Imagine that, all of a sudden, every star, planet, and any other form of matter beyond the boundaries of our Solar System simply ceased to exist. Nothing would remain—no light, no residual radiation. What would happen from that moment on? What would be the immediate impact of this total absence?
What if all matter outside the Solar System disappeared?
r/whatif
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We wouldn’t know about it for a while.
We wouldn’t even know it had happened to our closest stellar neighbor for 4.3 years.
All other effects also would not reach us for that long, because it all travels at C.
And since you can’t see nothingness, it’s not like we’d be able to see this expanding sphere of darkness in real time, except as it reached each additional object farther and farther away from where we are at a given time. We’d probably figure out something weird like that was happening due to the timing of things disappearing.
But, lacking any reason for it, we wouldn’t be able to explain it or even confidently say that it was in fact what was happening (or that, in this case, had already happened).
The biggest effects would be sociological. Things like new religions forming and whatnot.
It would take thousands to millions of years after the event for us to notice considering how slowly light moves at cosmic scales. If instead a black void were to form immediately outside the edge of our solar system we would notice in about five hours, as the light inside the void would take that long to resolve.
I ran it through Chat GPT.
There are a few changes that hardly anyone would care about, like the loss of cosmic rays and background radiation, but the average person would only notice the lack of stars in the sky.
That’s about it.
It messes up navigation. Except we now have satellites and compasses.
Sirius XM becomes just plain XM. Milky Way chocolate bar becomes just plain chocolate bar. Polaris vehicles stop working. The sky gets dark and the Annunaki perish, except for the ones who are here among us…
I’m not sure. Probably something catastrophic eventually. Matter can’t be destroyed
The next generation would have no idea what Don Mclean was singing about in “Vincent”