Size of The Universe

Off Topic
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[quote]ephrem wrote:

[quote]RSGZ wrote:

[quote]ephrem wrote:

[quote]RSGZ wrote:
It would suck if we found the edge of the universe and realized there was nothing else out there. Seriously.[/quote]

…haven’t read the rest of the thread, but scientist discovered something they call “darkflow” and this flow may indicate giant masses outside our universe, e.i. other universes: Mysterious cosmic 'dark flow' tracked deeper into universe -- ScienceDaily [/quote]

Very cool.

Now someone needs to discover how we can effectively bend time and travel quickly across millions of light years in space, ala Event Horizon (without the evil stuff, lol).[/quote]

…perhaps that starts here: “(…) that there exists a connection between the members of such a pair that defies both classical and relativistic concepts of space and time.”

[/quote]

Last I read, they don’t even really understand entanglement yet.

It’s also important to note that it only takes that length of time from the perspective of the earth. If you were the one traveling, the trip would be shorter, inversely proportional to speed (the faster you go, the shorter the trip). If you can travel the speed of light, the length of the trip from the travelers perspective is actually 0. The length contracts to nothing.

But figuring out how to get a massed particle up to light speed isn’t necessary (something that is probably physically impossible). Say, from earths perspective, it takes 28 years at 650 million miles an hour to get to a galaxy. HOWEVER, the traveler will experience less than 7 years of time. We have already achieved much higher speeds of massed particles in accelerators, it is possible. Hell, if we were able to travel at the speeds we can achieve in the accelerators, the trip would take less than a week to cover the trillions of miles. It just takes an obscene amount of energy.

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This is a great lecture from Lawrence Krauss, dealing with most of the topics here… (Just ignore the douche Dawkins)

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[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]ephrem wrote:

[quote]RSGZ wrote:

[quote]ephrem wrote:

[quote]RSGZ wrote:
It would suck if we found the edge of the universe and realized there was nothing else out there. Seriously.[/quote]

…haven’t read the rest of the thread, but scientist discovered something they call “darkflow” and this flow may indicate giant masses outside our universe, e.i. other universes: Mysterious cosmic 'dark flow' tracked deeper into universe -- ScienceDaily [/quote]

Very cool.

Now someone needs to discover how we can effectively bend time and travel quickly across millions of light years in space, ala Event Horizon (without the evil stuff, lol).[/quote]

…perhaps that starts here: “(…) that there exists a connection between the members of such a pair that defies both classical and relativistic concepts of space and time.”

[/quote]

Last I read, they don’t even really understand entanglement yet.

It’s also important to note that it only takes that length of time from the perspective of the earth. If you were the one traveling, the trip would be shorter, inversely proportional to speed (the faster you go, the shorter the trip). If you can travel the speed of light, the length of the trip from the travelers perspective is actually 0. The length contracts to nothing.

But figuring out how to get a massed particle up to light speed isn’t necessary (something that is probably physically impossible). Say, from earths perspective, it takes 28 years at 650 million miles an hour to get to a galaxy. HOWEVER, the traveler will experience less than 7 years of time. We have already achieved much higher speeds of massed particles in accelerators, it is possible. Hell, if we were able to travel at the speeds we can achieve in the accelerators, the trip would take less than a week to cover the trillions of miles. It just takes an obscene amount of energy.[/quote]

…what you said reminded me of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion saga where a sort of hyperdrive exists that enables a person to travel at incredible speeds, making interstellar travel possible. The only downside to that was the decelaration; it was so abrupt that nothing could survive it, making the whole endeavour difficult…

64

[quote]IronWarrior34 wrote:
this thread is sick…its bugging me out!! but i cant stop reading about it…sometimes when my freinds and have a few too many drinks and this topic is brought up it leads to some really really funny conversations give it a shot next time…like, “dude, space is huge, when does it end??” than let your drunk friends chime in with their 2cents haha

IronWarrior[/quote]

…i don’t presume to understand most of it, but it’s fun though!

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i dl’d the universe this morning. got a bit of pain, should of worn my weight belt. :frowning:

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.

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He said that we are created from “star dust”. Interesting way to look at it.

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So what do you guys think of the Fermi Paradox ?
The universe so big, yet no one seems to call (whine, whine…)?
Is our species that uncool (even with Obama) ?

Seriously, what do you guys think ?

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[quote]Fuzzyapple wrote:
He said that we are created from “star dust”. Interesting way to look at it.[/quote]

It’s become such a cliche though.

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[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
So what do you guys think of the Fermi Paradox ?
The universe so big, yet no one seems to call (whine, whine…)?
Is our species that uncool (even with Obama) ?

Seriously, what do you guys think ? [/quote]

…even if the universe is teeming with intelligent life, and interstellar spacetravel is as common as taking the train is for us, the vastness of the universe and our remote location compared to the centre of the milkyway prevents easy discovery of our little planet…

…i often wonder what humankind can bring to the table what other species would find amazing, something that’s a one of a kind in the intergalactic empire of sentient beings. Perhaps we’ve been spotted already but deemed uninteresting and barbaric by their standards. Perhaps…

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[quote]bond james bond wrote:
.[/quote]

lmfao

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Look at your hand, and think that in several billion years the molecules that comprise it could conceivably be a part of a star, planet or other celestial body millions of light years away.

Then, use that hand to turn on the TV. Change the channel to TBS. Oh look, “Kickboxer” is on. Why does TBS insist on showing Kickboxer 6-8 times a day?

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[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
So what do you guys think of the Fermi Paradox ?
The universe so big, yet no one seems to call (whine, whine…)?
Is our species that uncool (even with Obama) ?

Seriously, what do you guys think ? [/quote]

There could literally be life on 10% of planets in the universe, and it would still be LIKELY that we haven’t found it with how little of the universe we have observed at the level to find life. The Fermi Paradox isn’t really a paradox at all. For all we know we could have been “contacted” by another civilization by now but it’s going to take their radio signals the same few hundred years to reach us as it did for ours to reach them, assuming there aren’t GIGANTIC gaps in technology. If those gaps in technology do exist, it’s entirely possible that we just lack the ability to comprehend that we are being contacted, and that lack of ability is why another race may not make itself more obviously known(a sort of interstellar IQ test, if you can’t see this signal you need to wait longer before learning about higher beings).

The other thing about the “paradox” is that we also believe evolution to be an extreme chance occurrence, until life evolves to a certain point it will leave no footprint that we can observe. There is a possibility that we are the highest evolved beings in the universe(it would however, be extremely arrogant to assume this, and highly improbable as well).

74

[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
So what do you guys think of the Fermi Paradox ?
The universe so big, yet no one seems to call (whine, whine…)?
Is our species that uncool (even with Obama) ?

Seriously, what do you guys think ? [/quote]

what does it matter? we can’t even get along with ourselves, let alone a being with no concept of what our existence constitutes.

cultures are vastly different just from one side of the planet to the next. We could encounter beings of pure energy, incomprehensible to our primitive meat brains. And we could cease to exist via their hand for reasons we would never be able to understand.

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one word, klingons… we have our ups and downs, eventually we become friends, and I command a star fleet to take over the universe. damn i want a starship bad

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Scientists are reaching the limits of their ability to understand the universe with the existing physical theories. One such area where there is an inability to currently make any useful attempts at explanation is the extremely short period of time just after the big bang, when energy was so dense that gravitational effects were influential at the quantum scale. In the universe humans have been able to explore, the strong and weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force are so many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity that at the sub-atomic scale, these forces rule, and the effects of gravity are negligibly small. For this reason theories at this scale have ignored gravity and, for the most part, relativity. Likewise, on the large scale, because of the limited range over which the nuclear forces influence matter, and the fact that mass at large scale tends to be electrically neutral, gravity is the interaction that defines the make-up of the universe and how it structures itself. But the weakness of Relativity is that it ignores quantum truths, such as the fact that the universe is discrete, rather than continuous. It also may or may not be deterministic (quantum mechanics isn’t well enough understood to say definitively). It is actually fortunate that gravity has just the value it has, because it is just the right strength for the formation of stars (I’m grossly oversimplifying, of course). If gravity were much stronger, the stars that formed would be too small and burn out much too quickly. If gravity were even weaker than it is, far less matter would collect to form stars in the first place, and the stars that did form would be enormous and explode, I believe. I haven’t double checked that info so it could be wrong.

But anyway the point I was getting at is that physics is almost stuck until it successfully develops a workable and verifiable theory of quantum gravity. This is of course what String Theory is supposed to be, but I have doubts about string theory being correct, especially given it is a theory formulated in a Newtonian background, one in which space and time are absolute. I have more hope for Loop Quantum Gravity, because it fully embraces the relational universe which we know more accurately describes the universe. I also think that a theory of quantum gravity will be necessary to solve the conundrums of the black holes.

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[quote]PimpBot5000 wrote:
Look at your hand, and think that in several billion years the molecules that comprise it could conceivably be a part of a star, planet or other celestial body millions of light years away.

Then, use that hand to turn on the TV. Change the channel to TBS. Oh look, “Kickboxer” is on. Why does TBS insist on showing Kickboxer 6-8 times a day? [/quote]

See, These are the fundamental questions of the universe.