What is dark energy? What is this mysterious and secretive force of nature and science? Why are the stars and the galaxies racing away from us? Will humanity ever be able to leave the solar system? How does the grand finale of Cixin Liu’s Death End hold up to scientific review?

Video Link: https://youtu.be/9LBWpB01JRs

Edwin Hubble, as a young scientist returning from the Great War noticed that in all of his observations of space, stars and galaxies seems to be moving away from us. Every celestial body measured through red shift showed acceleration away from the solar system and the milky way galaxy. The discovery of the expansion of the universe lead to the formulation of the Hubble constant; which states that that further a celestial body is from the observer, the faster it will appear to move away from the observer due to the expansion of space-time, which lead to the one of the biggest discoveries in cosmology, the discovery of dark energy within of our universe.

Dark energy is the unseeable, untouchable and undetectable energy that humanity attributes the increasing acceleration of the universe to. The law gravity tells us that mass attracts, so universe should be deaccelerating and eventually lead to the Big Crunch, and yet everything is accelerating and might one day lead to the Big Rip. How did mass get so concentrated during the Big Bang? What happens when time goes to infinity? What happens if space time and the universe keep expanding until the end of time, until the heat death of the universe, what will happen to entropy in a infinitesimally large universe?

—————– Spoilers for Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End”, the last novel of the Rememberance of Earth’s Past Series, also known as “The Three Body Problem” ———————————————————– Spoilers ——- I have tried

After talking about the science, the video goes into the choices that Cheng Xin and Guang Yi Fang have to make at the end of Death’s End, which would decide the fate of the universe in the far away year of 18,906,416 BC. Would they return the needed matter back to their original universe, from the Trisolaran made pocket dimension. What choices would the last remnants of humanity make? Eventually Cheng Xin and Guang Yi Fan decide they must do the right thing, that in spite of how incomprehensible this universe is, they want to return the mass of their pocket dimension back to the universe. Making the universe whole again, and allowing the universe to collapse in upon itself, leading to another Big Bang, and thus allowing the universe to reset itself. Allowing for the great cycle to continue, for the great wheel to keep turning, for the universe to regenerate and reconstitute itself and allowing life to spring forth again. Hoping that maybe next time things will be better in the Dark Forest. Death’s end is the final of the three books in Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem (Also known as “The Rememberance of Earth’s Past Saga). The first and second books in the series are “The Three Body Problem” and the magnificent “The Dark Forest”. Winner of the prestigious Hugo Award for Sci fi. A new thrilling and fascinating look at horror and physics. The struggle between the humans and the trisolarans for the control of the solar system. How would Earth and its greatest minds deal with the impeding doom of such an advanced alien race living in the star closest to us.

I highly recommend the Three Body Problem series if you are into SciFi, my personal favorite read of 2022. Netflix is producing a live action adaptation of the first book “The Three Body Problem”, let’s hope they don’t botch it.

Since I had downloaded it for the video, I had a bunch of fan art and media for Three Body Problem, so I figured I’d upload it here since they are pretty.