What If You and Your Crush Lived for Skewes' Number of Years?

What if you and your crush lived for Skewes' number of years? Previous episode: What If You and Your Crush Lived a Googolplex Years?    • What If You and Your Crush Lived a Googolp...   A volcano drops a boulder on your head. The rock splits in half. You don't. You and your crush have already lived a googolplex years together, and she has seen everything. So she makes you a deal: find one beautiful place she has never seen, without creating the view yourself, and maybe she'll finally fall for you. Your deadline is Skewes' number of years, a number so big that a whole googolplex barely registers on its clock. You'll chase a double sunset on a world with two suns, surf waves of lava, dive for diamond rain inside an ice giant, and watch whole universes die and begin again... until, with 1,000 years left, a fracture in space takes her away, and you have to decide whether to follow. If you were immortal and had Skewes' number of years to explore, what would you want to see first? Tell us in the comments. Chapters 0:00 The volcano that couldn't hurt you 0:42 Nothing left to see on Earth 1:25 How big is Skewes' number? 1:57 A world with two suns 2:30 Surfing on lava 3:05 Diamond rain and a light echo 3:56 The planet without a sun 4:47 The fake paradise 5:21 1,000 years left 6:33 Lost in the dark 7:25 The wonder you didn't make 8:39 The great reversal • Skewes' number: in 1914, J. E. Littlewood proved that a famous prime-counting formula, which seems to always count too many primes, must eventually count too few. In 1933, Stanley Skewes gave the first upper limit for where that first switch happens: about 10^10^10^34, assuming the Riemann hypothesis. Today's estimates put it far lower, below 1.4 × 10^316. • Kepler-16b, found by NASA's Kepler telescope, was the first confirmed planet orbiting two suns (Doyle et al., Science, 2011). • JWST observations suggest the scorching super-Earth 55 Cancri e may have a magma ocean (Hu et al., Nature, 2024). • Laser experiments at SLAC recreated the pressure inside ice giants and made tiny diamonds, supporting the idea of "diamond rain" on Neptune and Uranus (Kraus et al., Nature Astronomy, 2017). • Gravitational lensing can show the same exploding star more than once: Supernova Refsdal appeared four times in 2014 and showed up again in 2015, after its light took a longer route (Kelly et al., Science, 2015). • Story rules, not science: you can't die, universes restart, and the fracture in space is pure Maybeverse. #WhatIf #SkewesNumber #Googolplex