Tired of worrying about the upcoming election, global war and/or the slow destruction of the Earth through climate change? Never fear! Here's a new, totally hypothetical yet frighteningly well-founded nightmare apocalypse scenario!

The theory is explained in-depth in a new video from Kurzgesagt, but here's the elevator pitch: quantum fields (which are basically a set of rules that the tiniest bits of matter need to obey) want to move from a high energy state to a lower energy state. When they are in the lowest energy state possible, they're stable. The fear is that one of these quantum fields, the Higgs field, is not actually stable, but rather exists in a "false vacuum." This means it still contains potential energy. If this energy was somehow triggered, it would create a rolling tide of destruction, called a stable Higgs field, moving at the speed of light, vaporizing everything in its path, and leaving in its wake a void where physics as we know it would cease to exist and life would be impossible. Pretty cool, huh?

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For all we know, this has already happened somewhere out there. But that doesn't mean we're screwed. The speed of light is pretty slow on the scale of the universe, and since the universe is expanding, its possible that one of these stable Higgs fields would never have the time to reach us. Or, scientists could just be wrong about the whole thing. Chances are we'll find another apocalypse to get wrapped up in before we ever really find out.

Source: Kurzgesagt

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