Proton lifetime was a puzzler for me too

urrent work on GUT suggests the existence of another force-carrier particle that causes the proton to decay. Such decays are extremely rare; a proton's lifetime is more than 10E32 years.

Then I realized that nothing exists except to the extent  the vacuum has the SNR. Everything is vacuum, nothing escapes the necessity of SNR to maintain quants.  SNR is a ratio, we need either a strong signal, or less noise. Physicists focus on the less noise, but lack of a strong signal works to undo the proton. Signal is ultimately the measure of space curvature. If the proton cannot see space curvature, it will go look for it, in parts. The proton charge is impedance matched to the necessary space curvature, that is an antenna for phase imbalance in the vacuum. Without the curvature, it comes apart.

What kind of causality made space curvature match proton charge? Only one thing, the cyclic behavior of the universe. If we think the proton lasts 10E20 years, and the universe is 10e10  years big, then it took the universe 10E10 cycles to get the curvature to match. But it could have been many simultaneous cycles in the beginning, the universe slowly becoming connected.

Compare the rate of space expansion you think is happening, with the precision of the proton.