You may not believe it, scientists believe that vacuum decay may destroy the universe at any time, once it is triggered, all material structures will be destroyed, and the entire universe will be reshuffled at the elementary particle level, producing a batch of new laws of physics, which is equivalent to another Big Bang.
As a basic principle in physics, vacuum decay is actually related to the steady state of the lowest energy level, that is, in a system, the energy will always spontaneously move closer to the lowest state, such as a ball on the top of a mountain, a gentle push can make it roll down the hill, which is a typical process of falling to the low energy stage.
In our universe, there are all kinds of invisible fields, including gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, quantum fields, but the most important thing is the Higgs field, in which the Higgs boson gives mass to all particles and is the most basic field in the universe, but the current standard model of the universe is actually located in the substable state of the Higgs field, that is to say, our universe may only be a ball on the top of a mountain or halfway up the mountain, and it may fall quickly to the top of the mountain and fall to a lower energy level at any time due to some small perturbations.
Physicists call this unstable state of the universe a pseudo-vacuum or pseudo-vacuum, and the so-called stable universe we see so far may only be a brief stage in the dynamic equilibrium of the universe, and it is possible that vacuum decay has now occurred and is spreading at the speed of light in the universe, but we can never know in advance.
Another important question is: how much energy is released to trigger vacuum decay?
Liu Cixin once set up a collider around the Earth's equator in "Chaowen Dao", the energy of this collider is comparable to the moment of the Big Bang, enough to cause vacuum decay, in order to avoid this situation, alien civilization came to the earth to stop the operation of this collider.
In the real world, the collider with the highest energy density is the European Large Hadron Collider, which can accelerate particles to a level close to the speed of light, but it is still far from the energy density of the Big Bang moment, let alone recreate the Big Bang, not even a black hole can be hit, and the energy density of other astronomical phenomena in the universe is not large enough, far enough to push the entire universe out of the pseudo-vacuum state and vacuum decay.
So at this point, our universe is currently very safe, but the problem is that the universe is controlled by quantum mechanics, in our invisible microcosm, quantum fluctuations have been happening, and the stable state of the entire universe, which is also a quantum state in nature, is full of uncertainty, which leads to the possibility that any place in the universe may become the place where vacuum decay occurs, thus causing the state change of the entire universe.
If there is a vacuum decay in the solar system, the earth will undoubtedly become elementary particles, and all the laws of physics within the solar system will disappear, and then this new vacuum will continue to spread around at the speed of light, and the moment you see the vacuum decay with your own eyes, you will disappear in an instant, without pain.
And if the vacuum decays in other places in the universe, then their impact may reach the earth, which may take tens of millions or even tens of billions of years, far less than affecting our current life, and even before the vacuum decay reaches the earth, human civilization may have disappeared in the universe.