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155 Comments
- CletusJones, on 10/10/2007, -8/+42http://flamewarrior.com/billions.htm
I think this page has a better way of putting it. But I still dugg this! - jmpeagle, on 10/10/2007, -3/+32here is where the analogy break down. How can I simultaneously hold a ballpoint pen and a ping pong ball 15 feet apart?
- Shadowhawk109, on 10/10/2007, -1/+26"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers.
The introduction begins like this:
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly 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. Listen..." and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination. " - rephil513, on 10/10/2007, -1/+26Does anybody still think we are alone in the universe...?
- DeskFlyer, on 10/10/2007, -3/+28In other words: It's blow-your-*****-mind enormous. :)
/astronomy geek - nipterink, on 10/10/2007, -1/+22the analogies are nice, but i must confess that it is still no easier to wrap my head around the sense of scale established. i just get a since of "whoa"
- adrianmonk, on 10/10/2007, -3/+23As an atheist who started off as a Christian and who used his brain a lot during both periods of his life, I have never been able to even really understand this argument. Is there some passage in the Bible somewhere that I don't know about where it says the universe is small? Or is the argument simply that an omnipotent, infinite being would find it "hard" to create a "big" universe but easy to create a small one? Or maybe the argument is that an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, infinite being would have a hard time caring about individual people if there are LOTS of individual people. The whole POINT of the idea of god is that his resources are not limited. So why does it matter if there are millions or billions or Ackermann(10,10) intelligent creatures in the universe?
- specialK16, on 10/10/2007, -7/+27Go troll somewhere else. Why the hell did you had to make this a Creation vs Evolution discussion when it has nothing to do about it.
- emjaymj, on 10/10/2007, -1/+20See that's the beauty of living without your head up your ass, you can fill up containers such as water bottles and swimming pools with things other than water if you so choose. An olympic-sized swimming pool for instance, hold roughly 88,000 cubic feet of water. By some amazing coincidence, it can also hold 88,000 cubic feet of sand.
- apollyon, on 10/10/2007, -0/+18I remember Bill Nye doing this on his show once. I think he started with a ping pong ball as the earth, a massive balloon for our sun and stopped hundreds of miles away with a massive weather balloon for the nearest star to our sun.
Can anyone find that video for me? I can't seem to get it from youtube. - wonderworm, on 10/10/2007, -13/+30And GOD made the Earth in seven days........but....but....he really didn't mean seven days...... like you know........even though the bible says seven days it could really mean something like 400 trillion days......yeah that's it. Seven days means 400 trillion days so see we are still right and Adam and Eve are the parents of us all due to a talking evil snake who tricked them into eating an apple which revealed to them that being naked is bad and shameful.
TEACHING OUR CHILDREN LIES IS CHILD ABUSE.
- Neem, on 10/10/2007, -6/+21It woulda been funny without the ***** tag
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -4/+18If the universe were created 6,000 years ago, we wouldn't theoretically be able to see any stars or galaxies farther than 6,000 light years away - which is clearly not the case.
- hfactor, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14Why does your life have to be something big and special to have a meaning?
- OneAndOnlySnob, on 10/10/2007, -1/+14The Milky Way alone contains 200 to 400 billion stars. If just 1 in 1 million stars have intelligent life--which is not an insane estimate--our galaxy would have 200 to 400 civilizations living in it. Meaning there is probably one reasonably close to us.
Why haven't we found it? It's very likely that the SETI program is incapable of detecting such life. Relatively speaking, the ~10,000 years we've been somewhat civilized has been but a fraction of a second. And in that 10,000 years, we've only been masters of radio waves for about 100 years. And we are already starting to move to more efficient modes of transporting data. Digital, highly compressed (noise if you don't know how to decompress it) signals moving through cables. We don't know how other civilizations would develop technologically, but we do mostly know how we did. We can only assume that other civilizations would follow a similar course.
Also, one must realize that we are not broadcasting signals to them, for fear of drawing "unwanted attention". Why wouldn't any other civilization be equally paranoid?
And finally, one must also realize that the transmissions that escape from our planet would be too weak to be detected on even alpha centauri by a similar SETI program.
Wow, it's late and I'm rambling like a crazy person. When you read this, please pretend you can see the carriage returns I put in this comment to create organized paragraphs. Also pretend that it's relevant and insightful. Thanks! - rabidbob, on 10/10/2007, -2/+14Believe it or not, it is possible to be a moral person without being religous.
- KloroFormd, on 10/10/2007, -1/+13Stretch Armstrong > You
- skinjester, on 10/10/2007, -1/+13strong possibility we exist in a multiverse
- Rezzy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12My life has lost all meaning.
- wonderworm, on 10/10/2007, -1/+11Actually, the Statistical probabilities are pretty high given the sheer amount of stars with revolving planets that could have similar conditions as Earth in which to spawn life similar to those on earth. The main lack of concrete evidence is solely due to the our present inability to solve these vast distances between each of these stars.
- spawnfree, on 10/10/2007, -1/+10Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Eric Idle. A clever man. - Bob042, on 10/10/2007, -1/+10u·ni·verse [Origin: 1325–75; ME < OF univers < L ūniversum, n. use of neut. of ūniversus entire, all, lit., turned into one, equiv. to ūni- uni- + versus (ptp. of vertere to turn)]
No. - apollyon, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Well, this is the closest thing to it on youtube currently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtohS55n0SM
"The Eyes of Nye" Bill Nye on Astrobiology, in multiple parts. - unitheory, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9Why does the size of the universe start a bunch of religious or anti-religious mud slinging?
- ChromaVita, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8You're going to need friends for this one...
- CorpT, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8Even if there were hundreds of thousands or millions of other life forms in the universe, it would be almost impossible to contact many if any of them. I would love to be alive when we do contact intelligent life, but I'm not holding out much hope.
- ChrisAlbon, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8Best analogy:
If the sun were a grain of sand, the stars in our galaxy would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
If our galaxy were a grain of sand, the galaxies would fill several olympic-sized swimming pools. - arbulus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7You mean we're not friends?
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -9/+15The religious nutters will tell you that the sun, moon and stars are there so we can look at them at night.
On the scheme of things, the Biblical God is a primitive invention of an illiterate mind incapable of comprehending the big picture. The universe scaling shows how insignificant humans are on the grand scale of the universe. - Jordan117, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8To slightly modify the words of a great writer:
"When confronted with the sheer enormity of the distances between the stars, better minds than nipterink have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in Reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts. The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination." - stack3r, on 10/10/2007, -4/+10Lets say the iphone was a chunk of dog sh*t and you were standing 1 feet away from it. You would realise its a chunk of sh*t.
amazing - rabidbob, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Nor I. It is the great disappointment of my life; I want to know what happens damnit!
- AtraSolis, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8You are correct and I didn't imply religion was the only way to be moral. All I'm saying is branding parents as "child abusers" for raising perfectly acceptable human beings is ridiculous.
- oneoverzero, on 10/10/2007, -4/+9Rather, infinitely less than a split second.
Nothing created it in no time at all. - orangester, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7Makes me feel so insignificant.
- cheese06, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6Another video to show how insignificant we are by the great Carl Sagan with music by Mogwai! http://youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw
- einstevo, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5my favorite fact for giving people perspective on what galaxies are like is that when two galaxies collide, as we have seen in many hubble pictures, it is extremely rare that any two stars actually collide during the process. the galaxies never actually "touch" and all ripping and tearing that we see in the pictures is due to mutual gravitational interaction warping the galaxies. crazy!
- thankyousir, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4that was a profound statement
- spawnfree, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5i know many people who have been brought up by religious parents.
whenever the kids challenge the parents beliefs they get rejected, which is the cruelest thing you can do to someone that is totally dependent on you.
So, i have many friends who feel guilty most of the time and see religion as the cure to that guilt, however they are very confused between acceptance from god and acceptance from their parents.
most parents who do this just believe they are doing the right thing because that's what happened to them.
its one of the many cycles that the human race as a whole is suffering from without realizing it.
Sad really, its just the same as the cycles of violence/confidence tricks/female genital mutilation etc.
realizing that abuse has occurred is a painful process, but by not confronting the pain we hand it down to the next generation.
religious books pretend to stop these cycles, i prefer the book 'families and how to survive them' because it actually helps understand, accept and outgrow such conditions instead of breeding dependence and control like religion does without exception. - AdamMagana, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6DAMN!
Every time I think about about the universe in scale, or anything for that matter, it baffles me. It really puts you in your place about significance and size. Truly wonderful. - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5This is scary I feel hopeless that we will ever find anything too easy to get lost =(
- codmate, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4"First, Hold the ball-point pen up in the air. Now hold a ping-pong ball about 15 feet away from the pen tip."
Who wrote this article? Mr Tickle?! - BufordT, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Great article, but the American "layperson" is not helped with the article's use of kilometers.
- spawnfree, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5its something to do with the baffling complexity of creation and just how much of it is beyond our comprehension and even our imagination.
And still people will actually pick up a book and tell me that it is all i need to know, and actually believe it. And they will, if given the chance again, bring all exploratory thought to an end for their own conceited and greedy ends. - angryredplanet, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4That is, life as we know it.
What if there are intelligent life forms that don't need liquid water and/or are not comprised of carbon based organic molecules? - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Ride the anti-gravity wave into the new universe!!!
- Rodman930, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5Yeah, I love getting put in my place.
- ShannaraFan, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Nope, never did. I just wish I could live long enough to see who/what we find first.
- abatch, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3I remember this from Bill Nye when I was in the third grade.
- cruzlee, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3"Suppose that our Earth is the ball in the tip of a ball-point pen. The sun is a ping pong ball 15 feet away from it."
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