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I asked ChatGPT what would happen. Here you go:
If every atom in the universe suddenly gained one extra electron, the result would be instant, universe-ending chaos — in less than a nanosecond. Here’s why:
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1. Universal Negative Charge Imbalance
Right now, matter is electrically neutral — the positive charges in nuclei balance the negative charges of electrons. Adding one electron to every atom makes every single atom negatively charged. The universe instantly becomes dominated by repulsive electrostatic forces.
Coulomb’s law tells us electric forces are ~10³⁶ times stronger than gravity. That means: • Atoms would violently repel each other. • Molecules couldn’t hold together. • Planets, stars, and galaxies — all held together by gravity — would be ripped apart by overwhelming electrostatic repulsion.
Within moments, all normal matter disintegrates into a plasma of electrons and nuclei being hurled away from each other.
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2. Collapse of Atomic and Molecular Structure
Each atom now has one more electron than its nucleus can bind: • The extra electron would either occupy a weakly bound outer orbital or be completely unbound. • Chemical bonds depend on balanced electron sharing — those would fail instantly. • Solids, liquids, and gases all cease to exist in recognizable form.
Essentially, chemistry ends. There’s no more “matter” in the familiar sense — just a roiling cloud of charged particles.
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3. Energy Release on an Unimaginable Scale
The addition of an electron to every atom requires — or releases — colossal energy, depending on the element and context: • Ionization energies and electron affinities differ between atoms. • You’re effectively forcing a global-scale electron capture reaction.
But the real kicker is that the sudden Coulomb repulsion between everything would dwarf any nuclear explosion imaginable. The entire universe’s matter would “explode” outward — far beyond the speed of galactic escape velocities — powered by the electrostatic potential energy now released.
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4. No Stable Matter, No Light, No Universe
With matter annihilated into a universal electron-ion plasma: • Photons would scatter off free charges (via Thomson scattering). • The universe would become completely opaque. • Eventually, as it expands and cools, you might end up with diffuse clouds of charged particles, but never stable atoms again.
You’d basically reset the universe to something like an ultra-energetic pre-recombination plasma — except with the wrong charge balance and no chance of re-neutralizing.
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In short:
Adding one extra electron to every atom would: • Destroy all atomic and molecular structure. • Overwhelm gravity entirely. • Convert the universe into a high-energy, negatively charged plasma. • Likely erase all physical structures — stars, planets, life, everything — in an instant.
It’s not a slow catastrophe; it’s an immediate, total one.
Maybe that’s what happened with the big bang. Some ent just randomly wished the protons and neutrons liked each other and electrons have to just dance around them instead of the stable atomic pudding as observed and proven by J.J Thomson which made sure the world was flat and unchanging, moving only on the whims of the Great A’tuin.
We now have this mess where things are spinning and rolling around. Absolute nonsense I tell you. It’s all chaotic and unbalanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly everything popped or ripped apart.
This reminds me of the sketch from Chris and Jack, where one person tries to outsmart a genie with the perfect wish and almost succeeds, but ultimately fails.
Chris n Jack are hilarious!
Fun fact : Jack is Jack de sena - Voice actor of sokka from Avatar the Last Airbender.
They have cameos from other voice actors from the show as well in their skits.
Wish granted: the same electron is added to all atoms in the universe.
This one single electron is created in a quantum state described by a wave function that is uniformly distributed over every atom in the universe. This wave function collapses nearly instantaneously to a single position, and the end result is that one random atom in the entire universe gains one electron.
Nothing of interest happens.
Can the wish include a --dry-run option before going for it fully?
That’s the Chris and Jack sketch currently listed above somewhere in this thread on my client.
-whatif
Considering how intentionally malecious the side effects of typical genie-wishes tend to be, the extra electron probably comes to rest in the wishers hypophysis and causes a free radical that leads to a rare sort of cancer that prevents the wisher from falling asleep ever again, so he dies in madness scratching out his own eyes.
0r something similar along that line.0r something similar along that line.
I’m really bothered by that zero 0 instead of an o O.
Oh, you are right…
Sorry, handwriting recognition sometimes has its own mind.
And this error must have slipt my prove reading as it is just too well camouflaged…Using a drawing pad for typing, and spelling the word “slipt” !?! could a prophet truly be among us???
No, just using the standard Gboard on Android. It has build-in handwriting recognition which for some reasons I like better than the standard virtual keyboard.
And regarding the remaining typing errors: just take them as an indication that I’m very likely not an AI ;-)
The “slipt” was probably caused by a false-friends-like scenario based on the translated word in my mother tongue: “entschlüpft”.
Notice the added “t” at the end that denotes the past tense.Today I learned: that there is a more exciting word than (false) “cognate” to describe an appearance of similar words between languages that may (or may not) have similar meaning as each other. Danke, meine “false-friend” 8)
its like the wishmaster GENIE(djinn) which is really demons, since demons also grant wishes. he gives wishes but the wishes always have unintentional consequences if your not very specific. I think Xfiles there was a genie episode, where mulder was able to grant a “true wish” that end up negating everything(the bad wishes). or like shikon jewel which doesnt really grant a true wish to a person.
Coincidently I watched the X-Files episode a few weeks back.
I loved it!
It is one of their more dark comedy ones with some philosophical topics.
No “true wish” at the end, as far I remember, but a nice twist and imo quite satisfying ending.
It’s all fun and games until someone points out that anti-atoms are predicted to have identical properties to atoms.
Then the whole chiral parity symmetry stuff gets involved, and you talk about quantized spacetime, and how come the entire universe is essentially perturbations on a continous universe spanning set of fields, and things start getting existential.
I personally believe time is the real problem.
Look into projection theory. a 3d object casts a 2d shadow, so a 4d object would cast a 3d shadow. The implications of that are wild.
Are you referring to the holographic principal?
My dad is a mathematician and loves to play with it. He’s got entire notebooks with it but unfortunately nothing profound (he was a professor for years). Mostly just proofs resulting in what’s already been published (not sure why, maybe he’s looking for something or just thinks it’s cool?)
I think this is much more challenging than One Block Minecraft
go with the one electron theory, how can you add an elecron to every atom when there’s already only one electron in the whole universe.
Well now there are two electrons in the universe and their job is way easier.
except that in the single electron theory, all electrons and positrons are the same object going back and forth through time, bouncing from the end of the universe and the big bang, adding another electron might double the mass in the universe
So that’s how matter won over antimatter.
Classic case of “history is written by the victors”. You only call it antimatter because it lost, if it won, you’d call it matter.
The genie granted two wishes at once. The other was from a speed runner.
During the race, an ionizing particle from outer space collided with DOTA_Teabag’s N64, flipping the eighth bit of Mario’s first height byte. Specifically, it flipped the byte from 11000101 to 11000100, from “C5” to “C4”. This resulted in a height change from C5837800 to C4837800, which by complete chance, happened to be the exact amount needed to warp Mario up to the higher floor at that exact moment.
boooring now do the apocalypse
The real question isn’t if the universe ends…
It’s if the genie magic expands outward from the source at the speed of light, or if it’s instantaneous everywhere, which would allow information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light, allowing for violations of causality, and destroying our fundamental understanding of the universe before we all died.
This assumes the genie doesn’t have access to some weird higher-reality or higher-“dimensional” power. For instance, if the universe is a simulation, then perhaps the genie has access to a console.
And you don’t call discovering that the universe is a simulation “destroying our fundamental understanding of the universe”?
Yes and no. Nothing that we know about the universe preclude it being a simulation, so learning only that it is a simulation is more expanding out fundamental understanding of the universe. However, as things stand, we are pretty damn convinced that nothing violates causality while following the internal rules of the universe, so if the genie did that without invoking some power we might call “outside the universe”, then we learn that the universe can internally violate causality - THAT might destroy our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Not if the universe is inside the genie.
It’s genies all the way down.
It’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really fun to think about taking a speed of light ride.
You wouldn’t have any time to appreciate it.
Well, it’s not a bowl.
No. It’s inside you. For listening to the genie.
The genie didn’t do anything. It was you the whole time!
real question, is there a difference?
In theory yes, but for any observer, it won’t matter and it’s all the same to them, as they cannot observe any difference in either case.
The fermion number conservation would be violated anyways.
1.) I wish the speed of light were 60 MPH.
2.) I wish nothing could travel slower than light.
3.) I wish for the genie’s freedom.
- Granted. The definition of a mile is now 1/60th of the distance travelled by light in an hour.
- This is already the case, as matter travels through time and space at the speed of light. The speed of light is the only speed, the only variable is how much of that speed is used in space or time.
Sounds like a case for xkcd’s what if
Did someone read The Laundry Files? What you are describing is approximately used in making a Basilisk Gun
Turns out, there’s a rule against exterminating all life in the universe with a wish, but the genie doesn’t know what an electron is or what adding one to every atom will do, so you’ve found yourself a loophole.
Genie, while looking up Wikipedia:
Aah, I understand. Nice wish, granted!Wouldn’t that make reality crash? Unless the genie can spawn all the electrons at once, but in that case you’d be talking to god.
I’m a physicist, not a genie, and I have no fucking clue what adding an electron to every atom would do. I can’t even begin to fathom the question.
I don’t know either, I just think the consequences would be universally negative.
Whatever it is that happens, it would be pretty violent.
“What If” had a slightly different, more localized but more concentrated premise it covered once:
Electron MoonQuote:
“This is, by far, the most destructive What-If scenario to date.”break all chemical bonds immediately, there will probably be further consequences regarding a universal electron imbalance, but we would already be atomised
just choose an electron somewhere random in the universe, and declare said electron to be the legal property of every atom in the universe. problem solved
I think in this way, one universe was obliterated and ours was created at the big bang.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” - Douglas Adams
So basically the simulation argument where the guys running the simulation are watching us.
Potentially. Douglas Adam’s imagined a lot of weird shit, and was also good at combining words in ways that drove imagination in the readers even if he didn’t have any specific thing in mind when written.
His words here could be taken to mean “God” didn’t want to be known/understood, like the Tower of Babel.
Unrelated to the previous, the Elder Scrolls mythos contains a sort of transcendence concept called CHIM, which involves coming to fully understand reality and the person’s relationship to it. Since that reality is, according to at least some, a dream, that means accepting that you are just a part of a dream. Managing to fundamentally internalize that without winking out of existence is apparently extraordinarily difficult. All that to say, perhaps a similar mechanic could drive the “dream” to reset itself, or start anew.
seriously, a single meaningless executive order or law. could make that wosh happen without ant magic
my wish is to change the mass of the proton.
To 23 lbs
*23 N
What will 1 extra electron do? Destroy universe?
Is it like every Proton has an anti-proton and if it wasnt perfectly balanced the universe would fall apart? Ive heard something like that before…
or would mess with the chemical bonds of all chemistry, likely breaking up every single molecule into individual atoms, immediately killing everyone and destroy everything
Lots of things become conductive.
It’ll be like a Coulombic explosion, but with an excess of negative instead of positive charges.
Everywhere in the universe where matter forms lumps, they would disintegrate.
Is there an XKCD What If about this? Sounds exactly like that territory.
Not 100% identical scenario, but near enough:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/Idk, but if not, I bet there’s an SMBC with an exponential implosion of the nonsense and then some.
ls this some kind of problem at all?
I mean, it is not wishing to add an electron to each atom in the Universe…I don’t get the difference
See e.g. here.
The relevant part:
The second difference between each, every, and all impacts how the objects of a sentence are distributed among the members of the group. Look at this:
Each child wore a hat. → one hat per child
Every child wore a hat. → one hat per child
All the children wore a hat. → the children shared one hat
So the wish would add one additional electron to the entire universe.
Ooh thank you!
To the set of all atoms in the universe, add one single, extra electron. Easy peasy:-).
Good catch
False vacuum … expansion?
