Guthrie Govan Discussion

[alexkhan]

For a perspective on how huge things get. I don't see it as earth or us being really small although we are in comparison. I think it's cool that we can even contemplate the universe we live in:











Well, consider a space probe heading towards Pluto at the speed of approximately 30,000 miles per hour. It'll take around 11 years to rendezvous with Pluto. Now if this spacecraft was to reach the nearest star about 4.3 light years away, it'd take nearly 90,000 years for the probe to get there. We're literally talking about the backyard in the scheme of only the Milky Way galaxy we're in. The Milky Way galaxy has approximately 200 billion stars and stretches 100,000 light years across. It takes our sun around 225 million years to orbit around the center of the galaxy. Our solar system has now made around 20 orbits. Just the scope of our galaxy is well beyond our comprehension. It would take our current technology spacecraft nearly 2 billion years to just traverse our galaxy.

The thing is that there are at least 150 billion other galaxies out there - each with at least millions and up to trillions of stars (some galaxies like the elliptical M87 are at least dozens of times larger than our Milky Way). The closest major galaxy (Andromeda M31) is over 2 million light years away. There are more stars out there than there are grains of sand in all of the beaches of the earth. There are galaxies whose light is now reaching after traveling for over 13 billion years. Since the universe is expanding, those galaxies that seem like 13 billion light years away are now more like 40 billion light years away.

And the thing is that the universe is much larger than what we can observe. What we see out there is only what the astronomers and cosmologists call the "observable universe". The entire universe is probably at least a thousand times larger than what we can observe. And if you consider MIT professor Alan Guth's revolutionary yet widely accepted inflation theory, there's a good chance that this universe is only one of nearly an infinite number of other universes. Our universe may only be one bubble in a sea of countless trillions and quadrillions of other universes floating away in their own dimensions. Yes, it's pretty colossal out there...
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Ed Yoon
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BOING Music LLC - Managing Partner
.strandberg* Guitars USA
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[RD]

It's infinite out there. That's the only logical explanation, even though it's hard to grasp. Because... if it ends somewhere, then what's behind that somewhere, etc.

[frankus]

I thought astronomers had prooved space wasn't infinite.

Speaking as someone who mislays lots of things, I find great comfort in that thought
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Fabulous powers were revealed to me the day I held my magic Suhr(d) aloft and said "by the power of great scale!"

I have the power!

[Wickedpicker]

Reminds me of "Whose behind the door" by Zebra. A very old and obscure reference for anyone who cares. There are only mathematical proofs that the universe is indeed finite. We can't see very far, a metaphor for life.
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It goes to eleven!