The Universe Is Trying to Destroy All Matter. Hakeem Oluseyi - #552

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An astrophysicist says the universe doesn't pull things down — it accelerates upward toward them. And that's one of the tamer claims in this conversation. Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi joins Brian to dismantle assumptions most physicists won't touch in public. Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi is a NASA researcher, Nova host, and author of Why Do We Exist, a unified framework spanning quantum fields to cosmology — and making a case for why imagination may be the universe's endgame. We cover: -why falling is the wrong way to think about gravity -what Hakeem discovered about heat flow while washing dishes that took decades to confirm -why humans sit at the exact logarithmic center of the universe, the calculation that puts 100,000 multicellular-life candidates in the Milky Way -why we'll likely never find any of them, and the one thing most people confuse for knowledge that Hakeem says is the most dangerous deception in society today. The universe makes life inevitable. It does not make multicellular life inevitable. Key Takeaways: 0:00 The Question That Breaks Physics 1:30 Meet Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi 3:10 The Earth Isn't Pulling You Down 6:00 Heat That Flows the Wrong Way 9:05 Why Electrons Run the Universe 11:15 The Most Dangerous Deception 14:20 We're at the Center of Everything 20:05 100,000 Worlds — And We'll Never Reach Them 22:30 Nine Realms: A Map of All Reality 25:25 When Two Realms Grind Each Other Apart 28:50 The Line Between Speculation and Science 33:20 The Hubble Tension War 40:40 How Long Until the Universe Destroys All Matter 44:05 Victor Glover and Why Representation Matters 48:10 What Happens to a Species That Stops Imagining 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The universe is going to wipe out the ability for life to exist at all because it's going to get rid of all the stars and planets and there's going to be black holes and not much else.
0:08.9	That's Dr. Hakeem O'Shea, Stanford PhD, NASA scientist, ABC News contributor, and he just told me exactly how much time we have left.
0:18.6	You say the universe will succeed in its ultimate mission. Oh, that's really great. And that mission, Hakeem, you say, is to destroy all matter. So what I want to ask you is, how much longer do we have? I mean, it's tax season. Should I pay my taxes? I am not a tax advice person. So anything I say, don't sue me. We got a long time, right? But one thing I see from this,
0:41.5	from this tale of the universe is that it appears to me that the universe is very young. And why do I
0:47.6	say that? Because only a young universe is observable, right? That cosmic event horizon is out there.
0:53.6	And the expansion rate of the universe goes faster and faster.
0:56.0	So it's kind of like when you have children, you're going to interact with them longer as them being adults than you are going to interact with them as them being children, right?
1:05.0	So your mind frame as a parent needs to be able to make that transition.
1:10.0	Well, the universe is going to exist much longer as a lonely place than it is as a place packed tight with galaxies, where galaxies are only like 10 times their own size apart from each other, right?
1:21.5	Where stars are tens of millions of times your own size apart from each other.
1:25.8	You know, soon we're just going to be the local group only.
1:29.9	So we're right at the beginnings of the universe.
1:33.0	What does that mean?
1:33.5	How long is that going to last for?
1:34.9	Yeah.
1:35.2	So I look at the universe as a series of events where the universe is attempting to go neutral
1:40.4	under these field forces, the strong force, the electromagnetic force, and the
1:45.7	Sileferus era is a universe going neutral under gravity, right?
1:49.9	So what is happening is, matter is collecting in these vast filamentary structures that we
1:56.0	call the cosmic web and is it expanding in the areas between them.
2:03.6	And as it does so, as the matter collects, higher levels of complexity are evolving.
2:06.6	So gas becomes stars.
	...

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