What is Digg?Sponsored by Guitar Center
When Heavy-handed Hints Fail--Guitar Center Wishlist Posters view!
guitarcenter.com - Cool personalized designs send a friendly reminder that a new Stratocaster would rock, thanks.
130 Comments
- DeskFlyer, on 01/24/2008, -0/+64Kind of off-topic, but it's mind-boggling to think that you'd need to travel at the speed of light for 1 billion years to get somewhere that far away.
- ub3rgeek, on 01/24/2008, -3/+38Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
/RIP Douglas Adams - lucidguru, on 01/24/2008, -0/+30I would be willing to bet that even the 14 billion LY universe that we can detect is still only the tip of the iceberg.
- Coldmetal, on 01/24/2008, -1/+26You know what's really depressing? That in our life time we won't see any kind of space exploration beyond the Moon and Mars. If we're extremely lucky maybe someone/or some country may make attempts to do something with the moon or Mars, but other than that we won't see anything spectacular in our life time, hell even our children may not see anything beyond the Moon or Mars in terms of starting up some sort of colonization. I suppose I'm just a nerd for this kind of stuff, but space really is the final frontier and we're such a small 1x1 pixel on an apparently infinite grid that it'd be really interesting to see.... *sighs*
- manicleek, on 01/24/2008, -1/+22you're always at the center of the furthest you can see
- renoitibma, on 01/24/2008, -1/+19What I find humbling is trying to imagine what if there was nothing. Nothing ever, nowhere, ever. If you can glimpse that thought for a moment, it is quite the experience.
- av4rice, on 01/24/2008, -2/+18Read the title of the page, dude. "The universe WITHIN 1 BILLION LIGHT YEARS" So measure that distance from us in all directions. It creates a sphere. This is not a complete map of the universe, nor is it of the center of the universe. It's a map of the spherical locality around us (probably because it's harder to detect things past that)
- Eeqmcsq, on 01/24/2008, -3/+19This is why astronomy is a very humbling field of study. We exist as a speck of dust, for just a blink of an eye, in our vastly aged universe.
- Hockey13, on 01/24/2008, -1/+17If you click the "zoom out" button it gets even more absurd. Does anyone remember that part of the HHG series where Zaphod has to go into the Total Perspective Vortex, the machine that shows you the entire size of the universe and a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot with the words "You Are Here" next to it? My favorite was the story of how it came into being. I don't have the book on me at the moment, so here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"The machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula's grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong. The Total Perspective Vortex had proved that in an infinite universe the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion." - h3lx, on 01/24/2008, -0/+10There is a ***** going on in space exploration. All of happening not just in your lifetime, but right now. Perhaps you not seeing anything spectacular is a result of you looking at it the wrong way. There have been new and unusual breathtaking views coming in every day now for at least the last 20 years. Each one more awe inspiring than the last. More interestingly, it's no so much the 'what' they are seeing, it's the 'how' they are seeing it. I just find it very difficult to believe you can see all of this around us and be depressed...
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html
-
Imagine how much more could have been done in exploration and discovery if we took 1/10 of the Iraq War fund and used it fund research and development all over the world... that's the travesty. - nils, on 01/24/2008, -2/+12The universe is 14 billion years old, this does not necessarily mean it is only 14 billion light years in size.
- inactive, on 01/24/2008, -2/+9Copy + Paste, Edit;Mirror Horizontal.
Now you have Bizarro Universe. - joper90, on 01/24/2008, -4/+11you are an idiot right?
imagine you are stood on a hill. you can see 5 miles in every direction.. and you map it.. the you are the center of that map.. move to another hill and repeat. you are going to be the center of that map too.. honestly.. think about it. - D14852001neko, on 01/24/2008, -1/+8One feels truly small when you consider the huge amount of galaxies there are... And some dare to think that we are alone in the universe? I truly think not...
Plus, do you even wonder why there are supervoids? Huge spaces with absolutely NOTHING? Not even a single galaxy, let alone, a star? Creepy... - ub3rgeek, on 01/24/2008, -1/+7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_s ...
- mjfitzge, on 01/24/2008, -0/+5no way it's a light year old! couldn't be more than 10 or 15 miles old in my opinion....
- MacSuxWindozSux, on 01/24/2008, -1/+6What you need is the ability to fold space. So you just appear where ever you want to.
That way you don't have to spend your time traveling. - LFAB, on 01/24/2008, -0/+5"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has generally been regarded as a bad move."
- Jon211, on 01/24/2008, -0/+5It's actually the other way round. What I posted is correct.
If you travel close to the speed of light time still passes at the same rate for you, but quicker back on Earth.
So you could be gone for a year and a hundred years have passed by the time you get back.
If you could ever reach the speed of light time would be going infinitely more quickly back on Earth.
So the billion years on Earth would be no time at all to you, of course given this you would actually reach the end of the universe in zero time!
This is why we don't actually think it's possible to travel at the speed of light (unless you have zero rest mass) - z3r0c0O1, on 01/24/2008, -4/+9I think I see Xenu!
- jemka, on 01/24/2008, -2/+6All you need is a spaceship with a gravity drive. Just don't let Dr. Weir build it.
- Velnich, on 01/24/2008, -1/+5and to think all the sci-fi I've ever seen or read only traveled as far as a "near by" galaxy.
- bsegovia, on 01/24/2008, -2/+6Right, i think that's accurate.
- Shambla, on 01/24/2008, -1/+5This isn't quite about the universe as a whole, but a pretty nice animated gif that shows earth's (and our solar system's) significance on the universal scale.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v122/Shamblroron ... - fzammetti, on 01/24/2008, -1/+5I was struck by the numbers on that page, specifically, Number of stars within 1 billion light years = 500 million billion. As I frequently do, I thought about this number in the context of intelligent life in the universe.
So, let's compare the odds that Earth is the only planet with intellient life on it to some other more commons odds...
...if I'm doing the math even remotely right, which is in no way a given I admit!, there's a 1 in 500 million billion chance of there being life on a given planet in a 1-billion lightyear spherical volume of space (assuming such a volume with us at the center is typical)...
Let's compare...
1. The odds of you winning a single-state lottery is about 18 million to 1, while multiple state lotteries have odds as high as 120 million to 1.
2. The odds of you being struck and killed by lightning is something like 2,650,000 to 1, given all the factors that go into that (time of year, place of residence, etc).
3. The odds of you dieing from an infection of flesh-eating bacteria are 1 million to 1 (which is frightenly too low in my book!).
4. The odds of you playing golf with a group of four, and two of you get a hole-in-one on the exact same hole are 17 million to 1.
5. You are 450,000 to 3,000,000 times more likely to die in an asteroid collision in the year 2029 than to win the lottery, according to space.com.
So, two facts should be evident:
1. Playing the lottery is an utter waste of money because you have, for all practical purposes, virtually no chance of winning, most especially if it crosses state lines.
2. The odds of winning the lottery are ASTRONOMICALLY better than Earth being the only planet with intelligent life in a 1 billion-lightyear spherical volume of space. In fact, while I'm not willing to even try to do the math, just conceptually it's obvious that you have better odds by a few million (billion?) times of winnnig the lottery than Earth being the only such inhabited planet!
Put another way: if we take the odds as absolute, meaning if you play the lottery 18 million times then you are guaranteed to win once, and if you take the appropriate volume of space you are guaranteed to find one planet with intelligent life, that means you could win the lottery millions, maybe even billions of times for every such planet you find.
Once again, my math may be WAY off, but here's the thing: even if I was off by a factor of a few million, I'd still be RIGHT by a factor of a few BILLION! The numbers are just so big, the margin for error is likewise unbelievably huge. No, either there really is a God that made the Earth and everything on it, and it's unique, or there are billions and billions of other species out there in the dark. It just seems incredibly obvious.
My opinion: anyone that thinks Earth is alone in all this vastness should probably be considered legally retarded. - muxaulo, on 01/24/2008, -0/+4You can argue that our lives are as insignificant as a grain of sand, when I look at that image, all I see is insignificant grains of sand.
- bignerd, on 01/24/2008, -1/+5WOW. Just wow! Using the zoom in and out feature really make you realize how small and insignificant we really are, seriously! When someone say "universe" I think we (at least I do) underestimate how big it really is.
- antechinus, on 01/24/2008, -4/+7What makes you think that we are the only sentient creatures on Earth?
- joper90, on 01/24/2008, -1/+4i wonder (before man kind dies out) if we will every get out of our own arm of the milky way.. I mean where the fark would you go first..
Its a shame we will never ever see outside our own solar system in our life time. (as in other systems) - jsaya, on 01/25/2008, -0/+3? Clearly it's OVER 9000!
- MacEnvy, on 01/24/2008, -0/+3No. There was a "point" (singularity) at the beginning, which is in fact something, not nothing.
Where did the singularity come from? We don't know, but we're working on it. Brane Theory posits some interesting ideas on the subject. - sabach, on 01/24/2008, -1/+4That's exactly why the spice must flow.
- Trax91, on 01/24/2008, -0/+3I think our solar system can be imagined as a grain of sand and the universe as the whole world. I think this is a great analogy to grasp the size of the Universe.
- inactive, on 01/24/2008, -3/+6Funny, I find it's easier to contemplate these things when I'm *not* stoned...
- TomTruelle, on 01/24/2008, -0/+3lol, way to delete your account.
- Thex1138, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2On =average= each of those galaxies has about half a trillion stars wizzing around them..
- Thex1138, on 01/24/2008, -1/+3Next time you're at the beach, pick up a grain of sand....1 grain only...half of that grain is what we know about the universe in comparison to the rest of the beach..
- CaptainScarlet, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2I totally agree with you there. It quite sad really, that we will live our lives without knowing our surrounding neighbors. Space exploration just takes too long!!
- inactive, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2It's missing a "You are Here" key.
- nils, on 01/24/2008, -1/+3We are not traveling. The universe is expanding. There's a mighty big difference there. Imagine inflating a balloon, while an ant crawls over its surface. The speed of the ant and the rate at which the balloon gets bigger are totally unrelated to each other.
- ImagineFreedom, on 03/12/2008, -0/+2Our expectations have been skewed by years of Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. Battlestar probably has it closest, humans in space but without alien humanoids. We really are in a very lonely place in space. That said I'd still love to meet some aliens and travel the stars. I'd even be willing to give near-light speed space travel a go. Sure everyone I knew would be gone if I returned but that's inevitable anyway (at least now).
- Jleagle, on 01/24/2008, -1/+3That's wrong, just because your going really fast doesn't mean time stops.
- h3lx, on 01/24/2008, -1/+3"This is still speculative, but according to one theory of quantum gravity a singularity is not formed. Instead, space and time do not collapse to a point but rather into a (four-dimensional) tube which opens into an entirely new region of space and time. The singularity "bounces" back out into a big bang. This means it is entirely possible that our own universe was produced when a black hole was formed in another universe."
Not of nothing, but of something so incomprehensible it's difficult to wrap our monkey brains around... - SilverBack101, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2Dugg for blowing my mind into space...and right before my lunch break.
- jj101, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2@h3lx - yep but then what created that universe. If you go back far enough there must have been a point where there was nothing. There must have been because I can't comprehend how that could not be the case. And if I cant understand it then its not possible. To say that our brains aren't capable of understanding it just a non-event. Obviously we can understand everything in the entire universe. The answer which fits best in my mind is that it was all created by God. That solves all the problems. And as for what God existed in before that, and how he came to being - well those are questions that only God can answer and part of having faith is accepting that you cannot know the mind of God.
- 3leggedHorse, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2 Not when you are an alien with a quantum folding gravity drive.
- AnEmpress, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2But....we are exploring space. We're using satellites, telescopes, and robots instead of humans, but we are exploring beyond the Moon and Mars.
- slapded, on 01/24/2008, -1/+3if the universe is infinite with infinite possibilities, that means theres another planet out there with guiliani as president. i feel sorry for these folks.
- madwh, on 01/24/2008, -0/+2I hope there will be something to make our lives longer during my life time so that I can see more of this Universe... but very sad indeed.
-
Show 51 - 100 of 132 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is 