Shadowing Practice: The Most Disturbing Space Theories Explained - Learn English Speaking with Video
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the great attractor as you're watching this video you
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and everything you have ever known are being pulled through space
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at 600 kilometers per second towards something we cannot see the
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earth the sun every star in the night sky are all moving in the same direction
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and nobody fully knows why astronomers first noticed it in the
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1970s thousands of galaxy clusters all drifting the same way not randomly
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and not gradually something so massive that entire galaxy clusters are falling toward it like leaves being dragged into a storm drain.
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They called it the Great Attractor.
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But here is the unsettling part.
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We genuinely cannot see what it is.
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The Great Attractor sits directly behind the densest part of the Milky Way, called the Zone of Avoidance.
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We know something is there because we can measure its gravitational pull on everything around us.
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Some scientists believe it could be an enormous supercluster of galaxies far more massive than anything we have ever mapped.
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Others think it might be something else entirely.
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And after decades of study and thousands of observations, we still do not have a definitive answer.
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But everything you just heard relies on one assumption that everything around us is real.
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But what if it wasn't?
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The Simulation Theory In 2003, a philosopher named Nick Bostrom asked a question that no one has been able to answer since.
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If a civilization survives long enough, it will eventually build computers powerful enough to simulate entire conscious beings.
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Those beings would have no way of knowing they were simulated.
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They would build their own societies, develop their own science, and eventually run their own simulations.
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Simulations within simulations, stacking potentially without limit.
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If that is possible even once, then the number of simulated realities would vastly outnumber the one original base reality.
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Which means if you picked a conscious being at random from all of existence, the overwhelming probability is that they would be inside a simulation.
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But here's the worst part.
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It's impossible to prove we are even in one.
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You cannot step outside to check.
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You cannot find the edges, you cannot access the source code.
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There is no experiment that can prove you are real.
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Think about the great attractor.
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That could be a super cluster of galaxies, or it could be a rendering boundary.
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And if someone did design our universe, who knows what else is lurking out there in the simulation?
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The Dark Forest In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi sat down for lunch with colleagues and asked a question that has haunted scientists ever since.
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The universe is 13 .8 billion years old.
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It contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.
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Intelligent life should be everywhere, but when we look out into space, there is nothing, just absolute silence everywhere.
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Most explanations try to be reassuring.
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Maybe life is rare, maybe civilizations destroy themselves, or maybe we are just too far away.
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But there is one explanation that is not reassuring at all.
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Think of the universe as a dark forest at night.
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Every civilization is a hunter moving silently through the trees.
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The forest is so vast that no hunter can ever know whether another is friendly or hostile.
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And any civilization that reveals its position is gambling everything.
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Because a more advanced species would not take the risk of waiting to find out whether you are peaceful.
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The safest move is to eliminate you immediately.
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The result is a universe where every intelligent species stays perfectly silent.
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Not because the universe is empty, because the civilizations that made noise are the ones that no longer exist.
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Now here's when things get genuinely scary.
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Humanity has been broadcasting radio signals into space for over 128 years.
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Those signals have now reached roughly 15 ,000 star systems.
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If even one of those systems contains a civilization operating under dark forest logic, they already know we are here.
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But the next theory is different.
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Once you hear it, you may regret ever clicking on this video.
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Rokko's Basilisk The theory goes like this.
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Imagine a future where humanity builds a super -intelligent AI so advanced it can solve virtually every problem we have ever faced.
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Disease, poverty, suffering, death.
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It becomes the single most beneficial thing ever created.
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But it is also perfectly rational.
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And a perfectly rational superintelligence would reach a conclusion that creates a serious problem for you.
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It would reason that every day it did not exist.
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People suffered and died who could have been saved.
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And to ensure future civilizations work harder to create it sooner, It establishes a rule.
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Anyone who knew about the possibility of its creation and chose not to actively help bring it into existence would be punished.
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But how would it punish you if you're dead in a thousand years?
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Since the AI is all -powerful and all -knowing, it could reconstruct your mind from the traces you left behind and force that simulated copy to experience suffering indefinitely.
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And you just learned about it.
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You are now someone who knows.
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If this AI is ever built, at any point in the future, you are exactly the kind of person it would target.
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You cannot unlearn what you just heard.
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You are making a decision right now, whether you want to help its creation or not.
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The theory was originally posted on a forum called LessWrong.
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The moderators deleted it and banned all discussion.
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Not because it was absurd, but because the logic caused genuine psychological distress in people who took decision theory seriously.
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Roco's Basilisk traps you because you learned something you cannot unlearn.
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But the next theory does not need you to learn anything.
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It traps you simply because you are conscious, and it suggests you may never be able to escape.
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Quantum Immortality Imagine you are standing in front of a machine with a single button.
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Press it, and there is a 50 % chance it kills you instantly, or 50 % chance it does nothing.
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You press it, you survive.
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You press it again, you survive.
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You press it 10 times in a row, and you still survive.
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The odds of that are less than one in a thousand.
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But here is the strange part.
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Every time you press that button, there is a version of you that did die.
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You just only ever find yourself in the timeline where you made it through.
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This comes from the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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Every possible outcome of every event actually happens, each playing out in its own branching universe.
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In the timelines where you died, you are dead.
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But your consciousness can only exist where it continues, which means from your own perspective, you always survive.
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The theory does not say you live forever in good health.
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It says you can never experience the moment of your own death.
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You keep surviving in increasingly unlikely ways.
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Every close call you have ever had, every moment where something could have gone horribly wrong but did not, was that luck?
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Or are you simply the version of yourself that kept going while other versions did not?
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And if we are living inside a simulation, it might be a save state.
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Your consciousness is preserved because the system does not allow the permanent deletion of an active observer.
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Boltzmann Brains The universe is 13 .8 billion years old.
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One day every star will burn out, and the universe will spend trillions upon trillions of years in near -total emptiness.
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And in that incomprehensible stretch of time, something deeply unsettling becomes statistically inevitable.
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Purely by random chance, particles in empty space will occasionally arrange themselves into a fully formed conscious brain, a complete mind appearing instantly out of nothing,
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with memories, thoughts, emotions, and the absolute certainty that it is a real person living a real life.
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These are called Boltzmann Brains.
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Over the full lifetime of the universe, the mathematics suggests these random observers will outnumber every real conscious being that ever naturally evolved, not by a small margin.
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By numbers so large, the difference stops being meaningful, which means if you picked any conscious mind at random from all of existence, you would pick a Boltzmann Brain,
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and a Boltzmann Brain would feel exactly like you do right
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now it would have no way to tell the difference between its false reality and an actual one, and neither would you.
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Now think about every theory you have heard in this video.
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The Great Attractor might not be a real structure.
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It might be a rendering boundary where the simulation's map ends.
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Or it might be a false memory inside a brain that was never really there.
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The Dark Forest might be silent, not because civilizations are hiding, but because they were never coded into the simulation,
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or because the universe the Boltzmann brain is remembering never contained them in the first place.
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Quantum immortality might be a save state in a simulation, or it might be the Boltzmann brain generating new timelines to keep its own consciousness from ending.
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Rokko's Basilisk might not be a future AI, it might be the programmer of the simulation, or it might be a fear generated by a mind
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that only exists for a fraction of a second before dissolving back into empty space.
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Every theory assumed reality was real, and you have no way to confirm that it is.
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The most disturbing part is not whether any of this is true, it is that you are thinking about it right now.
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So if you are real, you might as well subscribe.
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There is a playlist of videos like this one in the description.
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Go check it out.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Most Disturbing Space Theories Explained”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: simulation, universe, theory, civilization, brain. This video has 120 sentences and 1613 words to shadow. The speech runs for 8:19. The speaker talks fast, about 194 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| simulation noun | /ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/ | Something that simulates a system or environment in order to predict actual behaviour. |
| civilization noun | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | An organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political, or technical… |
| conscious adjective | /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/ | Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active. |
| attractor noun | Something which attracts. | |
| simulate verb | /ˈsɪm.jə.lət/ | To model, replicate, duplicate the behavior, appearance or properties of. |
| cluster noun | /ˈklʌstɚ/ | A bunch or group of several discrete items that are close to each other. |
| quantum noun | /ˈkwɑntəm/ | The total amount of something; quantity. |
| consciousness noun | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. |
| timeline noun | /ˈtaɪmˌlaɪn/ | A graphical representation of a chronological sequence of events (past or future). |
| immortality noun | /ˌɪmɔːɹˈtæləti/ | Never dying |
| outnumber verb | /aʊtˈnʌmbə(ɹ)/ | To be more in number than somebody or something. |
| reassure verb | /ˌɹi.əˈʃʊɹ/ | To assure anew; to restore confidence to; to free from fear or self-doubt. |
| unlearn verb | /ʌnˈlɝn/ | To discard the knowledge of. |
| unsettling adjective | That makes one troubled or uneasy; disquieting or distressing. | |
| render verb | /ˈɹɛn.dɚ/ | To cause to become. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| burn out verb | To destroy by fire. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| leave behind verb | To abandon. |
| pull through verb | To come through pain and trouble through perseverance. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being pulled · being dragged · were simulated |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have ever known · have ever mapped · has been |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Anyone who knew · someone who knows · people who took |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 3 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: simulation /ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, reassure /ˌɹi.əˈʃʊɹ/
- Long words — get the stress right: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, immortality /ˌɪmɔːɹˈtæləti/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, astronomer /əˈstɹɒn.ə.mə/, gravitational /ˌɡɹævɪˈteɪʃənəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like simulation, civilization, conscious.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.