REVscene Automotive Forum - The Scale of the Universe

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The Scale of the Universe

what an amazing and beautiful accident it is.

Quote:

Originally Posted by white_guilt (Post 7576051)

what an amazing and beautiful accident it is.

Accident?? :fuckthatshit:

no one knows if it was an accident or not.......

anyways. i always feel blown away by the relationship of us, macrocosm, microcosm... beginning and end.

where did the drive for survival at all levels of life come?

my mind will forever have the question till i die, intelligent order or chance.

its depressing that i will never fully comprehend the entire universe but exciting at the same time to experience persistent change around us.

the drive for survival was random, chance. if you roll an infinite amount of infinite sided dice together and an infinite amount of times, you're bound to get the right combo, thats how big the universe is

and I hafta go to work tomorrow at 8am

1 question.

how do we even know what the universe looks like, and where it ends? is this all just artist impression?

we can measure it using science, duh.

rofl, no we can't. They are at best a very very rough estimate. They can throw a random number and nobody will even doubt.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ulic Qel-Droma (Post 7576277)

:fulloffuck:
lol, couldn't follow your analogy of dice rolling and survival... and how it has to do with random chance.
But the universe is very big, indeed.

I think this was posted somewhere on rs before

http://www.techvert.com/wp-content/u...e-Universe.jpg

dice roll chance analogy always bothered me. or rather response to the unknown and saying there isn't a pattern(random, chance) because only at the moment we don't see a pattern. Who knows one day we may discover that there is more than just randomness to us. aliens, god, 2nd race from the comet crash etc...

If you slide the thing back and forth real quick you feel like God or Q from star trek. :fullofwin:

sorry, but I laughed at the "beautiful accident" part..

I just have a hard time believing that something as intelligent as us can exist.. (and who knows, maybe even more intelligent beings similar to us exist) without the chance of an all knowing and incomprehensibly intelligent entity being behind it all. Everything has a pattern and reason ..

If science and common sense has taught ME anything ..it's that something can not come from nothing ..

If you feel like replying to me with "but God can?", I'll gladly have a conversation with you via PM :)

Quote:

we can measure it using science, duh.

I think we need to be careful not to blindly trust science either. A lot of it is guessing, albeit educated guessing.. but guessing nonetheless.

It's a human practice and very flawed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by AzNightmare (Post 7577452)

:fulloffuck:
lol, couldn't follow your analogy of dice rolling and survival... and how it has to do with random chance.
But the universe is very big, indeed.

if every side (infinite) of the die had some attribute or factor, and there were near an infinite amount of these, and you had an infinite amount of dies, and an infinite amount of rolls, you'd eventually come up with the combination that included the drive for survival (or almost anything possible, you'd just have to roll the dice a shit load of times, which is what the universe has done or provided).

Quote:

Originally Posted by frozen (Post 7577212)

rofl, no we can't. They are at best a very very rough estimate. They can throw a random number and nobody will even doubt.

yes we can.

even if we are wrong, it is still the most accurate thing we have.

would you rather scientists tell you "that is only knowledge god may know".

fuck that, we're smart enough to figure out roughly how big our universe is, ROUGHLY is good enough for our purposes, we're not trying to send a microscopic spaceship across the universe and land it on a specific dust particle at a specific time in space.

so what if we're off by a few billion years? or a few billion light years? or few billion anything. you know how little difference that makes?

in fact it doesnt make any difference, because we wont know anyway.

i can tell you this, the scale we have now, is either right, or it's wrong, and if it's wrong, the universe is much bigger, how about that? what's there to argue? oh noo the universe is MUCH bigger than the scientists think... well no shit, it PROBABLY IS.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anjew (Post 7577534)

read up fractals.

random is also a pattern, it only appears almost totally random, from our perspective.

everything is a fractal. we live in a fractal world.

in fact, fractals are opposite of chaos. it's actually order. we live in a very orderly universe. from some perspective, there's ALWAYS a pattern.

yup. the picture the fellow posted a few posts above is also an example of fractals.

solar systems, galaxies, clusters, super clusters. they're all the same thing just on a bigger scale.

I found the flash very cool but what bothers me is it doesnt really give you the "FEEL" of how big the universe is, cuz the further you get from the small objects, the faster you're travelling, but your scrolling is constant.

this gives you a better idea of how big things really are. im not sure how accurate it is, but you can use the information to get a feel of what im talking about anyway:

Quote:

There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.

According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.

Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.

So how big is our universe?

HUGE

So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.

According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 10^35 light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 10^35 lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 10^60 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 10^60 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.

This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 10^18 light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 10^35 light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?

3.7 billion years.

Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10^100 galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 10^23 atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 10^60. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10^100 is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.

Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10^100 is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.

For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 10^75 advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!

Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.

So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.