The Immensity of The Cosmos

[Still-One]

This picture from the European Space Agency depicts the immensity of the Cosmos as every point of light is a "entire Galaxy". And I felt small before.

[mchydro]

According to my count they missed one. Lol

[radio times]

Yep, according to the latest cosmology research, there are two trillion galaxies in the known so far universe. And we are a pinprick in one of them, and what we see in the night sky is a tiny fragment. The man creates everything brigade take a little stumble.

[Catcher10]

This is the most amazing topic to me.......I am not sure how you even put into words the size and scope of what is in space.
The actual picture in time, somewhere up there a gazillion miles away is the start of what we are.

[bigblue]

There are more stars in the known universe than grains of sand on Earth.
And each single grain of sand has more atoms than there are stars in the Universe.

[JemHadar]

Our Milky Way galaxy is a modest 100.000 lightyears in diameter.

Heinrich Rudolph Hertz tickled the electromagnetic field in 1888. Maybe David Edward Hughes generated airborne electromagnetic waves as far back as 1880.

For sake of argument those photons, as much as they are lost in background noise, are now 130/138 lightyears out. Barely a foot out of the door.

If you take Marconi as a starting point, we are talking a sphere mildly in excess of 200 lightyears in diameter. Try to spot the blue dot

IMG_1820.jpg

Although the chronology of broadcast signals in the opening scene of the motion picture “Contact” does not make sense it remains one of my favorite scenes of all time.

https://youtu.be/EWwhQB3TKXA

To appreciate how slow the speed of light is, or how vast “The Expanse” is...check this one out

https://youtu.be/1AAU_btBN7s

If only we had an Epstein Drive

https://youtu.be/SIaGXcEnC74

https://youtu.be/JWZqp0QoXcw

All credit to the original content creators

...ah...and then there is the Fermi Paradox ; “Where are the Aliens ?”

There are many scenario’s...but this is one of the more sobering ones : Life is inevitable given the right conditions. Intelligent life is harder. The sustainability of civilisations is poor. Civilisations flicker in and out of existence at breakneck speed all over the cosmos taking into account cosmological timescales, but maybe only one or two per galaxy. Given the vast distances and constraint of the speed of light the chances of scoring a date are pretty much nonexistent.

[PHC1]

Vast universe indeed and keeps on expanding. One of the most difficult things to grasp is that as far as we can tell, there is no beginning, there is no end, it just is. Something not having an edge is a strange concept to us, surely most would love to know what lies beyond the edge or on the "outside"...

By definition, the universe contains everything, so there is no "outside." Physicist Stephen Hawking has often said that the whole question makes no sense, because if the universe came from nothing and brought everything into existence, then asking what lies beyond the universe is like asking what is north of the North Pole.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by Jem666

For sake of argument those photons, as much as they are lost in background noise, are now 130/138 lightyears out. Barely a foot out of the door.

That's as to our frame of reference. Problem being is that when a particle is traveling at the speed of light, such as the case of a Photon... Well, time does not exist for the Photon! As per Einstein and science agrees. Time stops at the speed of light.

Photon is born and in the same instant it is absorbed by a beautiful woman laying on the beach of Saint Tropez. That is life at the speed of light....

[Audiophilehi]

If you put all the beaches together on our planet we wouldn’t even be a grain of sand in the mackup of all the galaxies.

[JemHadar]

Originally Posted by PHC1

That's as to our frame of reference. Problem being is that when a particle is traveling at the speed of light, such as the case of a Photon... Well, time does not exist for the Photon! As per Einstein and science agrees. Time stops at the speed of light.

Photon is born and in the same instant it is absorbed by a beautiful woman laying on the beach of Saint Tropez. That is life at the speed of light....

My dear Serge....you are so right...massless excitations of quantum fields do not experience time....which is odd as they are oscillations in said quantum field. Lee smolin posits time is fundamental and not an emerging property as most theoretical physicists proclaim...now that is something to ponder.

As I’m watching the beautiful movie “Les Maîtres du temps” by Rene Laloux, I do get the feeling we are chasing epicycles. The standard model of particle physics, as astoundingly beautiful and successful as it is only accounts for 5% of the observable universe.

Maybe Max Tegmark is on to something: if a mathematical construct holds, there will be a physical manifestation of it. Humanity just has not discovered all of mathematics yet.

But Serge...in how many parsecs did you make the Kessel Run ?