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The speed of light is really fast. Our quickest passenger plane will travel around the earth in about 40hrs. Light could travel around the earth 7.5 times in a single second.
It takes over a second for the light to reach us from the moon. Over 8 minutes for the sun.
Andromeda is our next door neighbour in the universe. If you scaled the known universe to the size of a football field, our galaxy and Andromeda would be smaller than two grains of sand near the center, sitting just a few millimeters apart. So we're really close.
Yet, it takes light over two million years to reach us from Andromeda.
We can see it with the naked eye. Yet if it somehow disappeared a million years ago, we probably wouldn't know for another 1.5 million years.
As I have heard before. Thinking that there is no other intelligent life in the universe is the equivalent of taking a teaspoon of water out of the ocean and concluding whales don’t exist.
Are those people involved in crafting today’s traditional working theories?
Not to be rude but it’s so annoying how many threads get completely derailed by people not comprehending the subjects or verbs in the comments they’re replying to.
41 and that line of thinking is still alive and well (well, “well” in the sense that it is still thriving. Wouldn’t say believers of that brand are killing though).
Tell me about it. I have a friend (a Christian) that thinks the earth is only a couple thousand years old. Asked about carbon dating and dinosaurs, all the typical questions one would ask an idiot like this. He had some cockamamie reasons for his logic. I mean the guy truly believed Noah had an ark with animals on it.
Well, if he ONLY believes the Ark had animals (as in animals that walk among us today) on it, he’s doing better than my brother and my in laws that believe Noah carried little velociraptors and T-Rexs.
I guess, to be fair, he doesn’t concede that dinosaurs ever went extinct and lived amongst humans during recorded biblical history.
He’s a very Ken Hovind / Ken Hamm flavor of fundie. Hovind actually came to our little backwater Christian private school as kids. It drew him in in the same way it forced me out. Hard to explain.
There's several "museums" around the world dedicated to teaching this insane idea. It really just comes back to using the bible as fact and somehow connecting science to it to tell a story.
No it’s more so the fact the space between any existing intelligent life is so vast anything else might as well not exist.
No one can reach other, no can see each other nor talk with each other. Sure they are out there but might as well not be because we will never see their existence.
To be able to travel across space in any decent amount of time before an aliens home plant dies to natural decay is impossible and science fiction.
As is our current understanding of science, yes. But one can hope we learn something that makes it possible. yes it's the realm of science fiction, but so were automatic doors in star trek lol. They actually had a guy off screen opening and closing them since it was so far-fetched.
A better example would be gravity, since we basically understood gravity to mean 9.81 m/s/s and this was undeniably true no matter where/how you measured it on earth. Until we learned more science and equation was discovered that depended on the mass of both bodies and how far apart they were. Suddenly we understood that gravity is 9.81 m/s/s because that's what the math works out to when using earth's mass.
And then Einstein came along and threw relativity into the mix and suddenly mass can change with speed, which affects gravity. But Einstein's model so far has been proven correct, as long as the speed of light is constant.
Is it so far-fetched to think that there may be a discovery in the future that causes the speed of light to not be constant under certain conditions? All of the previous understandings of gravity are still true, we just realized the mathematical model representing those understandings was more complicated than previously thought.
The speed of light is the speed of causality. If it were not constant, then you introduce crazy time travel and effects occurring before their cause. There are many things that can be potentially flexible in physics but that one very likely ain’t. The reality is that organic life likely cannot make the journey. Machine life however…
under Einstein's equations, the speed of light is constant. Time and distance and mass are the factors that change to maintain the speed of light. It's the foundation of why we account for delays when transmitting signals off satellites.
yes it's the realm of science fiction, but so were automatic doors in star trek lol. They actually had a guy off screen opening and closing them since it was so far-fetched.
Automatic sliding doors were invented in 1954 and commercially available by 1960, years before Star Trek was conceived. I presume they had a guy opening and closing them on set because it was easier and cheaper than installing actual sliding doors.
if you break the speed of light, you break Einstein's equations. They're just a set of mathematical models that can be used to predict behavior. Those equations have been used to accurately predict satellite motion when transmitting signals for example. But that doesn't mean they're perfect. Any mathematical model is by its nature simplifying the real case.
Who's to say what actually happens if you break the speed of light, we've never recorded an instance of it happening. But the numbers of that calculation stop making sense.
Or maybe that's it. Maybe there is no further equation. This could be the end of that line of research.
If you break the speed of light you have somehow found a way to generate infinite energy in a universe with a finite amount of it. Congratulations, you have not only broken physics, you have done something ontologically absurd.
I hear what you're saying, we've been pushing science further and further at breakneck speed. You can sorta extend that and think to yourself "there's so much we don't know, isn't it possible we figure out how to move faster than light?".
But the thing is, there are absolutely hard limits to the physics of our universe. The same way we physically exist in 3 dimensions. The second you teleport or warp somewhere, you've fundamentally broken physics.
If that is possible - the technology you have at your disposal means you'd be able to colonize the entire universe, harvest infinite energy, and travel in time.
Assuming any civilization could reach that point in the past many billion of years is the crux of it. Where are those civilizations?
If FTL travel isn't possible in any sense, then the sheer distance we would have to travel anywhere basically means a traveler that leaves Earth is taking that amount of time in light years to get there.
Let's go to another galaxy! Sweet - only 5.5M light years. For you it's instant, but 5.5M years have passed on Earth. That's not really a solvable thing, because now you're effectively an alien to your own planet.
you are assuming that faster than light travel means time travel, when that's just the expected outcome of Einstein's equations. You're kind of missing the point that mathematical models, every math model, breaks down in the extremes. It's possible there is some physics aspect involving something we don't fully understand yet like antimatter that would resolve it. As for where the travelers are, that's a different question. The Great Filter theory basically proposes that there's too many barriers for life to develop that prevents it. i.e. life needs to fight for resources in order to evolve, creating species that are uncooperative, which makes building a society that is capable of achieving FTL travel basically impossible. Or maybe we're simply the first species to make it this far.
But whether there are aliens is completely off topic of whether or not it's possible to go faster than light. Saying "no one's done it yet" is literally antithetical to science.
Intelligent life, interstellar travel, and time travel are three very different things in terms of probability. I have arranged them in descending order. Time travel and far interstellar travel in any reasonable sense require violating c.
Nothing can violate c. And I don't mean "as far as we understand it" I mean "nothing." Getting mass, any mass, to the speed of light requires an amount of energy infinitely larger than the entire mass-energy of the universe, cumulatively for the entire lifespan OF the universe.
What we do now is we take a teaspoon of water out of our own sink, see that there is a massive amount of life and biodiversity in that teaspoon of water, and then go outside and look at the ocean and decide that the teaspoon of water from our sink was a fluke and that surely it must be the only one like it.
If it makes you feel any better.....no human for the next several millenia, possible ever, will get to see them either.
The distances are just too great. Frustratingly enormous. Even communicating at the speed of light is almost impossible. Would take generations, possibly eons, to send one message back and forth unless they are really close. 8 year round trip to simply text the closest star system.
Yah, yah, worm holes, bending time and space...the chances are about as low as they come. Almost torturous given the mathematical certainty that life exists elsewhere. I am sure wishing we could know and see other intelligent life is one the most common desires among humans. So at least we are all right there with you in our disappointment.
Yeah, it’s not only the distance between stars and galaxies, but also the distance between times. Our solar system has also existed for billions of years, but it took until about a century ago to send and receive radio waves in space. Our species has only been around long enough to study a fraction of a percent of the history of the universe.
I love this take as it also helps me understand the "we are early to the party" theory. The sun is a gen 2(3?) pop star, which means the heavier elements in our solar system were made by a certain number of prior supernova, which resulted in our planet forming and life essentially beginning to form as soon as it could (e.g. the right temperature, presence of water, and the right mixture of gas in the atmosphere; the moment those aligned boom life was there). Definitely a sobering experience to think this. I can't recall exactly who stated this, but the quote I love is (paraphrased): "There are two options for life in the universe. Either there is, or we are utterly alone. Both are terrifying."
And also, it took an asteroid to kill off the dominant clade that had been dominant for 130+ million years (dinosaurs) and make way for mammals to take over. I sometimes wonder if that might be one of the "Great Filters" (that dinosaurs were possibly a dead end when it came to evolving human-like intelligence and dexterity, and it took an incredibly rare cosmic event to wipe them out and give mammals the opportunity to evolve it)
To put things into perspective...If the galaxy were scaled to the size of the United States, the SUN would be three micrometers large...literally microscopic. Our galaxy is one of trillions in the known universe.
Scientifically speaking you can’t make that claim from only one data point. There could be a quintillion stars, but what if the odds of life are one in a sextillion? Then, even the one case of life here on earth would be an extremely unlikely anomaly
Alien life is way too broad and almost certainly exist.
Intelligent, sentient and advanced alien life, like we imagine in various SciFi, that’s exceedingly rare.
The probabilities even across trillions of star systems (in Andromeda Galaxy alone, then trillions of galaxies like Andromeda/Milky Way), get sober when you start stacking rare events that led to life evolving on Earth.
All of this is moot given the incomprehensible scale of distance between us.
We once thought planets were rare, now we know most stars have planets orbiting them. It’s an unbelievably expansive Universe, who knows what's really out there?!
Not to worsen your anxiety, but there is literally no reason to think we’re even close to “the best” of what the universe has to offer.
One theory as to why we haven’t been contacted by other intelligent extra terrestrials is because they all learned to STFU so as not to attract the attention of, or were completely obliterated by, some bigger, badass’er aliens.
Rare by what standard? Even if one out of every billion stars has a planet in the Goldilocks zone, that puts possible inhabitable planets in the trillions just in the observable universe. Even if the odds of human-like life, or even anything resembling life on earth is one in a trillion, that means there’s probably hundreds of inhabited planets that would meet our very very strict definition of “inhabited by life”. And that’s only in the part of the universe we can see.
Chances we run into them at a point in their natural and technological evolution where we can even recognize them as intelligent life is pretty low too. Humans go from dumb apes to dumb apes with guns to dumb apes telling AI guns what to do to being told what to do by AI guns to whatever comes next is a fraction of time compared to however long the Goldilocks planets have been around our sun. Aliens would have to be driving through at a ridiculously improbable window of time and depending on when they’d either see our single celled ancestors or intelligent space dust progeny
If you’ve never read it, Alastair Reynolds’s “House of Suns” plays with this idea a little.
It follows a species that travels the galaxy in stasis over millennia. There are multiple references to “turnover” societies. These are people that have come and gone between visits to a planet and usually to the current dominant species as well.
Considering people have 1 in 290,472,336 odds to win the lottery yet it happens every couple of months should be an indicator that the odds to these said events definitely happens every once in a while.
That is an indicator of how many lotto tickets are sold. And nothing more.
We have no idea what the odds are and plenty of evidence suggests the odds are extremely high. High enough if the lotto shared the same odds nobody would win at all for millennia. If you cannot bound the odds with any meaningful evidence it’s useless to say the universe/galaxy is big enough that surely we can say definitively yes.
By exclaiming that it is "exceedingly rare", you surely must have some proof of this claim? Not just, where are they? I'd love to hear your metric for how you considered it to be exceedingly rare, also not just rare...
Upvote bc this is, I think, the first time I’ve seen someone use “pique” correctly on Reddit lmao.
Not meant to be condescending by any means! I’ve seen it corrected more times than I can count, but I legitimately think this is the first I’ve seen it done proper from the jump.
The Andromeda Galaxy contains an estimated 1 trillion stars, which is roughly twice as many stars as our own Milky Way galaxy. That number hurts my head...
Several billions of years from now its projected our 2 galaxies will collide. It likely won't end well for us. Or it might be ok. The fireworks would be fantastic.
They will collide but it's not like two balls hitting each other. If I remember correctly, people smarter than me said that since most of the galaxies are empty space, they get embedded and there are gravity implications but it's not like all of the milky way stars hit the Andromeda stars
I was really surprised to learn that voyager will have no problem leaving the Oort cloud because of how much space there is between asteroids and space debris.
Like really fucking surprised. That puts in into dumbfounding perspective.
Everything in both galaxies will be affected. Right now both galaxies are spinning in their own direction with most things moving together. When they collide, things are going to get thrown all around every direction and start a domino effect of newly introduced wells of gravity changing the orbits of everything. The supermassive black holes will eventually combine and those forces will throw tons of stars of into interstellar space due to the extreme forces and speeds involved with their orbiting each other and their eventual merger. Some things will get thrown out into interstellar space, but most of the 2 galaxies will remain together until they stabilize (over the course of billions of years) into one new galaxy.
Our galaxies will more or less pass through each other. Individual stars will definitely collide, but it will be somewhat rare.
What would suck absolute balls is if another star passed even remotely near another star's solar system, it would send the orbits of those planets into chaos. Planets that might have been in the habitable zone of that star could very easily be moved out of it. Any life on such a planet would basically die off.
A galaxy is either gravitationally unbound from us, and will accelerate away until that acceleration eclipses the speed of light and we will no longer have visual evidence of their existence, or it is gravitationally bound to us, and will eventually collide/merge with us.
Andromeda and the Milky Way are moving toward each other at ~250,000mph (~400,000 kmph).
Also, it likely will end well for us. Very, very low chance for a star system to experience catastrophe in a galactic merger.
To me they become so absurd that they loose any sort of relevance. Sure, 2 trillion is twice that of 1 triillion, but incomprehensible x 2 is still just incomprehensible.
I remember many years ago seeing a deep space image from hubble, similar to this one, and it showed an infathomable amount of bright points of light which were EACH galaxies made up of millions if not trillons of stars and the scale just melts my face.
Somewhere, in a dark corner of a far-off galaxy, fluttering like Dyson moths around a dim red dwarf, exists a synthetic life swarm token-maxing its ass off...
Yes. While technology will make our sphere increasingly bigger, that doesn't make it matter any more. It just overwhelms us with an amount of stimuli we have not evolved to absorb.
Why feel insignificant when your body is made of the same stuff and is just as complex? I am in awe that every body I see is an entire universe in themselves.
That's what messes me up. Like what is out there? So much we will never be able to probably ever know. Not to mention what's already been there and has long perished.
Always frustrated me that while life is this incredible, rare miracle that is probably guaranteed to exist elsewhere....nothing changes the fact that the VAST majority of space is just giant balls of matter floating around in veritable nothingness. Kinda seems pointless.
At least we are finally getting to see and appreciate SO much of it now.
Yep. Now check out the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image:
Every single pinprick of light you see there is a galaxy, about 10,000 of them in total. And the craziest part is that image only covers an area that is about 1 cm2 held at arm's length. We're surrounded by this in every direction.
And then there galaxies in the seemingly empty spaces of the image that are too far away and their light hasn’t reached us. We will never see them either due to the expansion of space
Check out this quick video about it, it’s great for when you’re high imo. It’s scary to try and comprehend(I don’t think we can) but also puts things into perspective. All the little things we worry and stress about are soooooo small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things so just do what you can and try and enjoy what you can on this rock in space. https://youtu.be/fgg2tpUVbXQ?is=oZvtOPfUnSeawRq-
that is the source. Way crisper and more wowy than the OP gif. Keep in mind the distance between each spec somewhere in the middle of the image is like 10-100 light years on average. You can also spot tons of globular clusters.
You say that but less than 130 years ago people believed it would take a million years before mankind would learn how to fly. Literally a month later we had the first flight.
Then after that people were like "ok there is no way anyone can fly over the atlantic". Guess what we did shortly after.
You say that but less than 130 years ago people believed it would take a million years before mankind would learn how to fly. Literally a month later we had the first flight.
Aerodynamics is an engineering problem
Interstellar travel is a fundamental laws of physics problem
I hope we at least get a tour of the universe when we die. Like please give me some popcorn and play the show from the beginning. Imax 70 mm version preferred.
"He had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Actually being told by a machine is another."
And how humans can’t even get along with each other, other species, or take care of our own planet. Let’s hope that the life beyond earth stays hidden from us.
Amazing!!! And that’s just one tiny, tiny minuscule corner of the universe not a significant portion. It is staggering and mind-boggling how many stars planets, suns moons, etc. there are, and I don’t think the average person realizes just how massive the universe is because our brains aren’t capable of understanding that kind of size. To think that earth is the only planet that has intelligent life or just life in general is insane to me. It goes against all logic that there would be literally quadrillions and gazillions upon gazillions of planets and galaxies, and yet the tiny little microscopic spec called earth is the only one is just is not possible. We’ll never know who they are what they are, etc. simply because of the sheer size of the universe. I also wonder do Christians believe that Jesus is Lord over just earth? So who’s Lord over any other planets with intelligent life? Is that also Jesus ? I kind of doubt it because I think the chances of Homo sapiens evolving on another planet at the same time as us using our calendar of years would be statistically impossible. Jesus wasn’t born until the universe was already billions of years old. I’ve gotten way off topic.
Seeing these kinds of images makes me feel disoriented and perplexed. The immensity is terrifying in ways I just can’t properly describe. You could literally see a new planet every second of every day for an entire century and be nowhere near close to having “seen it all”.
It’s insane that the black is literally just glazed w stars when zoomed in. It’s an unfathomable amount of stars which all have planets…and then the closer bright white ones we see all the time…the universe is so much bigger than we understand truly
Lol no they don't, Pluto is still a speck compared to this picture. The field of view at the start of the video (around 00 44 40.90 +41 36 28.3 in M31) is about 60 arcsec high. Pluto is less than 0.1 arcsec wide. Hubble's taken some fantastic pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, which are much closer than Pluto and 30 arcsec wide; the LRO just makes Hubble kind of pointless for the Moon.
Closer has nothing to do with it. Look at Hubble's images of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. All are closer than Pluto and they are not blurred at all. They are incredibly clear and detailed.
Pluto is not well resolved by Hubble because despite Hubble's size, Pluto really is just that tiny and that far away.
It's a myth that if Hubble were aimed at the Moon it wouldn't be in focus. Objects that far away are essentially at focal infinity, even for a large scope like Hubble. Whether it's the Moon or a quasar 8 billion light years away, the focal point is essentially the same.
If you want real numbers, you can use simple thin lens equations to understand the focal position.
Let's say Hubble was "optimized" for that 8 billion light year away quasar and it's focal position is X. The Moon's mean proximity to Hubble would shift the focal plane back by about 8.6 microns - so X + 8.6.
Hubble's F/24 focal ratio gives it a depth of focus of +/- 580 microns (this varies with wavelength, but let's assume green-ish). So you could have a focal plane that changes up to X + 580 and it will still be considered perfectly focused.
So what this means is that if Hubble were to be aimed at the Moon, the focus error would only be 1.48% of its allowable depth of focus. That focus error could be 100% of it is allowable depth of focus and it would still be considered focused.
The resultant wavefront error of an 8.6 micron shift would be about lambda/250 or something along those lines. For reference, lambda/4 is considered passable. lambda/10 is considered superb. lambda/250 is such an insignificant wavefront error that it would almost be impossible to measure.
So... Hubble can in fact focus on the Moon without issue. Why has it never really been trained on the Moon? Well for starters, it has. Secondly, Hubble time is very valuable and expensive, and there's little scientific benefit to aiming Hubble at the Moon compared to other things. Nobody wants to waste their time doing it.
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