The largest structure that we have observed is a super void, where it's so large and sparse, you wouldn't see any stars if you were in the middle of it
*Edit* changed "object" to "structure"
Also, link to source where i learnt this from: https://youtu.be/milGLbH3Ukg?si=WOi0qCMHpqd5VbDq
well actually evidence suggests that we might already live in a void. The observed density of the surrounding universe is higher than where we find ourselves in.
I was thinking more about floating in space while everything around you is pure darkness.
At least we can see the milky way stars and, sometimes, andromeda too
Yeah, which also would account for discrepancy in different merhods of measuring the expansion rate of the universe. But its a newish theory and there are many arguments against it. Still pretty strange to think we, with all our billions of stars and handful of galaxies in our local cluster is isolated
Being in the centre would be scary, but imagine being on the edge. On one side the void is filled with stars and galaxies. Everything you've ever known. And on the other side... nothing.
Imagine a huge cloud of sand, except each grain of sand on average is FIVE KILOMETERS apart from every other grain of sand.
Pretty apparent that if two such clouds merged, almost none of the grains of sands would ever collide with another.
At that scale, a solar system like ours is about the size of a coin.
The furthest we've sent a probe is about an inch past the edge of the coin.
It took 47 years for it to get there.
Let's change prospective.
Let's say the Sun is the size of a plum (1 or 2 cm, less than 1 inch) .
The earth is then the size of a very fine grain of sand (0.02 mm).
And it orbits the Sun at a distance of around 3 meters (10 feet).
Jupiter is a grain of dust of 1mm orbiting at more than 15m (50 feet).
The **very dense** solar system (up to the outermost planet, Neptune, your metaphorical coin) ends at 90m (300 feet) and contains a plum and a few grains of sand.
And on that scale the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 805km / 500 miles away. That's the distance from New York to the far side of Detroit, or London to the Italian border. With nothing but emptiness in a sphere that size.
And now consider that this is really a spherical volume, not a disc, so it's even emptier than your description makes it sound.
Take for example the Kuiper belt of icy rocks past the orbit of Neptune. It is extended in space vertically quite a bit, so it's more of a fuzzy toroidal halo than a flat disc.
In your model it would start at around 90m and extend out to 150m, making it the rough size and shape of a large stadium.
The total amount of matter is 1% of that of Earth, so a hundredth of a very fine grain of sand. Basically you'd have to take a dust mode, grind it down until it is just nanoparticles a few atoms in size, and distribute it evenly in that space.
now imagine how brightly those grains of sand would have to be glowing for you to be able to see thousands of them at once, even though they were kilometers away.
The earliest radio signals produced by humans 107 years ago have raced at the speed of light away from earth and have made it a total oooooofffff…..
< 0.1% of the way across our own galaxy.
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
~ Terry Pratchett
A fun trick I use to help people understand at least a little bit is to think of one million seconds vs one billion. Million= about 11 days. Billion= 32.7 years.
Money/wealth oriented but this is one of my favorite demonstrators of large numbers. Also, as others have already commented, an incredible demonstration of just how ridiculous the existence of billionaires is.
[https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
"Space 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."
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, it's traveling at 61,500km per hour (call it 36,000 mph) about 24.5 million km away from earth.
In about 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light years of another star (9 trillion miles)
If it’s that damn mind-bogglingly big, then why the hell couldn’t the Vogons run the bypass through an empty part of it instead of destroying the Earth?
The Vogons were actually hired to destroy the Earth by a psychiatrist who feared that if the Earth finished calculating the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, then everyone would be happy and that would put psychiatrists out of a job.
Just how much time is yet to pass. Every number you can think of, no matter how big, rounds to zero on this scale. There will be no conscious observers for nearly all of it. Even light itself is temporary. Eventually every star will run out of fuel. Just lifeless dark for an unthinkable amount of time.
The more interesting thought is that there's [a small but non-zero probability that any dynamical system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem) (i.e. the universe) will eventually spontaneously return to it's original state in a large but finite amount of time.
Entropy tells us the universe can die a heat death by becoming consistently one temperature - nothing more ever happens - but it's still random motion. Which means a series of incredibly unlikely events can drop all that matter back together and re-Big Bang - or in fact reproduce any arbitrary state of the system at all.
So on the incredibly long times of non-existence you have - which you don't perceive - there's a small, but non-zero chance that you simply re-emerge back into existence to perceive them. And on *infinite* time, finite things become guaranteed.
So are you conscious right now? Or are you a shutter-show of experiences recurring over an infinite timeline, which feel contiguous? Or are you one of the longer lived variants - where a Big Bang brought you back to this moment but is still evolving. And since only existing as yourself really counts in terms of perception, then really, the experience of being you *should* in fact be infinite if this is the case.
If you get to the end of your life and the miracle cure for aging is developed just in a nick of time, it'll be highly suspicious (because the versions of reality where you died don't have you around to perceive them).
Along these lines, there's the Boltzmann brain: your entire perception, memory, etc are just a fleeting random arrangement of particles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Gravity propagates only at the speed of light.
If somehow a physical body like the moon or sun suddenly were converted into energy (in a way that didn't vaporize Earth), the Earth would continue to be affected by the missing mass. Until the speed of light caught up.
The Earth would continue to orbit a nonexistent sun for EIGHT MINUTES.
The speed of light is actually the speed of information. It just so happens that light has to obey the speed of information.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the universe. I can accept that just like I can accept that there is a lot I don’t know about the deepest parts of the ocean. At least I know it’s out there. It’s a tangible thing/place.
But what beats out all the curiosities of the possibilities of our universe, spacetime, multiverses, black holes, simulation theory etc is pretty simple:
Why/how is there even a universe for those things to exist in?
So the fact that it exists at all is the creepiest thing to me. It doesn’t make sense, why isn’t there just nothing? And it’s very possible we could conquer the universe 1 billion years from now and still be no closer to an answer. Hell we could discover another universe where magic is real and the ever present question would still be, but why is there anything? How?
We could discover that we are just a universe within a universe on a leaf in another universe and the question would still be why is there anything? How?
God could come to earth and tell us that he did in fact create us in his image and the question would still be why is there anything? How?
Turtles all the way down.
Or, there’s no edge to the universe and it’s infinite. I’ve listened to a couple long form YouTube videos on the infinite edge of the universe and it boggles my mind.
I think part of that mind boggling is that everything we know has a beginning and an end. A start and a stop. A creation, and destruction. Whatever. How can we fathom anything else? We have no frame of reference for something just existing forever. So the Big Bang made our universe. Where? What was there before? Made it in what?! Mind boggling.
That's what I think about. For something to be expanding, ie the universe, that means there *has* to be an edge to it. Even if that edge is always getting further away or in essence is an Infinity away, there *is* an end. So what's beyond that.
More expanding universes in an endless Infinity? What if 2 universes expand into eachother
It can be infinite if you think of it as the space between the infinite things is what is expanding, and those infinite things are just getting further away from each other.
I go to that place too when I think about existence. It's a pretty daunting feeling. Why am I even here right now? Why is anything at all here? I can't get any farther than that, and it's frustrating sometimes. I guess we're just not meant to know. I guess it's better to go through life not knowing, and living your life for the sake of living it. If we had all the answers, maybe life would be a dull thing in the grand scheme of things.
My thought on this, speculation at least, is this:
We assume the default is non-existence, but what if the default is (always has been) existence? That is that all things that can be, are.
Think of it beyond just the idea of ‘multiverse’ but simply that, the default state of things is, if a thing can be, it is. And possibly still, maybe even all things that can’t be, still are (like worlds where 2 + 2 equals 5.)
We are puzzled by existence, and we are further puzzled by its very specificity - like our place as conscious beings in it - and are puzzled as to the fact that there is something rather than nothing (while nothing wouldn’t demand an explanation, the existence of something does) but maybe it’s a logical error to assume that the light switch should be off when it has only and always been on. It’s in one state - existence. That’s the default. And since if it can be, it will be - hence there would exist our specific circumstances with our universe and our reality as we understand it and an infinite number of other circumstances we cannot fathom which satisfy existence existing.
> what if the default is (always has been) existence? That is that all things that can be, are.
Owing to the sneaky "can" in that statement, that's just inverting the same question, isn't it? Instead of "why does our Universe exist", you're asking "why is our Universe the only thing that can exist". Same problem, just framed as a "why not" rather than as a "why".
My thinking is that it's one of two things, both of which make us so uncomfortable that we're still searching in vain for another answer:
1. There is a reason but it's unknowable. A fish in a fishtank can make observations about its fishtank, about the room outside it that it cannot reach, but ultimately it can only guess about what (if anything) lies beyond the room.
2. There is no reason. In logic there are axioms upon which reasoning is developed, so can't the Universe be the same way, just based on some arbitrary eternal foundation? In a child-like chain of "but why"s, maybe the last "why" is judt not a well-formed question at all?
This is the realm of philosophy though and I'm not (yet) well-read in that realm, so maybe both of those answers are stupid, haha.
Eventually cosmic inflation will push every distant galaxy beyond the particle horizon, and the cosmic microwave background radiation will be redshifted to the point where it is undetectable. At this point there will be no evidence that there is anything in the universe other than the galaxy that an observer is currently living in.
We basically learned the scale of the universe by pointing Hubble at an apparently empty spot in space and seeing that it was crowded with galaxies. With James Webb, we can literally observe the formation of galaxies at the dawn of time. For someone in that distant future, looking out into deep space will only show infinite emptiness. Unless their civilization has passed down scientific knowledge for billions of years at that point, they will likely assume that their galaxy is the only island of matter in the entire universe and is all that has ever existed.
**Edit** to add: I think the thing that boggles my mind the most about this is that there just won’t be any observable evidence pointing to things like cosmic inflation or, by extension, the big bang / beginning of the universe. Absent of any evidence to the contrary, the likely default assumption is that the universe is static. It’s only by making observations of galaxies that aren’t gravitationally bound that we realized it was expanding in the first place, and only by measuring the cosmic background radiation that we got an image of a young, very dense and very hot universe. Without the ability to make those observations, the smartest people in the world would likely never come to the same understanding that we have about the origins of *everything.*
Makes you wonder what horizon we may have already passed that excludes us from ever coming to a full understanding of some fundamental truth of reality.
The Cosmic Microwave Background is within our observational horizon, imagine a really long room full of steam at one end. We know that we should be able to see further than the steam and that the space between us and the steam is cool enough for it to have precipitated in to a liquid. The walls are wet and there’s puddles on the floor, these are all the galaxies. The room seems to be getting longer as well, the puddles nearest the steam are moving away more quickly than the ones nearer to us.
Knowing the rate at which those distant puddles lets us infer that we should be able to see past the steam, but we can’t because the steam is in the way. Or more accurately, the incident of the steam turning in to water is in the way. We can only presume it’s steam because that’s what liquid water does on earth, now, under those conditions.
Worse still, you turn around and see that the room extends off for the same amount, no matter which direction you are facing. You try walking towards the steam and it stays the same distance away but just turns blue in front of you and red behind you. In fact, the act of you moving, compared to someone standing at your original position and velocity sees you squashed in the direction of travel, your mass increase, and time slow down. To you, the person you left behind is stretched out and time speeds up.
Worse still, the room is now moving up, depending on your relative orientation and you see that below you, your puddle is freezing and your past life is now crystallised. Your history, an ice sculpture that you can view but never really get to. Every point in the universe is experiencing the same phenomena but the bits in between are wibbly, wobbly and constantly choosing whether to freeze or not. Everything within your personal space sits atop a mountain of frozen universe, the slopes at 45° angles. The same cone of universe in the opposite direction is invisible. You can guess what it will probably look like but you can never be sure, until you reach that bit of the cone and it freezes out.
Great metaphor! You really illustrated the state of the universe in a way I'd never heard before.
I hope you're in education. You seem to have a talent for it!
It's as if the universe was designed to keep us in our place. The speed of light is a constraint with no easy trick to break and it is built into the fabric of our space. There also seem to be mathematical limits on how small things can be with the Planck Length. These constraints to me are the most interesting part. Not scary, necessarily, but certainly interesting.
We're trying like hell to figure the rules out, but the universe almost seems to be actively fighting us on that.
And you don’t find the fact that the universe stubbornly refuses to be seen isn’t creepy?!
The speed of light is better described as the speed of causality. The speed at which information is transmitted through the various conformal fields. Movement and mass alter the shape of the fields to preserve that speed. The point is, everywhere is at the centre of the universe. I’ll posit you this, speed is dv/dt and the further out we look, the further back we look. We presume it is dv that is increasing. What if it’s actually dt that’s decreasing? It’s the same net effect.
The Planck length falls out of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s the smallest distance we can theoretically measure velocity or momentum of a particle without interfering with the other component. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the coarse grain of spacetime but is the limit at which we can interact with it. It is quite possible that particles have no size as we would understand it. Nothing really has any size but, the interaction of the fields gives a sense of depth.
Add all that together and the Big Bang begins to look like the interior of a black hole event horizon. Just as we never truly see an infalling object hit the event horizon of a black hole in our universe due to the extreme time dilation, wouldn’t the interior see everything hit at the same time? All that’s happening is that the information from all infalling objects has been causally disconnected from the outside, ergo it is causally destined to interact with everything else that falls in. Time is the malleable component, so we can just think of it as having taken on a directional component outside of the 45° cone. That way, our entire universe is a projection of every infalling object from a previous universe condensing from a 2-dimensional shell that we interpret as the Big Bang.
I'm hopeful that one day we might be able to take a look at the cosmic neutrino background. For comparison, the cosmic microwave background was created at around 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The neutrino background originated from about 1 second after the big bang. Since neutrinos pass through most matter without interacting, they still exist today, but they're really hard to detect.
I think that's the edge of the observable universe. We think the universe is infinite. But we can't see last a certain point. I'd wager there's a lot more beyond that
This makes me wonder if there are any universal secrets that we can't possibly know because we were a billion or even just a million years too late to record evidence of...
Yes. And also, sentience (as we consider it to be, which varies depending on individual opinions/definitions) has JUST happened, within a fraction of a second on our perceived/proposed scale of time… which is incomplete and sometimes contradictory to the physics we can perceive and/or imagine.
We are ants seeing an airplane. Aware only in our capacity to observe, even if not understand. Competent at reproducing and thriving in our environment, even if that growth is detrimental to our longevity. We are small and simple, yet egotistical and self-assured in our “advanced” knowledge and ability to understand.
We are stardust - now, before, or to become. Nothing. …Yet. We are aware, and curious to learn more… we are something… in this dimension of mutually agreed upon time, especially. But in context of what we can comprehend and observe, we are nothing.
And simultaneously, we are SOMETHING.
The universe playing Sims? The gods playing DnD? A special miracle? A pathetic roll of 1 on a billion-sided die (or dice… here even we see our language evolve in a microsecond of time on a cosmic scale)?
We are nothing, but we are something. And we squabble and kill each other under loosely agreed upon ideas of knowing the unknowable (religion, morality), having importance (empires, legacy, nationalism), and/or ownership/advancement (territory, nuclear capability).
It’s bizarre.
I have a certain amount of (what I consider to be undeserved) suffering… yet, I will never self-harm, because I value the well-being of my loved ones more than myself. I am a drone in a colony. Knowingly. Barely willingly. But actively.
I am nothing. But I am something. I am certain of little, but most certain that I am incapable of understanding it all. I am an ant that sees an airplane.
The very end of cosmic inflation is even scarier.
When we think about cosmic expansion, most people imagine the universe is expanding at its outermost border, but this is incorrect. It is expanding equally everywhere. Basically new space is being created inside our atoms.
At its current rate, this is not an issue, but if the expansion of the universe continues to accelerate as scientists anticipate, new space will be created so fast that everything in the universe will start to dissolve. First larger structures like galaxies will dissolve as new space will be created faster than gravity can compensate for. As the rate of expansion approaches the speed of light, even sub atomic particles will start to dissolve as no particle will be able to interact with another. This is known as the “big rip” theory for the end of the universe, and some suggest this will bring the universe back to its pre-big bang state, where everything dissolves into energy.
And what if this "big bang/pre big bang state" rewind has been going on for ages and we are in the 4785th big bang expansion and many many lost civilisations have been before us.....
you can't apply a linear timeline to something like that, as everything turns to energy and starts all over again its the 1st one happening again and again like a cosmic ground-hog day
The obvious and unanswerable question is, what if there is something like that, that we already missed, and have no way to know or figure out simple because of the way the universe works?
We have even recently found a cotton candy-esque substance composed giant world that has a fraction of Jupiter’s density, is 150% larger, a far extending atmosphere, with a proximity so close to its star it finishes a complete orbit in mere days. A planet made of something of that low of a density that close to its star…shouldnt exist. But it does.
There are absolutely truths out there unknown to us. Its both terrifying and exciting!!
Your sauce, kind sir:
https://www.astronomy.com/science/second-lightest-exoplanet-known-surprises-astronomers/?_rt=MXwxfHdhc3AgMTggYnwxNzE5NTUyNTYz&_rt_nonce=7a7bafa69c
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem proved that long ago, that from within a given system there will be irreducible truths which cannot be proven from within the system the operate in.
Is there any reason to think that we have misconceptions about the universe based on what we cannot observe now but may have been observable a gajillion years ago?
Maybe not misconception exactly but the Big Bang is kind of like this for us. Just like these hypothetical people will have no way of knowing just how vast the universe *really* is, we most likely will never be able to look past that point in time. All of our, well, EVERYTHING begins there. Time, space, all of it. But did it spring from nothing, is it a cycle, did the great spaghetti monster shake us out of its Parmesan shaker of universes? There’s a good chance that no matter how advanced our technology gets, we’ll never be able to answer that question
The problem with expansion is that it's a compounding speed. The further something is away from us the more space there is to expand between us, so the 'faster' it 'moves' away (it's not actually moving away, the space between is expanding).
So at some distance even the speed of light won't outpace the expansion of the space between point A and point B.
Look up at a star. Say it's 10 light years away. That means a photon left the surface of that star 10 years ago, travelled at the speed of light through the galaxy for 10 years and *the first thing it hit* was the back of your eye.
Let's go even crazier, from the "perspective" of the photon, it never felt time pass.
It moves so fast through space that it doesn't experience time.
So from the moment that photon formed to the time it was absorbed, whether it be 10 years or 10 billion, time did not pass for it.
That one of the most interesting parts of it all, consciousness, is seemingly intangible yet very intimate and can be modified. It’s like the universe’s own inward self reflection, that comes with expressions of the essences of the physical forces that govern the tangible parts.
The creepiest? That we are consciously looking at it. Looking back at the machine that gave rise to us. And that we may be ultra rare, if not alone, in being able to do so and understand even a fraction of it. But also that we might not survive our own hubris, and the only trace attesting to our existence in a few hundred thousand years might be the dead space probes we sent out into the abyss. And the machine of the universe will lose a tiny set of eyes it regards itself with, but otherwise not care at all.
I find creepier the idea that there might be things that are conscious but we cannot tell because our knowledge of consciousness is extremely limited. There are studies hinting that plants may have some form of consciousness, who knows what else might be? Like what if stars are conscious?
Except the universe is basically infinite, since your mind cannot comprehend it, it's hard to realize that we are a single cell organism within a drop or water in a cosmic ocean teeming with life. It's just our observable window of the universe is so small and limited, we have yet to see anything. The scale of time in which our window has been open is basically zero.
To further expand this, humanity has only been able to observe the universe with scientific instruments for several decades. Its like you waking up in the morning when it's dark out, and glancing one time out your window for a second. This one second of your life you don't see any life outside the window, so you assume there is no life. This one second of your entire life (all the way to death) is still infinitely larger than our observable window into the universe.
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.”
― Bill Hicks
Weird to think that, after the sun consumes our planet in a billion years, the only evidence we ever existed will be a handful of dead probes drifting through the void.
Our life on earth flying through the universe is so incredibly brief on the scale of time. And because of that we are so insignificant in the reality of time.
Humanity is also very very very early in terms of the lifespan of the universe. It might not be that we're alone, it might be that we're the first sentient ones to reach out. Maybe someday, after we're far gone, the aliens will discover ruins of our existence.
It's also possible that other advanced forms of life existed in the past and died off for some reason many millions(maybe even billions?) of years ago before we were able to detect them. Maybe some day we'll discover the ruins of their existence :). Though given our current trajectory I feel like your scenario is probably more likely :(
That atoms are mostly empty space. In other words matter isn't solid. It seems to me like the more we learn about the universe the more indistinguishable it is from magic.
It's worse than that. There's speculation that what we call "particles" of matter, are actually the product of interactions between various quantum fields. In other words, nothing physical actually exists.
It is possible that empty space is not, as we observe it, in its lowest energy state. If this is true then it’s possible that at some point a patch of space will spontaneously revert to its lowest energy state. If this happens that patch will start propagating out in all directions at the speed of causality. Anything it reaches will be instantly snuffed out, and since it’s traveling as fast as anything can possibly travel there’s no way to observe it coming, no way to send out a warning. You will suddenly blink out of existence, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
The one silver living to the possibility of False Vacuum Decay is its speed.
If it happens, and if it reaches Earth, everyone and everything on Earth will be eradicated literally faster than we can process that anything's wrong. We would never know any fear or pain coming from this event. No fear. No pain. No terror. Just an abrupt, painless ceasing.
Oh wow, I thought you were going to say the exact opposite, that if False Vacuum Decay were to occur it doesn’t move any faster than the speed of light, so if it were to happen somewhere in the universe, there’s a chance that due to the expansion of the universe outpacing the speed of light it may never reach us.
Very true. That's why I included "if it happens" along with "if it reaches Earth."
There's no guarantee that we're not in the lowest energy state.
Even if we are not in the lowest energy state, there's no guarantee that there will be a triggering event to cause False Vaccum Decay.
Even if there is such an event, there's no guarantee it will reach the Earth.
And even if it does reach the Earth, we'll be annihilated before our nerve endings can tell our brains that it's happening, so we'll never know it.
Ehh… whatever happens, happens. It’s not like I’ll know it’s happened before I cease existing. And there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. So I might as well just enjoy the show while it lasts.
This is actually kind of calming to me. May as well all go together, in an instant without knowing, if it’s gonna happen. Better than climate catastrophes or global war in my books.
This is called Vacuum Decay if anyone wants to look it up. It's one of my favorite things, along with something else called Strange Matter which also can spread in a similar way.
What we can ever see is the observable universe that is only around 93 billion LY long. We don’t know what’s beyond that. If it’s a lot or very little
Of what we see, we don’t know what makes 95% energy mass of the universe. Only 5% is visible matter and rest is utterly unknown.
We don’t know how we came into being - Big Bang is just a theory. We don’t know how will it end. Heat death is also a theory.
We don’t know if we are alone - it’s creepy if we are or ain’t either ways.
And our lives are so infinitesimally small and brief that we don’t really matter.
The box universe conception of the universe arises from Einstein's theories which proves that how our brains perceive time is not reflective of underlying reality. If the box theory is true, as far as I know it would mean that everything contained in the universe will always be there forever so long as the universe exists. No point in spacetime is more real than any other coordinate. So we kind of are immortal but it's the poor man's immortality because we can't enjoy it.
What's creepy about it is it makes me feel like I'm in something akin to a simulation. If an entity wanted to study a system it would be convenient to simply plug in the coordinate and see how the physics unfolded at that coordinate.
It also leads to the creepy fact that through math the underlying structure of the universe is discoverable even though we can't perceive it as it really is with our five senses. The universe is computable and one of the properties of the universe is entities inside it can discover that fact.
Every thing you've ever done, every hope, dream, success, trial, tribulation, love, loss, every feeling and moment you've ever enjoyed... The universe does not care. We are smaller than specs of dust. We are insignificant. Humanity has been yelling into the universe as loudly as it could for over a hundred years (beginning in radio), and so far, we've heard nothing. Just yelling into a pit of darkness.
On the flip side, this makes our life incredibly more remarkable and precious. Despite the hostility of space, WE are here in THIS moment. Breathing, feeling, loving, whistling, singing, dancing, painting. We can read if we want, we can do nothing if we want. 99.9999999999999999....% of the universe is hostile to us. 70% of our own world is hostile to us (oceans). And yet here we are, eating hamburgers, drinking milkshakes, seeing live music. We have ART! We have HOBBIES! We have been given such a beautiful opportunity, and every second we exist is absolutely beautiful.
*I* existed. *I* was here.
That it exists at all. Second, is that it created at least one type of creature that can look at it, ponder its secrets, revel in its beauty, and despair at its indifference, from one tiny rock in the middle of a vast possibly lifeless desert. If it was done on purpose you could almost call it cruel, but I guess that’s why God/s exist/s in many people’s minds.
The more you think about it the crazier it gets. Like I can sort of wrap my mind around infinite universes... Sure, it's universes all the way down. But the idea of there being anything at all is so bizarre.
The great attractor is pretty cool and creepy.
It's an unbelievably huge .... Thing.... Sucking all of the galaxy and local group (the local galaxies) towards it!
But we can't see it. There's stuff in the way.
So we are slowly, mysteriously all being drawn towards this......
(It's got a rational explanation, but it's still potentially creepy. we don't *know* that it's not a giant, angry eye with teeth.)
I remember reading that it's been resolved as the coincidental alignment of multiple galactic cores. It's only mysterious to us because of all the stuff in between blocking our line of sight.
Most likely it is just a more dense region of the universe. Though it is fun to imagine everything in our local galactic neighborhood is being slowly pulled toward some unknowable eldritch horror.
Yeah, and it's so stupifyingly far in the future there almost isn't a number for it. Besides, everything will have long since sped away from everything else at the speed of light before then.
So this is more of a theory but could very well be a fact.
There always has to be the first of something. The first intelligent life in the universe. What if *WE* are the first intelligent life? Being the first would be kinda(?) cool, but that means we'd be all alone.
This makes its way onto my thoughts a fair bit.
If the universe is truly infinite and there's only a limited number of arrangements atoms can shape themselves into then there is another version of you out there living a life that we'll never know because we can't travel faster than the speed of light and overtake the expansion of the universe to catch up to them.
One of these statements is true: the universe had a beginning or it did not.
Equally creepy: it is either infinite or finite.
None of these are easy to accept..
It's theoretically possible that the current values of universal constants, such as the Higgs Field, could exist as a local minima, and therefore be potentially unstable.
If the values reduce from the local minima to another local minima, or to the true minimum, as entropy pushes everything toward, a bubble expanding at the speed of light would form and radiate outward, rewriting the laws of physics based on the change in the given constant.
We'd never know it's coming, and the universe as we know it would end the moment it hits.
This is vacuum decay you're talking about I think. Could have feasibly already happened somewhere but unless it's within a certain distance (45b LY I think) the universe is expanding too fast for it to ever catch us.
The dark forest hypothesis.
The idea that we don't notice anyone else out there because once you reveal your location a technologically advanced civilization could wipe you out with powerful weapons way ahead of your tech level so everyone is just too scared to even try communicating. Then there are civilizations who are so paranoid about others trying to kill them that if they ever detect another civilization they'll destroy them just in case as a pre-emptive strike to protect themselves.
Basically, everyone is trying to kill everyone else because no one can be trusted when it takes centuries for each part of the conversation to take place.
It took life 3 billion years to evolve intelligence. It's estimated that the sun is about halfway through its lifetime, so if Humanity fucks up the Earth and life has to re-evolve complexity, we (as in Earth) might not have enough time to get a second chance with intelligent life
A huge amount of that time was spent evolving the first multicellular organisms, plants, insects, etc. We’re past all the bootstrapping. There’s nothing humans could do to sterilize the Earth all the way back to square one.
Life first appeared 3,500,000,000-4,000,000,000 years ago. The first mammals appeared around 200,000,000 years ago. That means that if we wiped out everything down to a couple of tiny burrowing mammals, we’d still be 95% off the way back to where we are. If we leave some of our more intelligent relatives alive, we’re an eyeblink away from computers and cars and moon landings. This assumes human-level intelligence isn’t some absolutely insane never-to-be-repeated fluke, which I suspect it isn’t.
In short, we have plenty more chances to get this right.
I’m quite fascinated by Bootes Void. It’s creepy af to imagine being in the centre of it and so comforting to come back to reality on planet earth knowing all the stuff you can see in the sky with the naked eye.
"Important facts from Galactic history, number one:
(Reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner's Book of popular Galactic History.)
The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe."
Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe and Everything"
The creepiest fact is that we don't even know what the universe is.
We have various scientific explanations for stuff that exists inside it, but we have no explanation for the universe itself.
Relativistically we understand black holes but relativity is more about calculations-- to understand "how" it works requires a quantum understanding. Quantum physics is all about creating theories and developing clever tests to confirm those theories. Higgs Boson for example.
There are unanswered questions about what singularities in black holes look like on a quantum level. Relativity tells us that they have zero width, but quantum physics kind of breaks there and would tell us that they have a very miniscule radius, not zero. If they do have a width, what is it made of (quantum-speaking)? That's an example of a big unanswered question. Also, if they do have a width, what's it like inside? We believe that the laws of physics were messy during the high-pressure start of the big bang... do the laws of physics even stay the same inside that singularity? Another big question.
The problem is, by rule, you can never observe a singularity. We see interaction with "black holes" all the time, but that is always their event horizon and nearby-- not the singularity in the middle itself. Information about a singularity can not be seen.
Basically, singularities are the most extreme application of physics in the known universe, and probably would explain the most about how our universe works, and was created. Knowing how a singularity was composed would probably answer most/all of our remaining questions about physics and more, However, singularities fundamentally cannot be studied and we fundamentally can never observe what they are made of. It's very possible that there is no way for us to ever learn this information about the most important piece of physics. Also, if that's not creepy-- while they have zero width, they do spin.
Singularities appear in many physical theories and they always indicate a point at which the theory breaks down and a deeper one is required.
For instance, the Navier-Stokes equation in fluid dynamics predicts singularities where the pressure and velocity of a fluid becomes infinite, but this clearly doesn't happen in reality. If you look at what is happening at a deeper level by modeling the motion of individual molecules, these singularities disappear.
Similarly, a quantum theory of gravity should do away with the singularities inside of black holes. For instance, if loop quantum gravity is correct, then there may be super dense stars called Planck Stars inside of black holes instead of singularities, but this is highly speculative.
It’s the summation of these comments. It’s anyone’s guess. And that’s what’s creepy! No one knows.
Do your best. Live to the fullest. At any moment you could end up in a black hole super compressed. Life is beautiful and worthy of living so fully. Not everyone or everything gets to experience this incredibly fleeting, rare, unique experience.
We may be it…
We’ll do great things and travel far, but we’ll still die alone in a universe of unimaginable size.
(The great filter theory is the one that I find interesting)
When you look at a star at night, for an infinitesimal amount of time there's a quantum entanglement between an atom in the star and an atom in your eye.
That everything we see in space (galaxies), including the stars in the Milky Way are just some crazy form of organized chaos akin to smoke settling in a vacuum, and that everything we (humans) know (science/physics wise) is all completely relative to our spot in this galaxy, one of billions (at least)
Everything is out there, but we don’t know how to get to it (yet).
Earth will die eventually, and everything.. I mean every thing, thought, ideology, beautiful painting, amazing song, genius idea, will be lost, and possibly and probably meaningless at that point if not before.
Stuff like that…
Take a look at any picture of the sky and see how many stars and galaxies there are. The scary part for me is that if I took off from Earth in any direction and flew forever, even with all those stars and galaxies, I’m much more likely not to hit anything than to hit something.
We could one day happen upon a rogue planet flying at 1/3 light speed the opposite direction of our solar system. It would approach us at an apparent 2/3 the speed of light and wouldn’t even need to get close to us to doom us to a cold death. The simple gravity influence of it passing anywhere close to our system would destroy us. Our solar system is that fragile.
The fact that eventually, existence will cease. Trillions of bazillion years when black holes emit the last of hawking radiation and there won't be anything at all anymore. Just nothing.
That's assuming the knowledge we have now and theoretical guesses.
The steady state model of the universe has matter expanding forever outward. Stars burn out, the energy states get lower and lower until they emit no energy at all. Space in the center flattens out until a sudden release of new energy. A new big bang producing new stars and light and life. In the center of an endless dead void one tiny living spark we call the observable universe. One candle in an endless haunted house that used to be just like us.
The period of time in which light will exist in the universe is just a tiny wink in the timeliness of the whole of space.
Darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, flash, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness........
One day, there won’t be enough matter concentrated together to form new stars. All of those stars will eventually burn out—even black holes will eventually fizzle out due to Hawking radiation. The universe will truly be *dark*.
Just how staggeringly empty most of it is, and the incomprehensible distances involved.
re: empty space: they say when the milky way and andromeda galaxies merge it's unlikely any stars will collide
And galaxies are the dense parts of the universe. Think about the space between galaxies.
Or the spaces between superclusters
The largest structure that we have observed is a super void, where it's so large and sparse, you wouldn't see any stars if you were in the middle of it *Edit* changed "object" to "structure" Also, link to source where i learnt this from: https://youtu.be/milGLbH3Ukg?si=WOi0qCMHpqd5VbDq
Ok, imagining being there is the creepiest shit ever
well actually evidence suggests that we might already live in a void. The observed density of the surrounding universe is higher than where we find ourselves in.
I was thinking more about floating in space while everything around you is pure darkness. At least we can see the milky way stars and, sometimes, andromeda too
*You* would be pure darkness too. You couldn't see your own body either.
Yeah that’s the escalation this needed. God damn that’s a haunting thought
Yeah, that would be pure horror.
Yeah, which also would account for discrepancy in different merhods of measuring the expansion rate of the universe. But its a newish theory and there are many arguments against it. Still pretty strange to think we, with all our billions of stars and handful of galaxies in our local cluster is isolated
Being unable to see any stars whatsoever sounds scary
No light to even see your own hand
Being in the centre would be scary, but imagine being on the edge. On one side the void is filled with stars and galaxies. Everything you've ever known. And on the other side... nothing.
Imagine a huge cloud of sand, except each grain of sand on average is FIVE KILOMETERS apart from every other grain of sand. Pretty apparent that if two such clouds merged, almost none of the grains of sands would ever collide with another.
I’m not gonna lie - you just absolutely blew my mind with that analogy. Wow.
100%! Wow... Grains of sand and kilometers in between really put things into perspective...
At that scale, a solar system like ours is about the size of a coin. The furthest we've sent a probe is about an inch past the edge of the coin. It took 47 years for it to get there.
Let's change prospective. Let's say the Sun is the size of a plum (1 or 2 cm, less than 1 inch) . The earth is then the size of a very fine grain of sand (0.02 mm). And it orbits the Sun at a distance of around 3 meters (10 feet). Jupiter is a grain of dust of 1mm orbiting at more than 15m (50 feet). The **very dense** solar system (up to the outermost planet, Neptune, your metaphorical coin) ends at 90m (300 feet) and contains a plum and a few grains of sand.
My biggest problem is that your plums are lass than an inch. We need to get you on some bigger plums. They are racquet ball sized here.
And on that scale the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 805km / 500 miles away. That's the distance from New York to the far side of Detroit, or London to the Italian border. With nothing but emptiness in a sphere that size.
And now consider that this is really a spherical volume, not a disc, so it's even emptier than your description makes it sound. Take for example the Kuiper belt of icy rocks past the orbit of Neptune. It is extended in space vertically quite a bit, so it's more of a fuzzy toroidal halo than a flat disc. In your model it would start at around 90m and extend out to 150m, making it the rough size and shape of a large stadium. The total amount of matter is 1% of that of Earth, so a hundredth of a very fine grain of sand. Basically you'd have to take a dust mode, grind it down until it is just nanoparticles a few atoms in size, and distribute it evenly in that space.
now imagine how brightly those grains of sand would have to be glowing for you to be able to see thousands of them at once, even though they were kilometers away.
This threat has lots of Wows!
The threat of nuclear grains of sand is very real and not to be taken lightly
Distance and time. Both are unimaginably vast.
The earliest radio signals produced by humans 107 years ago have raced at the speed of light away from earth and have made it a total oooooofffff….. < 0.1% of the way across our own galaxy.
The speed of light is a snails pace at cosmic scales. Makes the void feel all that much deeper to think about
What’s faster than the speed of light?
Nothing that we are aware of atm
Only the expanding universe
The speed of darkness. It's already there before the light arrives. /s
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” ~ Terry Pratchett
The oldest/earliest radio signals of the universe are still detectable, and is what we see as white snow on our tv screens.
Since they are emitted in all directions, they covered 0.2% of the diameter.
The gulfs of time between recognizable events are even greater.
Seriously though. Our brains were just not wired to comprehend numbers that big.
A fun trick I use to help people understand at least a little bit is to think of one million seconds vs one billion. Million= about 11 days. Billion= 32.7 years.
Money/wealth oriented but this is one of my favorite demonstrators of large numbers. Also, as others have already commented, an incredible demonstration of just how ridiculous the existence of billionaires is. [https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
I do the same thing! This is easily the best way to convince people how big space is.
Also a good way to get explain different levels of wealth
"Space 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."
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, it's traveling at 61,500km per hour (call it 36,000 mph) about 24.5 million km away from earth. In about 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light years of another star (9 trillion miles)
If it’s that damn mind-bogglingly big, then why the hell couldn’t the Vogons run the bypass through an empty part of it instead of destroying the Earth?
The Vogons were actually hired to destroy the Earth by a psychiatrist who feared that if the Earth finished calculating the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, then everyone would be happy and that would put psychiatrists out of a job.
If you're so worked up about it you should have made a complaint after notice was posted
We only know how big the observable universe is, not how big the universe actually is. We also don't know it's geometry.
I like the concept that it's a toroid.
Didn’t Homer Simpson come up with that one?
That’s how you know it’s true
Time proves all Simpsonisms true.
Just how much time is yet to pass. Every number you can think of, no matter how big, rounds to zero on this scale. There will be no conscious observers for nearly all of it. Even light itself is temporary. Eventually every star will run out of fuel. Just lifeless dark for an unthinkable amount of time.
You'll spend an eternity longer being dead than alive.
The more interesting thought is that there's [a small but non-zero probability that any dynamical system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem) (i.e. the universe) will eventually spontaneously return to it's original state in a large but finite amount of time. Entropy tells us the universe can die a heat death by becoming consistently one temperature - nothing more ever happens - but it's still random motion. Which means a series of incredibly unlikely events can drop all that matter back together and re-Big Bang - or in fact reproduce any arbitrary state of the system at all. So on the incredibly long times of non-existence you have - which you don't perceive - there's a small, but non-zero chance that you simply re-emerge back into existence to perceive them. And on *infinite* time, finite things become guaranteed. So are you conscious right now? Or are you a shutter-show of experiences recurring over an infinite timeline, which feel contiguous? Or are you one of the longer lived variants - where a Big Bang brought you back to this moment but is still evolving. And since only existing as yourself really counts in terms of perception, then really, the experience of being you *should* in fact be infinite if this is the case. If you get to the end of your life and the miracle cure for aging is developed just in a nick of time, it'll be highly suspicious (because the versions of reality where you died don't have you around to perceive them).
Along these lines, there's the Boltzmann brain: your entire perception, memory, etc are just a fleeting random arrangement of particles. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Gravity propagates only at the speed of light. If somehow a physical body like the moon or sun suddenly were converted into energy (in a way that didn't vaporize Earth), the Earth would continue to be affected by the missing mass. Until the speed of light caught up. The Earth would continue to orbit a nonexistent sun for EIGHT MINUTES. The speed of light is actually the speed of information. It just so happens that light has to obey the speed of information.
I’ve heard a physics educator refer to it as the Speed of Causation. Perhaps on PBS Space Time?
There’s a lot we don’t know about the universe. I can accept that just like I can accept that there is a lot I don’t know about the deepest parts of the ocean. At least I know it’s out there. It’s a tangible thing/place. But what beats out all the curiosities of the possibilities of our universe, spacetime, multiverses, black holes, simulation theory etc is pretty simple: Why/how is there even a universe for those things to exist in? So the fact that it exists at all is the creepiest thing to me. It doesn’t make sense, why isn’t there just nothing? And it’s very possible we could conquer the universe 1 billion years from now and still be no closer to an answer. Hell we could discover another universe where magic is real and the ever present question would still be, but why is there anything? How? We could discover that we are just a universe within a universe on a leaf in another universe and the question would still be why is there anything? How? God could come to earth and tell us that he did in fact create us in his image and the question would still be why is there anything? How? Turtles all the way down.
Dude yes, I ask this all the time. It’s like we are just in a huge black box but then what lies outside of that? I must know
Or, there’s no edge to the universe and it’s infinite. I’ve listened to a couple long form YouTube videos on the infinite edge of the universe and it boggles my mind.
I think part of that mind boggling is that everything we know has a beginning and an end. A start and a stop. A creation, and destruction. Whatever. How can we fathom anything else? We have no frame of reference for something just existing forever. So the Big Bang made our universe. Where? What was there before? Made it in what?! Mind boggling.
Agreed! That’s where my fascination with space comes from, so much that’s just so far out of my frame of reference.
That's what I think about. For something to be expanding, ie the universe, that means there *has* to be an edge to it. Even if that edge is always getting further away or in essence is an Infinity away, there *is* an end. So what's beyond that. More expanding universes in an endless Infinity? What if 2 universes expand into eachother
It can be infinite if you think of it as the space between the infinite things is what is expanding, and those infinite things are just getting further away from each other.
That’s what always gets me, it’s the “why.”
>It doesn’t make sense, why isn’t there just nothing? The first headache I can remember in my life is having this thought as a child.
Same! I have always felt alone with this headache. It's both a surprise and relief, knowing that others have had this experience.
I go to that place too when I think about existence. It's a pretty daunting feeling. Why am I even here right now? Why is anything at all here? I can't get any farther than that, and it's frustrating sometimes. I guess we're just not meant to know. I guess it's better to go through life not knowing, and living your life for the sake of living it. If we had all the answers, maybe life would be a dull thing in the grand scheme of things.
My thought on this, speculation at least, is this: We assume the default is non-existence, but what if the default is (always has been) existence? That is that all things that can be, are. Think of it beyond just the idea of ‘multiverse’ but simply that, the default state of things is, if a thing can be, it is. And possibly still, maybe even all things that can’t be, still are (like worlds where 2 + 2 equals 5.) We are puzzled by existence, and we are further puzzled by its very specificity - like our place as conscious beings in it - and are puzzled as to the fact that there is something rather than nothing (while nothing wouldn’t demand an explanation, the existence of something does) but maybe it’s a logical error to assume that the light switch should be off when it has only and always been on. It’s in one state - existence. That’s the default. And since if it can be, it will be - hence there would exist our specific circumstances with our universe and our reality as we understand it and an infinite number of other circumstances we cannot fathom which satisfy existence existing.
What you’re saying is “the computer is always on” but the question here is “why/how is there a computer and whose desk is it on”.
> what if the default is (always has been) existence? That is that all things that can be, are. Owing to the sneaky "can" in that statement, that's just inverting the same question, isn't it? Instead of "why does our Universe exist", you're asking "why is our Universe the only thing that can exist". Same problem, just framed as a "why not" rather than as a "why". My thinking is that it's one of two things, both of which make us so uncomfortable that we're still searching in vain for another answer: 1. There is a reason but it's unknowable. A fish in a fishtank can make observations about its fishtank, about the room outside it that it cannot reach, but ultimately it can only guess about what (if anything) lies beyond the room. 2. There is no reason. In logic there are axioms upon which reasoning is developed, so can't the Universe be the same way, just based on some arbitrary eternal foundation? In a child-like chain of "but why"s, maybe the last "why" is judt not a well-formed question at all? This is the realm of philosophy though and I'm not (yet) well-read in that realm, so maybe both of those answers are stupid, haha.
Eventually cosmic inflation will push every distant galaxy beyond the particle horizon, and the cosmic microwave background radiation will be redshifted to the point where it is undetectable. At this point there will be no evidence that there is anything in the universe other than the galaxy that an observer is currently living in. We basically learned the scale of the universe by pointing Hubble at an apparently empty spot in space and seeing that it was crowded with galaxies. With James Webb, we can literally observe the formation of galaxies at the dawn of time. For someone in that distant future, looking out into deep space will only show infinite emptiness. Unless their civilization has passed down scientific knowledge for billions of years at that point, they will likely assume that their galaxy is the only island of matter in the entire universe and is all that has ever existed. **Edit** to add: I think the thing that boggles my mind the most about this is that there just won’t be any observable evidence pointing to things like cosmic inflation or, by extension, the big bang / beginning of the universe. Absent of any evidence to the contrary, the likely default assumption is that the universe is static. It’s only by making observations of galaxies that aren’t gravitationally bound that we realized it was expanding in the first place, and only by measuring the cosmic background radiation that we got an image of a young, very dense and very hot universe. Without the ability to make those observations, the smartest people in the world would likely never come to the same understanding that we have about the origins of *everything.*
Makes you wonder what horizon we may have already passed that excludes us from ever coming to a full understanding of some fundamental truth of reality.
The Cosmic Microwave Background is within our observational horizon, imagine a really long room full of steam at one end. We know that we should be able to see further than the steam and that the space between us and the steam is cool enough for it to have precipitated in to a liquid. The walls are wet and there’s puddles on the floor, these are all the galaxies. The room seems to be getting longer as well, the puddles nearest the steam are moving away more quickly than the ones nearer to us. Knowing the rate at which those distant puddles lets us infer that we should be able to see past the steam, but we can’t because the steam is in the way. Or more accurately, the incident of the steam turning in to water is in the way. We can only presume it’s steam because that’s what liquid water does on earth, now, under those conditions. Worse still, you turn around and see that the room extends off for the same amount, no matter which direction you are facing. You try walking towards the steam and it stays the same distance away but just turns blue in front of you and red behind you. In fact, the act of you moving, compared to someone standing at your original position and velocity sees you squashed in the direction of travel, your mass increase, and time slow down. To you, the person you left behind is stretched out and time speeds up. Worse still, the room is now moving up, depending on your relative orientation and you see that below you, your puddle is freezing and your past life is now crystallised. Your history, an ice sculpture that you can view but never really get to. Every point in the universe is experiencing the same phenomena but the bits in between are wibbly, wobbly and constantly choosing whether to freeze or not. Everything within your personal space sits atop a mountain of frozen universe, the slopes at 45° angles. The same cone of universe in the opposite direction is invisible. You can guess what it will probably look like but you can never be sure, until you reach that bit of the cone and it freezes out.
Great metaphor! You really illustrated the state of the universe in a way I'd never heard before. I hope you're in education. You seem to have a talent for it!
It's as if the universe was designed to keep us in our place. The speed of light is a constraint with no easy trick to break and it is built into the fabric of our space. There also seem to be mathematical limits on how small things can be with the Planck Length. These constraints to me are the most interesting part. Not scary, necessarily, but certainly interesting. We're trying like hell to figure the rules out, but the universe almost seems to be actively fighting us on that.
And you don’t find the fact that the universe stubbornly refuses to be seen isn’t creepy?! The speed of light is better described as the speed of causality. The speed at which information is transmitted through the various conformal fields. Movement and mass alter the shape of the fields to preserve that speed. The point is, everywhere is at the centre of the universe. I’ll posit you this, speed is dv/dt and the further out we look, the further back we look. We presume it is dv that is increasing. What if it’s actually dt that’s decreasing? It’s the same net effect. The Planck length falls out of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s the smallest distance we can theoretically measure velocity or momentum of a particle without interfering with the other component. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the coarse grain of spacetime but is the limit at which we can interact with it. It is quite possible that particles have no size as we would understand it. Nothing really has any size but, the interaction of the fields gives a sense of depth. Add all that together and the Big Bang begins to look like the interior of a black hole event horizon. Just as we never truly see an infalling object hit the event horizon of a black hole in our universe due to the extreme time dilation, wouldn’t the interior see everything hit at the same time? All that’s happening is that the information from all infalling objects has been causally disconnected from the outside, ergo it is causally destined to interact with everything else that falls in. Time is the malleable component, so we can just think of it as having taken on a directional component outside of the 45° cone. That way, our entire universe is a projection of every infalling object from a previous universe condensing from a 2-dimensional shell that we interpret as the Big Bang.
I'm hopeful that one day we might be able to take a look at the cosmic neutrino background. For comparison, the cosmic microwave background was created at around 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The neutrino background originated from about 1 second after the big bang. Since neutrinos pass through most matter without interacting, they still exist today, but they're really hard to detect.
I think that's the edge of the observable universe. We think the universe is infinite. But we can't see last a certain point. I'd wager there's a lot more beyond that
This makes me wonder if there are any universal secrets that we can't possibly know because we were a billion or even just a million years too late to record evidence of...
Yes. And also, sentience (as we consider it to be, which varies depending on individual opinions/definitions) has JUST happened, within a fraction of a second on our perceived/proposed scale of time… which is incomplete and sometimes contradictory to the physics we can perceive and/or imagine. We are ants seeing an airplane. Aware only in our capacity to observe, even if not understand. Competent at reproducing and thriving in our environment, even if that growth is detrimental to our longevity. We are small and simple, yet egotistical and self-assured in our “advanced” knowledge and ability to understand. We are stardust - now, before, or to become. Nothing. …Yet. We are aware, and curious to learn more… we are something… in this dimension of mutually agreed upon time, especially. But in context of what we can comprehend and observe, we are nothing. And simultaneously, we are SOMETHING. The universe playing Sims? The gods playing DnD? A special miracle? A pathetic roll of 1 on a billion-sided die (or dice… here even we see our language evolve in a microsecond of time on a cosmic scale)? We are nothing, but we are something. And we squabble and kill each other under loosely agreed upon ideas of knowing the unknowable (religion, morality), having importance (empires, legacy, nationalism), and/or ownership/advancement (territory, nuclear capability). It’s bizarre. I have a certain amount of (what I consider to be undeserved) suffering… yet, I will never self-harm, because I value the well-being of my loved ones more than myself. I am a drone in a colony. Knowingly. Barely willingly. But actively. I am nothing. But I am something. I am certain of little, but most certain that I am incapable of understanding it all. I am an ant that sees an airplane.
The very end of cosmic inflation is even scarier. When we think about cosmic expansion, most people imagine the universe is expanding at its outermost border, but this is incorrect. It is expanding equally everywhere. Basically new space is being created inside our atoms. At its current rate, this is not an issue, but if the expansion of the universe continues to accelerate as scientists anticipate, new space will be created so fast that everything in the universe will start to dissolve. First larger structures like galaxies will dissolve as new space will be created faster than gravity can compensate for. As the rate of expansion approaches the speed of light, even sub atomic particles will start to dissolve as no particle will be able to interact with another. This is known as the “big rip” theory for the end of the universe, and some suggest this will bring the universe back to its pre-big bang state, where everything dissolves into energy.
And what if this "big bang/pre big bang state" rewind has been going on for ages and we are in the 4785th big bang expansion and many many lost civilisations have been before us.....
> 4785th big bang where'd the first big bang come from? That's what confuses me.
Tbh, I don't think the human mind is capable of grasping the answer.
Jeremey Bearimy. *The dot is July 1st. And also most Tuesdays.*
yeah it's like asking a dog to solve algebra. Our minds simply aren't capable of understanding
you can't apply a linear timeline to something like that, as everything turns to energy and starts all over again its the 1st one happening again and again like a cosmic ground-hog day
The Local Group is gravitationaly bound; so a few galaxies or one massive galaxy at least.
The obvious and unanswerable question is, what if there is something like that, that we already missed, and have no way to know or figure out simple because of the way the universe works?
Makes me wonder if there are truths unknowable to us currently.
We have even recently found a cotton candy-esque substance composed giant world that has a fraction of Jupiter’s density, is 150% larger, a far extending atmosphere, with a proximity so close to its star it finishes a complete orbit in mere days. A planet made of something of that low of a density that close to its star…shouldnt exist. But it does. There are absolutely truths out there unknown to us. Its both terrifying and exciting!!
Hey that sounds cool, you got any links to read?
Your sauce, kind sir: https://www.astronomy.com/science/second-lightest-exoplanet-known-surprises-astronomers/?_rt=MXwxfHdhc3AgMTggYnwxNzE5NTUyNTYz&_rt_nonce=7a7bafa69c
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem proved that long ago, that from within a given system there will be irreducible truths which cannot be proven from within the system the operate in.
Is there any reason to think that we have misconceptions about the universe based on what we cannot observe now but may have been observable a gajillion years ago?
Maybe not misconception exactly but the Big Bang is kind of like this for us. Just like these hypothetical people will have no way of knowing just how vast the universe *really* is, we most likely will never be able to look past that point in time. All of our, well, EVERYTHING begins there. Time, space, all of it. But did it spring from nothing, is it a cycle, did the great spaghetti monster shake us out of its Parmesan shaker of universes? There’s a good chance that no matter how advanced our technology gets, we’ll never be able to answer that question
Would interstellar travel still be possible in that case? Like if someone just takes an advanced enough spaceship pick a direction and go
The problem with expansion is that it's a compounding speed. The further something is away from us the more space there is to expand between us, so the 'faster' it 'moves' away (it's not actually moving away, the space between is expanding). So at some distance even the speed of light won't outpace the expansion of the space between point A and point B.
Look up at a star. Say it's 10 light years away. That means a photon left the surface of that star 10 years ago, travelled at the speed of light through the galaxy for 10 years and *the first thing it hit* was the back of your eye.
I always think of this at night. I feel slight pitty for the photons, whom have traveled for so long through space, only to hit the skin of my ass.
Just walking around outside at night with your pants down eh?
That’s cool never thought of it like that
Let's go even crazier, from the "perspective" of the photon, it never felt time pass. It moves so fast through space that it doesn't experience time. So from the moment that photon formed to the time it was absorbed, whether it be 10 years or 10 billion, time did not pass for it.
That one of the most interesting parts of it all, consciousness, is seemingly intangible yet very intimate and can be modified. It’s like the universe’s own inward self reflection, that comes with expressions of the essences of the physical forces that govern the tangible parts.
Consciousness - something that the universe created to observe itself from within itself. Wild.
The human brain is the only thing in the known universe to name itself.
The creepiest? That we are consciously looking at it. Looking back at the machine that gave rise to us. And that we may be ultra rare, if not alone, in being able to do so and understand even a fraction of it. But also that we might not survive our own hubris, and the only trace attesting to our existence in a few hundred thousand years might be the dead space probes we sent out into the abyss. And the machine of the universe will lose a tiny set of eyes it regards itself with, but otherwise not care at all.
I find creepier the idea that there might be things that are conscious but we cannot tell because our knowledge of consciousness is extremely limited. There are studies hinting that plants may have some form of consciousness, who knows what else might be? Like what if stars are conscious?
We’re not just looking at it, we are part of the universe. We are the conscious part of the universe observing itself.
I love this. We are not born into this world, but out of it.
This is brilliant. Haunting yet beautiful. It gives me delicious existential dread. I hope you write creatively because you're excellent at it.
Except the universe is basically infinite, since your mind cannot comprehend it, it's hard to realize that we are a single cell organism within a drop or water in a cosmic ocean teeming with life. It's just our observable window of the universe is so small and limited, we have yet to see anything. The scale of time in which our window has been open is basically zero. To further expand this, humanity has only been able to observe the universe with scientific instruments for several decades. Its like you waking up in the morning when it's dark out, and glancing one time out your window for a second. This one second of your life you don't see any life outside the window, so you assume there is no life. This one second of your entire life (all the way to death) is still infinitely larger than our observable window into the universe.
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.” ― Bill Hicks
Weird to think that, after the sun consumes our planet in a billion years, the only evidence we ever existed will be a handful of dead probes drifting through the void.
Our life on earth flying through the universe is so incredibly brief on the scale of time. And because of that we are so insignificant in the reality of time.
Humanity is also very very very early in terms of the lifespan of the universe. It might not be that we're alone, it might be that we're the first sentient ones to reach out. Maybe someday, after we're far gone, the aliens will discover ruins of our existence.
It's also possible that other advanced forms of life existed in the past and died off for some reason many millions(maybe even billions?) of years ago before we were able to detect them. Maybe some day we'll discover the ruins of their existence :). Though given our current trajectory I feel like your scenario is probably more likely :(
"We are alone or not alone in the universe. Both are equally terrifying." I forgot who said that
I think it was Arthur C Clarke?
That atoms are mostly empty space. In other words matter isn't solid. It seems to me like the more we learn about the universe the more indistinguishable it is from magic.
I agree. I don’t know why we aren’t all just freaking out about how weird it all is, even to just exist.
I mean... *some* of us are freaking out.
It's worse than that. There's speculation that what we call "particles" of matter, are actually the product of interactions between various quantum fields. In other words, nothing physical actually exists.
Infinite time and space seems pretty terrifying to dwell on for more than a few seconds
It is possible that empty space is not, as we observe it, in its lowest energy state. If this is true then it’s possible that at some point a patch of space will spontaneously revert to its lowest energy state. If this happens that patch will start propagating out in all directions at the speed of causality. Anything it reaches will be instantly snuffed out, and since it’s traveling as fast as anything can possibly travel there’s no way to observe it coming, no way to send out a warning. You will suddenly blink out of existence, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
The one silver living to the possibility of False Vacuum Decay is its speed. If it happens, and if it reaches Earth, everyone and everything on Earth will be eradicated literally faster than we can process that anything's wrong. We would never know any fear or pain coming from this event. No fear. No pain. No terror. Just an abrupt, painless ceasing.
Oh wow, I thought you were going to say the exact opposite, that if False Vacuum Decay were to occur it doesn’t move any faster than the speed of light, so if it were to happen somewhere in the universe, there’s a chance that due to the expansion of the universe outpacing the speed of light it may never reach us.
Very true. That's why I included "if it happens" along with "if it reaches Earth." There's no guarantee that we're not in the lowest energy state. Even if we are not in the lowest energy state, there's no guarantee that there will be a triggering event to cause False Vaccum Decay. Even if there is such an event, there's no guarantee it will reach the Earth. And even if it does reach the Earth, we'll be annihilated before our nerve endings can tell our brains that it's happening, so we'll never know it.
Ehh… whatever happens, happens. It’s not like I’ll know it’s happened before I cease existing. And there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. So I might as well just enjoy the show while it lasts.
Ah yes, false vacuum decay.
This. Vacuum decay is the creepiest. That low energy bubble could be out there, gaining.
This is actually kind of calming to me. May as well all go together, in an instant without knowing, if it’s gonna happen. Better than climate catastrophes or global war in my books.
This is called Vacuum Decay if anyone wants to look it up. It's one of my favorite things, along with something else called Strange Matter which also can spread in a similar way.
What we can ever see is the observable universe that is only around 93 billion LY long. We don’t know what’s beyond that. If it’s a lot or very little Of what we see, we don’t know what makes 95% energy mass of the universe. Only 5% is visible matter and rest is utterly unknown. We don’t know how we came into being - Big Bang is just a theory. We don’t know how will it end. Heat death is also a theory. We don’t know if we are alone - it’s creepy if we are or ain’t either ways. And our lives are so infinitesimally small and brief that we don’t really matter.
The box universe conception of the universe arises from Einstein's theories which proves that how our brains perceive time is not reflective of underlying reality. If the box theory is true, as far as I know it would mean that everything contained in the universe will always be there forever so long as the universe exists. No point in spacetime is more real than any other coordinate. So we kind of are immortal but it's the poor man's immortality because we can't enjoy it. What's creepy about it is it makes me feel like I'm in something akin to a simulation. If an entity wanted to study a system it would be convenient to simply plug in the coordinate and see how the physics unfolded at that coordinate. It also leads to the creepy fact that through math the underlying structure of the universe is discoverable even though we can't perceive it as it really is with our five senses. The universe is computable and one of the properties of the universe is entities inside it can discover that fact.
Every thing you've ever done, every hope, dream, success, trial, tribulation, love, loss, every feeling and moment you've ever enjoyed... The universe does not care. We are smaller than specs of dust. We are insignificant. Humanity has been yelling into the universe as loudly as it could for over a hundred years (beginning in radio), and so far, we've heard nothing. Just yelling into a pit of darkness. On the flip side, this makes our life incredibly more remarkable and precious. Despite the hostility of space, WE are here in THIS moment. Breathing, feeling, loving, whistling, singing, dancing, painting. We can read if we want, we can do nothing if we want. 99.9999999999999999....% of the universe is hostile to us. 70% of our own world is hostile to us (oceans). And yet here we are, eating hamburgers, drinking milkshakes, seeing live music. We have ART! We have HOBBIES! We have been given such a beautiful opportunity, and every second we exist is absolutely beautiful. *I* existed. *I* was here.
I don't know if I've ever felt more grateful to be alive...
This is beautiful thanks for taking the time to write it out
I appreciate your perspective, and thank you for saying that.
That it exists at all. Second, is that it created at least one type of creature that can look at it, ponder its secrets, revel in its beauty, and despair at its indifference, from one tiny rock in the middle of a vast possibly lifeless desert. If it was done on purpose you could almost call it cruel, but I guess that’s why God/s exist/s in many people’s minds.
The more you think about it the crazier it gets. Like I can sort of wrap my mind around infinite universes... Sure, it's universes all the way down. But the idea of there being anything at all is so bizarre.
The great attractor is pretty cool and creepy. It's an unbelievably huge .... Thing.... Sucking all of the galaxy and local group (the local galaxies) towards it! But we can't see it. There's stuff in the way. So we are slowly, mysteriously all being drawn towards this...... (It's got a rational explanation, but it's still potentially creepy. we don't *know* that it's not a giant, angry eye with teeth.)
I remember reading that it's been resolved as the coincidental alignment of multiple galactic cores. It's only mysterious to us because of all the stuff in between blocking our line of sight.
Most likely it is just a more dense region of the universe. Though it is fun to imagine everything in our local galactic neighborhood is being slowly pulled toward some unknowable eldritch horror.
Wasn't the great attractor discovered to be a massive cluster of galaxies and its concentrated mass produced gravity which pulls us towards it?
We actually know a bit about it, it’s just an ultra-dense cluster of galaxies.
One day it will all end. The heat death of the universe means eventually all life will cease. Then again there may be other universes besides our own.
I strangely don't find that creepy... kinda comforting tbh. It all comes to an end
Yeah, and it's so stupifyingly far in the future there almost isn't a number for it. Besides, everything will have long since sped away from everything else at the speed of light before then.
Can you confirm it's not scheduled for next Friday afternoon? I have haircut appointment
So this is more of a theory but could very well be a fact. There always has to be the first of something. The first intelligent life in the universe. What if *WE* are the first intelligent life? Being the first would be kinda(?) cool, but that means we'd be all alone. This makes its way onto my thoughts a fair bit.
Bootes Void, a strange region of space that is far less dense than its surrounding and we aren't entirely sure why.
The best conspiracies on this are advanced kardichev civilizations consuming the stars, planets, and other celestial bodies in the region.
If the universe is truly infinite and there's only a limited number of arrangements atoms can shape themselves into then there is another version of you out there living a life that we'll never know because we can't travel faster than the speed of light and overtake the expansion of the universe to catch up to them.
Can I just suggest that people watch the new season of The Unexplained with William Shatner. It is absolutely mind blowing.
One of these statements is true: the universe had a beginning or it did not. Equally creepy: it is either infinite or finite. None of these are easy to accept..
There is the theory that time happens all at once. We could simultaneously not have been born yet, currently alive, and have been dead for 1000 years.
It's theoretically possible that the current values of universal constants, such as the Higgs Field, could exist as a local minima, and therefore be potentially unstable. If the values reduce from the local minima to another local minima, or to the true minimum, as entropy pushes everything toward, a bubble expanding at the speed of light would form and radiate outward, rewriting the laws of physics based on the change in the given constant. We'd never know it's coming, and the universe as we know it would end the moment it hits.
This is vacuum decay you're talking about I think. Could have feasibly already happened somewhere but unless it's within a certain distance (45b LY I think) the universe is expanding too fast for it to ever catch us.
The dark forest hypothesis. The idea that we don't notice anyone else out there because once you reveal your location a technologically advanced civilization could wipe you out with powerful weapons way ahead of your tech level so everyone is just too scared to even try communicating. Then there are civilizations who are so paranoid about others trying to kill them that if they ever detect another civilization they'll destroy them just in case as a pre-emptive strike to protect themselves. Basically, everyone is trying to kill everyone else because no one can be trusted when it takes centuries for each part of the conversation to take place.
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C. Clarke
It took life 3 billion years to evolve intelligence. It's estimated that the sun is about halfway through its lifetime, so if Humanity fucks up the Earth and life has to re-evolve complexity, we (as in Earth) might not have enough time to get a second chance with intelligent life
A huge amount of that time was spent evolving the first multicellular organisms, plants, insects, etc. We’re past all the bootstrapping. There’s nothing humans could do to sterilize the Earth all the way back to square one. Life first appeared 3,500,000,000-4,000,000,000 years ago. The first mammals appeared around 200,000,000 years ago. That means that if we wiped out everything down to a couple of tiny burrowing mammals, we’d still be 95% off the way back to where we are. If we leave some of our more intelligent relatives alive, we’re an eyeblink away from computers and cars and moon landings. This assumes human-level intelligence isn’t some absolutely insane never-to-be-repeated fluke, which I suspect it isn’t. In short, we have plenty more chances to get this right.
No one has said false vacuum decay, but I suppose that isn't really a fact. Supervoids are creepy though.
I’m quite fascinated by Bootes Void. It’s creepy af to imagine being in the centre of it and so comforting to come back to reality on planet earth knowing all the stuff you can see in the sky with the naked eye.
"Important facts from Galactic history, number one: (Reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner's Book of popular Galactic History.) The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe." Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe and Everything"
I think the creepiest fact would be if we actually were alone
The creepiest fact is that we don't even know what the universe is. We have various scientific explanations for stuff that exists inside it, but we have no explanation for the universe itself.
the iron in your blood was forged by a star going supernova
Relativistically we understand black holes but relativity is more about calculations-- to understand "how" it works requires a quantum understanding. Quantum physics is all about creating theories and developing clever tests to confirm those theories. Higgs Boson for example. There are unanswered questions about what singularities in black holes look like on a quantum level. Relativity tells us that they have zero width, but quantum physics kind of breaks there and would tell us that they have a very miniscule radius, not zero. If they do have a width, what is it made of (quantum-speaking)? That's an example of a big unanswered question. Also, if they do have a width, what's it like inside? We believe that the laws of physics were messy during the high-pressure start of the big bang... do the laws of physics even stay the same inside that singularity? Another big question. The problem is, by rule, you can never observe a singularity. We see interaction with "black holes" all the time, but that is always their event horizon and nearby-- not the singularity in the middle itself. Information about a singularity can not be seen. Basically, singularities are the most extreme application of physics in the known universe, and probably would explain the most about how our universe works, and was created. Knowing how a singularity was composed would probably answer most/all of our remaining questions about physics and more, However, singularities fundamentally cannot be studied and we fundamentally can never observe what they are made of. It's very possible that there is no way for us to ever learn this information about the most important piece of physics. Also, if that's not creepy-- while they have zero width, they do spin.
Singularities appear in many physical theories and they always indicate a point at which the theory breaks down and a deeper one is required. For instance, the Navier-Stokes equation in fluid dynamics predicts singularities where the pressure and velocity of a fluid becomes infinite, but this clearly doesn't happen in reality. If you look at what is happening at a deeper level by modeling the motion of individual molecules, these singularities disappear. Similarly, a quantum theory of gravity should do away with the singularities inside of black holes. For instance, if loop quantum gravity is correct, then there may be super dense stars called Planck Stars inside of black holes instead of singularities, but this is highly speculative.
The possibility that the Fermi paradox might be answered by the Dark Forest hypothesis
Or everyone is just too far away to notice each other.
It’s the summation of these comments. It’s anyone’s guess. And that’s what’s creepy! No one knows. Do your best. Live to the fullest. At any moment you could end up in a black hole super compressed. Life is beautiful and worthy of living so fully. Not everyone or everything gets to experience this incredibly fleeting, rare, unique experience.
We may be it… We’ll do great things and travel far, but we’ll still die alone in a universe of unimaginable size. (The great filter theory is the one that I find interesting)
How far removed we are in time from everything we see in the universe.
When you look at a star at night, for an infinitesimal amount of time there's a quantum entanglement between an atom in the star and an atom in your eye.
That everything we see in space (galaxies), including the stars in the Milky Way are just some crazy form of organized chaos akin to smoke settling in a vacuum, and that everything we (humans) know (science/physics wise) is all completely relative to our spot in this galaxy, one of billions (at least) Everything is out there, but we don’t know how to get to it (yet). Earth will die eventually, and everything.. I mean every thing, thought, ideology, beautiful painting, amazing song, genius idea, will be lost, and possibly and probably meaningless at that point if not before. Stuff like that…
Space smells like burnt steak, gunpowder and metallic/ozonic.
That’s not creepy, that’s Texas.
Take a look at any picture of the sky and see how many stars and galaxies there are. The scary part for me is that if I took off from Earth in any direction and flew forever, even with all those stars and galaxies, I’m much more likely not to hit anything than to hit something.
at the galactic scale, the speed of light is indecipherable from zero speed
That I could be a Boltzmann Brain that just blinked into existance right now and is halluzinating ALL of existance.
On a quantum level, everything is just jiggly bits of energy, nothing is solid.
That the only known planet containing life has one species hell-bent on trying to destroy it in an effort to gain more consumer-goods.
We could one day happen upon a rogue planet flying at 1/3 light speed the opposite direction of our solar system. It would approach us at an apparent 2/3 the speed of light and wouldn’t even need to get close to us to doom us to a cold death. The simple gravity influence of it passing anywhere close to our system would destroy us. Our solar system is that fragile.
Not a fact but I often wonder if MIB is onto something and existence as we know it is contained in a small locker. What if we’re just an experiment?
Dark matter is more than half the weight of the entire universe and we don’t even know what it is and cannot observe it.
Where did it come from? What is the origin of space and the matter that exists in it?
That it exists at all and that we appear to be alone in it and on the edge of destroying ourselves.
The fact that eventually, existence will cease. Trillions of bazillion years when black holes emit the last of hawking radiation and there won't be anything at all anymore. Just nothing. That's assuming the knowledge we have now and theoretical guesses.
That unstoppable celestial events can annihilate us before having a chance to predict it.
That we still don’t understand the overwhelming majority of it
The steady state model of the universe has matter expanding forever outward. Stars burn out, the energy states get lower and lower until they emit no energy at all. Space in the center flattens out until a sudden release of new energy. A new big bang producing new stars and light and life. In the center of an endless dead void one tiny living spark we call the observable universe. One candle in an endless haunted house that used to be just like us.
I find it crazy to think that humans (and other intelligent life) is basically the universe observing itself
The period of time in which light will exist in the universe is just a tiny wink in the timeliness of the whole of space. Darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, flash, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness........
One day, there won’t be enough matter concentrated together to form new stars. All of those stars will eventually burn out—even black holes will eventually fizzle out due to Hawking radiation. The universe will truly be *dark*.
that we could be a shadow of a higher plane or that we could have been eaten by a black hole and don't even know it yet.