live a googolplex years, surviving the death of stars, the universe, and even black holes, while making a bet over twenty dollars.
Key Takeaways
- Friendship and holding on to each other matter more than who wins a bet.
- Cosmic timescales, from stellar death to black hole evaporation, are vast and humbling.
- Real physics concepts such as vacuum decay, Boltzmann brains, and quantum tunnelling are explained through narrative.
- The bet and the twenty-dollar iron coin serve as a motif for loyalty and connection.
What the video covers
- The story opens with the narrator being bitten by a great white shark and both friends becoming immortal for a googolplex years.
- They explore extreme environments such as the Mariana Trench and a volcano without dying.
- Nick proposes a bet: whoever gets sick of the other first owes twenty dollars.
- The narrator and Nick drift through space, nearly losing each other, as Earth's Sun becomes a red giant and then all stars die.
- Physical timescales are explored: galaxies dissolve, matter decays, rock flows like honey, and black holes evaporate.
- The universe eventually fills with cold iron stars, and vacuum decay is described as a possible catastrophe.
- Boltzmann brains, random brains that appear from quantum fluctuations, are introduced as a physics thought experiment.
- Nick lets go and drifts away, and the narrator throws the iron twenty to pull them back together.
- The story ends at 100% of a googolplex years, with the friends hoping for a next universe.
- Physicists Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen's idea of empty space spontaneously creating a new Big Bang is referenced.
Chapters
- 00:00Immortal Start: Shark Bite and Mariana Trench
- 00:35What Is a Googolplex? The Bet Begins
- 01:08Lost in Space: Year 1 to Year 150
- 02:00Stars Die and Galaxies Fall Apart
- 03:05Atoms Decay, Vacuum Collapse, and Iron Stars
- 04:37Black Holes, Boltzmann Brains, and Silence
- 06:24Drifting Apart and the Iron Twenty
- 08:08100% Reached: Hope for the Next Universe
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
NICK: Dude! It chipped a tooth on me! You can't die. Neither can Nick. And you're both going to stay this way for a googolplex years.
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By lunch, you've walked along the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the water pushes down 1,000 times harder than up here, and Nick has jumped into a volcano.
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NICK: My shoes melted. These were new! You don't age. You don't need air, food, or sleep.
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Your clothes, on the other hand, are on their own. A googolplex is a one followed by a googol zeros.
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The nine-year-old who named it said it means "a one, followed by writing zeros until you get tired." Write one zero on every particle in the observable universe, and you'd run out of particles first.
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NICK: A googolplex years. With you. Twenty bucks says you get sick of me first.
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You shake on it. Neither of you knows it yet, but you just made the longest bet in the history of the universe.
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Year 1. You hitch a ride to space on the outside of a rocket. Out there, Nick says something. You can't hear a word.
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Space has no air, so there's no sound. So you press your foreheads together. Now his voice comes through your skulls.
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NICK: Can you hear me now? Then he lets go of the rocket to take a selfie with the Earth, and starts drifting away.
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In space, nothing slows you down. There's nothing to grab, nothing to push against. You catch his ankle with one finger.
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That's the first time you almost lose him. It won't be the last. Year 150. Everyone you grew up with is gone. Your families.
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Your old friends. Everyone. NICK: So it's just us now. Just you two. For a googolplex years.
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Then the years start to get bigger. Around year 7.5 billion, the Sun swells into a red giant.
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It might swallow the Earth. Scientists still argue about it. You watch from beach chairs. You don't even need sunscreen.
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Year 100 trillion. The last star goes out. Year 10 quintillion. Your whole galaxy falls apart.
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Close encounters fling its dead stars out into the dark, and the two of you with them.
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You don't let go. Year 10³⁴. Some physicists think atoms start to fall apart around now.
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Nobody has ever seen it happen. Not once. So in this story, they don't. Year 10⁶⁵. You sit down on a mountain, and it flows out from under you, like honey.
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Given enough time, even solid rock moves, atom by atom. Black holes start popping like fireworks.
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Year 10¹⁰⁰. A googol. Long enough to watch every star die. You check your progress.
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0%. NICK: Zero?! We just watched the universe die! You haven't even started. Year 10¹⁶¹. Around now, physicists estimate, empty space itself could break.
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Our universe may be balanced like a ball on a shelf. If it falls, a bubble of new physics appears, racing outward at the speed of light, tearing apart everything it touches.
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NICK: Even us? Nobody knows. But this one forms so far away that space is stretching faster than the bubble can travel. It can never reach you.
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NICK: And the next one? Physics says one reaches you eventually. In this story, you get lucky.
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Every single time. Year 10¹¹⁰⁰. The dead stars start exploding again. The heaviest black dwarfs have been slowly turning their cores to iron.
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One by one, they collapse and blow up. Probably the last supernovae the universe will ever have.
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You and Nick surf the shockwave for a million years. NICK: Best. Day. Ever. It was not a day.
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Year 10¹⁵⁰⁰. You check the twenty in your pocket, the one for the bet. It's not paper anymore. It's iron.
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So is everything else. The planets. The dead stars. Nick's jacket. NICK: It still fits. It's just... iron.
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Over enough time, light atoms slowly fuse, heavy ones split, and everything ends up as iron, the most stable stuff there is.
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The universe fills with cold, dark iron stars. Year: a one, followed by a hundred trillion trillion zeros.
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You and Nick are sitting on an iron star when it starts to sink under you.
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Quantum tunnelling is crushing it into a black hole. You fall in together. Nothing escapes a black hole. Except, eventually, the black hole itself.
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You wait about 10⁶⁷ years for it to evaporate. Nick complains the entire time. NICK: Twenty bucks still stands.
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When it finally pops, you're both still there. Whatever made you unkillable doesn't care about physics.
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Year: a one, followed by a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion zeros. A brain appears in front of you. Out of nothing.
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No body. No reason. Just a brain, built by pure chance from the tiny random flickers of empty space. It thinks one thought, and it's gone.
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NICK: Did that brain just... look at me? Physicists call it a Boltzmann brain, and it's a nightmare for them.
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Given endless time, random brains like that would vastly outnumber real ones. So how do you know you're not one?
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How do you know Day 1 really happened? NICK: I remember the shark. So do you.
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Then chance builds something else. A second Nick. He lasts half a second, says "Dude?", and blinks out.
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NICK: Was that... me? You decide not to think about it. Then the last iron star collapses. The last black hole flashes, and goes out.
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No stars. No planets. No light. You can't see Nick anymore. You only know he's there because you're holding his hand.
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You check your progress. 0%. NICK: Still zero?! Every star, every black hole, all of it happened in the first 0%.
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The other 100%... is this. Just you, Nick, and the occasional brain. And now, finally, the bar starts to move. 1%.
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You tell every story you know. Then every story you don't. You invent games, play them a trillion times, and invent new ones.
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Around 10%, you start finishing each other's sentences. Around 30%, Nick starts humming. The same song.
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Forever. Somewhere around 50%, Nick goes quiet. NICK: I need some space. And he lets go.
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You can't see him. You just feel his fingers slip away. He's drifting slower than a snail. But out here, that's enough.
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Drift far enough, and the expanding universe takes over. You will never find each other again.
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There's nothing to push against. Nothing, except the iron twenty in your pocket. You throw it as hard as you can, the other way.
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It sails off into the dark forever, and pushes you, just a little, toward him.
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It takes 6 years. Then your hand finds his. NICK: You threw the twenty? You remind him who let go first.
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NICK: Put it on my tab. You never let go again. Turns out the bet was never about who'd get sick first.
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It was about who'd still be holding on. 90%. 99%. Year ten to the googol. A googolplex. 100%.
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NICK: We made it. Nick still owes you twenty bucks. You figure you'll collect in the next universe.
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Because there might be a next one. Physicists Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen calculated that empty space, given enough time, could start a brand new Big Bang all by itself.
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The chance is so small they joked it might be the smallest positive number in the history of physics.
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You'd have to wait so long that a googolplex years looks like nothing. NICK: Twenty bucks says we make it to the next one.
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Subscribe, and you'll be there when we find out. So, would you take that bet? Tell me in the comments.
Speaker A
Day 1.
Topics:googolplexfar futureuniverse endBoltzmann braincosmologyphysics explainedMariana Trenchblack holesfriendship storyscience storytelling
