Elite just made me feel small.

Privata

Privata
ahwala said:
Galaxies form groups and clusters, which themselves form superclusters, which form filaments, and those are afaik the largest known structures in the observable universe.
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I should have looked that up... wierd that I never came across any mention of this.
Anwyay thank you for that bit of info , the universe is so amazing and its horrible to be stuck on this planet. sure earth is amazing... but space , no word for how awesome it is can possibly be expressed with words
 
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DaveB

DaveB
GJ51 said:
Enough fun

Now go get your head around the concept of Planck time...
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Once you get that the Planck length is the smallest distance it is ever possible to measure in the physical universe, even with an impossible device with theoretically infinite resolution, the idea of the time it takes for light to cross that distance isnt that hard. It's all bloody quantum anyway. There's always quantum. It gleefully screws your universe quite nicely.
 

Ziljan

Ziljan
Being insignificant in the grand scheme definitely takes the pressure off. But there is another way of looking at it.

It takes time for complex materials to form and create the building blocks of life. And the violence of the Universe has only recently calmed down enough to give life a chance to evolve without being obliterated by incessant deadly sterilizing radiation from bursts of star formation and death. Yet these star deaths are what create the materials necessary for life. So only very young stars have enough of the recycled heavy elements needed to create complex life forms like you and I.

Our star is actually abnormally rich in these building block materials, and it took 4 billion years for primitive life to evolve into Us. So really, we might be the FIRST intelligent life forms in the galaxy! Which not only explains the Fermi Paradox, but also means that we would all indeed very rare and therefore quite special.
 
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askavir

askavir
[video=youtube;p86BPM1GV8M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M[/video]

[video=youtube;4S69zZwYrx0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S69zZwYrx0[/video]
 

NeilKD

NeilKD
Okay, let's put things into proper perspective.

The Observable Universe is about 90 billion light years in diameter. That's just the bit we can see. Although the Universe is just under 14 billion years old, because of expansion the photons of the Cosmic Background Radiation have traveled 45 billion light years to get to us so that is the radius.

The best current estimates are that the whole Universe, including the bits we can't see because they are too far away, is at least 250 times bigger than the Observable Universe. http://tinyurl.com/zwyrvyf

Now that is a thought that is just a little bit too big to fit inside my head.
 

varonica

varonica
Privata said:
I should have looked that up... wierd that I never came across any mention of this.
Anwyay thank you for that bit of info , the universe is so amazing and its horrible to be stuck on this planet. sure earth is amazing... but space , no word for how awesome it is can possibly be expressed with words
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And now wrap your head around something like the Great Attractor -> The Great Attractor is a gravitational anomaly in intergalactic space within the vicinity of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster at the centre of the Laniakea Supercluster that reveals the existence of a localised concentration of mass tens of thousands of times more massive than the Milky Way

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor

2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa.jpg
 

GJ51

GJ51
And the biggest secret they won't tell you is that none of this was here until you were born...

or at most, a few months before then.
 

Mephane

Mephane
Ziljan said:
Which not only explains the Fermi Paradox, but also means that we would all indeed very rare and therefore quite special.
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That is if one even accepts that there is a paradox. I say us not seeing anyone is a combination of a) the indicators we expect are not those that happen in reality and b) the actual indicators that are there may still be beyond the reach of our sensors and/or computers. Heck, SETI could have been listening to interstellar radio communication all the time and it is merely so heavily encrypted far beyond the limit what we could hope to even distinguish from random noise, let alone decrypt.
 
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frostypaw

frostypaw
Mephane said:
Heck, SETI could have been listening to interstellar radio communication all the time and it is merely so heavily encrypted far beyond the limit what we could hope to even distinguish from random noise, let alone decrypt.
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This is a theory I talk about - The Intelligibility Bubble that starts with us sending out radio waves and ends with encryption. Suddenly an easily decoded stream can become a constant flow of apparently random data - the day we switch off the FM transmitters might be the day we go dark.

Timing's the issue - there could be millions of civilisations spread across our galaxy alone and still to detect them they have to have evolved and developed to exactly the right few hundred(?) year window of Intelligibility at the right time for their distance for us to have a single chance of picking them up if we're looking in the right direction.
 

Pennacchi

P
Stupid_hippy said:
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams
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Anything from Adams always improves the day :cool:

My 5 year old keeps on asking; 'Daddy, can we play the space game?' I am only too happy to indulge this [heart]
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
Also, keep in mind that the observable universe is just that. We can only look so far out as we can only see so far back in time, the time that it takes for the light – edit: and now gravitational waves, some of which my computer is busy looking for as I type this :) – of those events to reach us. The universe may be much larger still than we can see.
 
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who?

who?
Ziljan said:
Our star is actually abnormally rich in these building block materials, and it took 4 billion years for primitive life to evolve into Us. So really, we might be the FIRST intelligent life forms in the galaxy! Which not only explains the Fermi Paradox, but also means that we would all indeed very rare and therefore quite special.
Click to expand...

Hah!

I wasn't aware of our sun being in any way special (other than to us!) in its composition. But I had thought that whoever were the first first sentient/'intelligent' species to evolve would inevitably speculate that in a galaxy this enormous, what are the odds that they are the only intelligent life? But as probable as that sounds, "we exist, therefore we are not alone" isn't necessarily a logical assumption.

(As for Fermi Paradox, I don't think it's that much of a mystery. Interstellar travel requires a very high level of evolutionary development - and all the environmental resources and stability to enable that. It's also resource expensive. Unless someone masters superluminal travel it's massively time consuming. They would have to find us, one star system among 400 billion. And - I think this is a crucial one - any species sufficiently evolved to find and reach us, would also likely have the awareness of the competitive, selfish, violent nature of life*. Perhaps they just wouldn't want to meet us?)

* assuming life on other planets works on the same principles on other worlds as here.
 
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