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Wow The Universe Is Huge

Kommander_Kink

Kommander_Kink

Banned
I just read in a book something that should seal the fate of the human fantasy to explore space. The book said that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. To reach the next star it will take 4 years at the speed of light, so relatively if the beach in Miami was our galaxy it would take 4 years to travel from one grain of sand to the next one and thats only if you are travelling at the impossible and fantasy speed of light. To reach the next galaxy at Fort Myers, Fla. for example it will take 100,000 years at the speed of light, now can you imagine trying to reach the grains of sand in a beach in Indonesia? It boggles the mind, we are dead in the water.
 
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Ye of little faith.

Type II civilizations may be able to travel among stars thru extreme warping of spacetime (eg, black holes/wormholes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

In addition, if you had read "A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime" by John Archibald Wheeler, then you would see that it is also possible to go anywhere in the universe with a sufficiently fast rocket. "With speed close enough to the speed of light, we can make the aging factor so small that while the Earth and stars age 50 billion years, we age 40 years. The extent of space and time that in principle is accessible to a single mortal is almost inconceivable." - Quote from Pg53, Chapter 3 "Interval: That All of Space is Ours"

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Gravit.../dp/0716750163
 
If we are some how able to get to close to the speed of light when compared to earth on the ship it will take far less time for those traveling on the spaceship.

Otherwise we will have to figure out some exotic form of travel. Something like bending spacetime around the spaceship so that instead of moving though space we expand or contract space. Sorta like the way space is expanding faster than the speed of light.
 
The universe is expanding at faster than the speed of light? So what is in place right now in those X points where the universe has not yet reached? Empty space? But is not empty space part of the universe already?
 
This question is based on the ever popular misconception that the Universe is some curved object embedded in a higher dimensional space, and that the Universe is expanding into this space. This misconception is probably fostered by the balloon analogy which shows a 2-D spherical model of the Universe expanding in a 3-D space. While it is possible to think of the Universe this way, it is not necessary, and there is nothing whatsoever that we have measured or can measure that will show us anything about the larger space. Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see, and this is not a profitable thing to think about. Just as Dali's Corpus Hypercubicus is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D object that represents the surface of a 4-D cube, remember that the balloon analogy is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D situation that is supposed to help you think about a curved 3-D space, but it does not mean that there is really a 4-D space that the Universe is expanding into.
 
Might be totally wrong but I always thought of this as: Expanding not "into something" but EVERYTHING is expanding, including the space between atoms, space between grains of sand, planets, etc.
 
C1 said:
With speed close enough to the speed of light, we can make the aging factor so small that while the Earth and stars age 50 billion years, we age 40 years.http://detonator.dynamitedata.com/c...y-Spacetime-Scientific-American/dp/0716750163
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It would suck spending 40 years in a space ship and when you reach the destination you find that 50 billion years of technological advancement has already brought about faster-than-light travel, seen the planet colonized, stripped of resources and reduced to a slum world worse than the one you left.
 
lord_emperor said:
It would suck spending 40 years in a space ship and when you reach the destination you find that 50 billion years of technological advancement has already brought about faster-than-light travel, seen the planet colonized, stripped of resources and reduced to a slum world worse than the one you left.
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😀
 
Imagine that you had the power to travel instantaneously to any destination. Of course you want to tour the Universe and see it's marvels, so you start visiting other solar systems immediately. There are a whole lot of them, so you decide to spend only one hour at each one. Assume you have an 80 year life span, and started the tour on the day of your birth, and kept travelling until the hour of your death (now that's motivation!).

You were able to visit 700,800 star systems in this time period, which is approximately 0.0005% of the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. In spite of your lifelong whirlwind tour of the Universe, you didn't even have time to get a good look at your own galaxy!

You next realize that there are more galaxies in the Universe than there are stars in the Milky Way, and spend your last moments lamenting that there are so many things you didn't have time to see :-(

t-man
 
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C1 said:
Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see.
Click to expand...

Okay, finally someone got my question right.

So you are saying that the universe simply auto-creates its own space as it expands? Do you know how silly this notion sounds? Regardless it's the most plausible one. Anyways, I'll leave this question to be answered by the quasi physicists that exist in this forum, the same ones that said in my other thread that I was a teenager not fit to discuss physics 🙂
 
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All this stuff is very complicated and unless you already have a lot of knowledge it's not going to make any sense. So all you are getting is a dumbed down explanation about what is thought to be happening, or what is happening. If you want a good explanation about a lot of these questions you might have there are good books out there. Or head over to something like physicsforums.com and ask your questions or search for your questions. You will get great answers
 
What if the universe is what it is.

Sound only has a definition when there is someone to hear it, otherwise it is just a series of compression waves in a 3D elastic media.

The question of the "Universe" and "space" somehow being two different things is rather inconsequential, as there is no way to see what is not there.

The universe itself is not expanding faster than the speed of light. It is expanding as fast as theory will take it.



PS: LE = Movie plot!!
 
Like every debate, the first thing to do is define the terms. What is the definition of the "universe"? I used to really be into this sort of discussion, but not so much anymore, so I dont really know. But I think that when people say the "universe" is expanding, they really mean the material that we can see that is moving away. If the universe is defined as everything that exists, it can only be "expanding" if either matter and/or space (or both) is being created from nothing. Even if you say that all matter is moving away from other matter, as someone else said, what is it moving into? Wouldnt what it is moving into already be part of the "universe"?
 
Even if you say that all matter is moving away from other matter, as someone else said, what is it moving into? Wouldnt what it is moving into already be part of the "universe"?
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Exactly.

And who is to say that there ISN'T another "universe" in space? If the only way we can tell is by reception of EM waves, what happens if there are OTHER Big Bangs going on? What if one happened a trillion years ago over a trillion light years away?

What if our universe is just the equivalent of a sub atomic particle in yet a larger system?





WHAT IF HORTON HEARS A GODDAMN WHO??!?!?!?!
 
Turtle.Man said:
Imagine that you had the power to travel instantaneously to any destination. Of course you want to tour the Universe and see it's marvels, so you start visiting other solar systems immediately. There are a whole lot of them, so you decide to spend only one hour at each one. Assume you have an 80 year life span, and started the tour on the day of your birth, and kept travelling until the hour of your death (now that's motivation!).

You were able to visit 700,800 star systems in this time period, which is approximately 0.0005% of the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. In spite of your lifelong whirlwind tour of the Universe, you didn't even have time to get a good look at your own galaxy!

You next realize that there are more galaxies in the Universe than there are stars in the Milky Way, and spend your last moments lamenting that there are so many things you didn't have time to see :-(

t-man
Click to expand...

What you need is a "universe crawler" that travels to every star system long enough to record data (1-2 millisecond) and send out several billion of these in every spherical arc from Earth. Have them relay the data to a "google-like" database and simply search for something notable that you are looking for.

For example "System with 9 planets with atleast one planet with liquid water orbiting around a class G star" and get the filtered results and only visit those.

Assuming the ability exist, why do we humans have to do any of the grunt work?
 
What C1 said. That's the most logical way of "exploring" the universe. Thus, if we're going to be "contacted by aliens," very likely, our first contact would be with robots. (Unless there was a logical reason not to do this.)
 
THE NOTION OF MILLIONS OF STARS AND GALAXIES IN OUR UNIVERSE IS ALL A "LIE": TOP ASTRONOMER SAYS

and I totally believe this assumption. He said that if this was true we would be blinded by a white wall of lights from so many light-emitting stars and also blank space in the universe would be white not black.

C'mon it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. Go to field in the dark and have 100,000 people with flashlights spaced out around you and shining their flashlights at your face, would you see a white wall or a black wall around you? Would you see another group of 10,000 people beyong that group of 100,000? No you wouldn't, I rest my case.
 
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Kirk, I assume you're trolling, but so many posts in Highly Technical seem like that to me so I guess I'll respond.

First, by "top astronomer," I assume you mean Thomas Digges, who did indeed make that argument in the late 1500s. Luckily, astronomy has progressed more than a little since then.

Olbers' paradox, as this idea has been known since the early 1800s, was still something of a conundrum until the early 1900s. It was, in fact, one of the early indications that the universe was not at steady state. This ties into some of the other confusion posters have expressed in this thread about the very well understood behavior of universal expansion. If you'd like to catch up with the last century of discussion, rather than looking to arguments made by forum posters with no relevant education, read the well written Olbers' paradox article on Wikipedia and then follow some of the cosmic inflation links.

As I reread Kirk's post I'm now 100% sure I've been trolled - not only is it nonsensical, but we have directly seen far more than "millions of stars and galaxies" in telescopes. Hopefully my trollability at least leads someone to some better sources of information, though.
 
McWatt so asking for definite hard evidence is considered trolling to you? Have we literally counted billions of stars one by one or are we just assuming about the numbers? How is it possible to see other galaxies with telescopes when theres billions of stars between us and them? Explain that one to me or do you think Im still trolling? Im a hardcore skeptic if you dont mind.
 
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