83 points
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To my knowledge, we also have zero evidence that they didn’t exist. Nor have we ever observed matter/energy appearing out of thin air vaccuum, so it seems unlikely to me.

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25 points

And to my knowledge there can’t be a before time.

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65 points

Oh yeah? Then where did they film The Land Before Time? Checkmat

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15 points

I like how there are at least three things that are immediately recognizable as wrong with this question.

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7 points

Can time really exist if there was no frame of reference to measure it? We can only detect it by motion or entropy. It’s the only way of “time”. So if there was some point where there was nothing that moved, then time wouldn’t exist.

For that matter, there’s no way of measuring if time is even consistent. If it were constantly speeding way up, or slowing way down, we’d have no way of knowing.

Time is just a figment of our imagination so we can keep track of movement. Just like magenta isn’t a real color.

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2 points

Kompromat!

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2 points

Darn. I fold.

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11 points

Well, yes and no. Time is a concept derived from a change in state. There is no “real” time. If the universe before the Big Bang existed in a static state, then the concept of time itself becomes meaningless. So in that case, it would be “before time” in a sense

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6 points

The state cannot have been absolutely static - if it was, the big bang would not have occurred, and the same stasis would be existing now, unchanged.

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2 points

Duh, spacetime is a casual filter.

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0 points
*

Time is an illusion

It’s just a human made concept to create a reference to measure shit

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7 points

Time is change, and exists whether or not we measure it.

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0 points

Absolutely not, time doesn’t give a shit about humans, and would happily pass without any conscious observer at all anywhere in the universe.

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19 points

Well, we haven’t directly observed matter appearing spontaneously in a vacuum, but we have evidence to support it does happen

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6 points

My layman’s understanding is that virtual particles can and do emerge from vacuum, but in ways that usually cancel out before affecting anything. Occasionally it does affect normal stuff - see the Casimir effect acting on surfaces very close together.

I personally suspect this is an explanation for dark matter and a possible origin of the universe.

If there’s tiny bits of stuff and anti-stuff blinking in and out of existence, anywhere there’s a big fat nothing, both halves should still exhibit gravity before blipping back out. It wouldn’t show up as normal matter because it spends most of its time not existing. The vacuum really is empty… on average. It just hums with enough short-lived quantum shenanigans to have nonzero mass.

And if this follows a steep curve for distribution, then it’s like blackbody radiation. A hot rock will overwhelmingly emit photon wavelengths near the peak, for any given temperature, but in theory any temperature can emit any wavelength. It just happens with vanishing rarity as you get up into the spicy photons. If vacuum will occasionally fart out a particle and antiparticle, then very occasionally it should fart out two particles and antiparticles, together. And with vanishing rarity it can theoretically fart out an arbitrary quantity of mass, alongside a negation that is presumably equal. But if that’s off by a little bit - if it’s allowed to be off by a little bit - then an equally arbitrary quantity of mass will remain. Even if the masses have to match exactly, they could recombine in ways that produce angular momentum and never properly rejoin. And if vacuum produces gravity, well, anything that’s left will accelerate away in all directions.

On cosmic timescales it’s possible that matter just kinda happens. We’d be left with the question of why the fuck that’s how anything works, and where all this quantum vacuum bullshit came from. But creationist cranks would have to retreat back to the first sentence. In the beginning, there was nothing. And it was slightly heavy.

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4 points

Yeah, I suspect that the universe may expand and contract, so likely all the matter in the big bang came from it all being compressed from the previous cycle.

I also think all total matter gets distributed the same way each cycle, so I guess I think all matter that exists now is the same matter that has existed always.

I also think each cycle, everything happens the same way deterministically, even though it would be exciting to see if maybe events happen differently each cycle.

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2 points

My crackpot theory is that there’s a universe inside each black hole and we’re currently inside a black hole. All of the matter that a black hole ingests feeds into a big bang on a separate timeline.

The big bang was a singularity where our understanding of time and space breaks down. Well a black hole is the same thing.

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1 point

Hypothetically if this where true where would the original black hole come fromh

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58 points

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

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14 points

It’s not so much that we know there was nothing before it, but that we can’t figure out what was before it.

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13 points

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

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4 points

But something must have triggered the big bang. The model might not support this, but this only means the model is insufficient to describe what goes beyond our known universe.

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1 point

It is incoherent that sonething could suddenly exist out of nothingness.

Clearly the universe does not exist, this is all an elaborate statistical artifact.

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1 point

Seems like a distinction without a difference, I sort of assumed the OP meant that is all I mean. We don’t know anything before the beginning after all. Like you said.

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4 points

That’s nonsense. You think some massive amount of matter just materialized from nothing into a singular point? How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

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16 points

Not just matter but time as well. That’s what they were referring to. There is no “before time”.

Regarding your rethorical question: go find an answer and you’re sure to win the Nobel Prize.

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1 point

Absolutely nothing is a reliable constant except the speed of light.

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9 points
*

It’s only something we can speculate about. It represents a limit to our ability to gather any evidence that might validate those speculations. We can’t say what happened before it, because time itself was one of the things that popped out of the big bang. What would “before” even mean if time didn’t exist?

Even if time and matter did exist in some sense, we can’t get any evidence for it. We can’t make any kind of useful theory about it. At best, we can make wild guesses.

We could also just say “we don’t know what it was like”. Russell’s Teapot suggests we should instead say there was nothing, because we can’t prove there was anything.

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1 point

There’s no evidence to point to the big bang as being the very beginning, though. There may well have been a billion big bangs before this one. Each one taking so long to reset and start anew that to us, it might as well be seen as about infinity. Humanity outright doesn’t have the knowledge of what happens on extremely large or extremely small scales. We don’t really have a clue for what actually made space start to expand in the first place, so we don’t know if it’s ever happened before, or even if it happened anywhere else at any other time but outside of our observable universe.

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9 points

It wasn’t matter that did the banging, it was space-time itself. Have you heard how we know that the universe is expanding? Well we can extrapolate backwards and find the point in time where space-time was just a point: “the big bang”. Not only was there no space-time for matter to exist in before the big bang, there was no concept of “before” because that word only makes sense in the context of spacetime. So yeah, the person you’re replying to is right, “before the big bang” is a nonsense phrase.

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-1 points

They keep finding inconsistencies to that. Groupings and radiation and gap distances that don’t line up with the expansion expectations.

Then the other more applicable point is that what makes you think “the big bang” was the first big bang? You think mass and entropy and radioactive decay and all this shit in the nothingness of space all started with “the big bang” but it only happens once and then in a ridiculously long time from now when everything reaches absolute 0 and there’s no energy left anywhere, that it’s just done? A one trick pony?

Well what if it all eventually manages to head back to its origin point after that and it makes another big bang that kicks off again?

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6 points
*

Based on the comment you’re replying to, I assume they would say “no, nothing materialized from nothing because there wasn’t a ‘before’ in which nothing could have existed”

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1 point

What makes anyone think “the big bang” has only happened once?

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1 point

How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

You’re still thinking like a meat-monkey. There are stranger states out there than one can imagine, and that’s not hyperbole. There was no causality before expansion, because there was no meaningful interactions or spacetime in which interactions can occur.

You’re always going to have a hard time imagining this, because again, you are a human. We all are, none of us can imagine states of the universe without time and space.

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4 points

very nice analogy. I’m stealing it.

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2 points

I still think that means I have to up towards Polaris.

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24 points

Evidence of god?

ZEROOOOO

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18 points

I know it’s old, but I still cannot believe it’s the same woman in every panel. Girl looks like a different person in each pic.

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10 points

The original commercial was showing different women as if to imply it works for anyone. The arrangement of the panels is different from the original ad. It looks like panels 2 and 4 are swapped. I believe there are 2 different women.

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3 points

If you look at the straps on her outfit,it looks like it’s two people.

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4 points

That’s what I was thinking. And I just noticed that in 2 of the pics the shoulder strap to her shirt is different. If it’s not different women, it’s at least different shirts in some of the panels

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3 points
*

I haven’t seen this meme before but the person in the upper right and middle left look the same. And the rest of the panels look like one other person. Matches with the shoulder strap another person commented on. Probably someone took two different commercials of the same product and stitched them together.

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1 point

It’s not the same woman. It’s an interview style advertisement with 2 women. Here’s the ad - https://youtu.be/1n9sLzlxPf0?si=GFUfdfBUpA5BFazE

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11 points
*

Hey, man, we’re all just echoes of light bouncing around and making good vibrations as we bounce pgf of each other. Yeah, man, like, totally trippy when you think about it.

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