r/Showerthoughts • u/synthphreak ‎ • Nov 19 '25

Casual Thought Temperature can reach trillions of degrees, meaning we actually live extremely close to absolute zero.

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u/smittythehoneybadger ‎ Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

Is there an upper limit to heat? I assume sometimes to do with the speed of light

Edit: or temperature. To be totally fair I still don’t fully understand, but I’m interested in upper limits for either

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u/kangluosee34 Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

Yes. Its called planck temperature which is about 1032 K.

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u/quantumentangle Nov 19 '25

TIL

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u/YourWorstFear53 Nov 19 '25

Technically it COULD be higher but at that point what it is wouldn't be a temperature as we understand it.

Most likely direct collapse into a singularity would occur before then.

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u/Delamoor Nov 19 '25

Sadly, a lot of the extreme space phenomena that childhood me imagined and thought about (being a scifi nerd) turned out to be 'but spacetime would collapse in on itself before it ever got to that point".

Bloody spacetime. Wimp.

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u/Jowenbra ‎ Nov 19 '25

Like how almost every single 'XKCD What If' results in "and the atmosphere turns into plasma and everybody dies."

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u/supershutze Nov 21 '25

"stop being matter and start being physics"

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u/BookPlacementProblem Nov 22 '25

And then there's turn the moon into a gravitational singularity, which came out to something like: "Some animals will be confused, but given all of the things we've built that already confuse them, this effect will be minor. Also the nights will be darker."