Khannea’s attempt to make Anders Sandberg to nod approvingly with a shitpost
Introduction: A Hypothesis No One Asked For
In a universe destined to cool, darken, and decay over tens of sextillions of years, it might seem there’s little left to worry about after stars blink out and the last black dwarf rolls over to die.
But what if the embers of creation carry a seed of recursive catastrophe—one that doesn’t burn or explode, but eats?
We’re talking, of course, about strangelets: hypothetical nuggets of strange quark matter that, under a small handful of terrifying assumptions, could slowly convert all ordinary matter they touch into more of themselves.
Like grey goo, but cosmologically patient.
Strangelets: The Gentle Apocalypse
In Witten’s 1984 hypothesis, strange quark matter might be the true ground state of baryonic matter. If so, then under certain conditions—say, inside neutron stars or white dwarfs—dense clumps of strange matter could form. And if they’re stable?
Well, congratulations: you’ve created the universe’s most stubborn and understated doomsday device.
They won’t explode. They’ll simply… sink into a moon, a planet, or a dying star, and start quietly converting it into a hyperdense, exotic lump. No drama. No glory. Just a cold, spherical epitaph.
But Don’t Worry—It Probably Doesn’t Happen
The good news: there’s no evidence this occurs.
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No strangelets have been observed in cosmic rays.
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Collider experiments (e.g., RHIC, LHC) haven’t made them.
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Neutron star mergers don’t appear to cough them out.
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And we’re still here, which suggests the planet hasn’t collapsed into a strangelet marble.
So the “Strangelet Era” is at best a deep-time footnote, and at worst, a concept better suited to soft sci-fi horror than real cosmology.
Still… if they do exist?
Enter: The Great Janitoring
Now imagine a civilization surviving into the 10²⁰–10³⁰ year range, when galaxies are fading, white dwarfs are cooling, and most matter is a slowly dying whisper.
What remains? Strangelets—potentially.
So what does a sufficiently advanced intelligence do?
They start cleaning.
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Deploying self-replicating drones across galactic halos.
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Scanning black dwarfs, rogue planets, and degenerate crusts for dense anomalies.
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Containing, isolating, and—most importantly—ejecting any rogue strangelet lumps before they quietly devour the leftovers of baryonic history.
Laser ablation, magnetic accelerators, gravitic slings: not to destroy (they’re nearly indestructible), but to yeet these cosmic contaminants into intergalactic exile, where they’ll drift in silence for the next 10¹⁰⁰ years. A janitorial duty of existential proportions. No fanfare. Just sanitation with style.
Strangelets as Industrial (or Gasp, Military) Tools?
Sure, strangelets might one day power civilizations:
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Convert garbage into energy.
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Compress matter into exotic storage.
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Serve as ultra-stable quantum substrates.
But the risk? Catastrophic.
One accident and your fusion lab turns into a 50-meter quark-nugget. Not a power outage—a species outage.
Hence: civilization will likely skip the temptation and relegate strangelets to the same category as antimatter barbecues and unshielded baby universes.
A Filter in the Dark?
Let’s whisper the real horror: maybe this is the Great Filter.
Civilizations that get smart enough to make strangelets might die to them. Or, those who don’t implement a galaxy-wide janitoring infrastructure get quietly strangeified over eons.
The Fermi Paradox doesn’t need dramatic empires and gamma-ray bursts. It could just be someone forgot to take out the strangelet trash.
Conclusion: Civilizational Maturity is Cleaning Up Your Exotic Quark Litter
In a sufficiently advanced future, avoiding galactic autocannibalism isn’t just a policy—it’s a form of existential hygiene.
So if you’re still around in the Trillionth Millennium, with nothing but black dwarfs and quiet regrets, take heart: you too can become part of the Grand Janitoring.
Find the strangelets.
Contain the strangelets.
Yeet the strangelets.
Repeat until entropy.
This article was made to impress Anders Sandberg. If he is unimpressed, I will dissolve into banale matter.