Scale of the universe

[jez101]

Running away or gravity sweeping it away like a sea current. I have been led to believe the contrary, that our galaxy and another is on a head on collision, with no safety belts.

It seems like we are all going to die when that happens in 3 billion years time.

I think the sun is due to explode before that though, so if we can escape the solar system in less than 1 billion years, that still leaves us a fair while to find our way out of the Milky Way before this happens.

 

[Sarinaide]

It seems like we are all going to die when that happens in 3 billion years time.

I think the sun is due to explode before that though, so if we can escape the solar system in less than 1 billion years, that still leaves us a fair while to find our way out of the Milky Way before this happens.

It may be within Chucks lifetime so he will just round house kick the sun away for not maintaining its gravitational path around chuck.

Yeah on a serious not, It is still a long time.

 

[MCLS]

We'll be long gone by then, both literally in our terms and probably humans in general.

 

[Sarinaide]

We'll be long gone by then, both literally in our terms and probably humans in general.

Well if we go by science, maybe we will evolve into a higher species and leave this god forsaken planet.

 

[Bill Boddy]

Well if we go by science, maybe we will evolve into a higher species and leave this god forsaken planet.

Maybe we would even evolve into an intelligent species. If you look at the way we behave at the moment it would be an enormous leap though.

 

[Tacitus]

The intersting thing about our galaxy colliding with andromada is that the number of stars colliding is very low, such are the vast distances between stars. If our sun magically remained at the same state and we are somehow still alive I suspect that the increase in cosmic radiation would kill us, or something like that.
Have we actually got any cosmologist on this forum or are we all drivers and engineers?

 

[gethinceri]

I am neither a driver nor an engineer, so I must be a cosmologist. Scan through my comments regarding the Space Shuttle, startling.

 

[jez101]

Have we actually got any cosmologist on this forum or are we all drivers and engineers?

Not me, but my fellow pitstop spreadsheet creator: from the "what do you do in real life thread"

I'm doing a masters in Physics. All going well I will be at Cern working on the LHC for a year from September.

sounds exciting, just hope they dont re-create too big a bang

 

[RevMaxPower]

Well if we go by science, maybe we will evolve into a higher species and leave this god forsaken planet.

Except this planet is fine - too bad about the war-mongerers...

 

[Jen]

I like this planet and am hoping to come back again after my demise

 

[mjo]

Just to confuse us even further, the latest theory is that the universe is flat, and that there are infinite number of universes, "that pop up from nowhere" (google 'infinite number of universes' to find the article)

 

[Sarinaide]

Okay I watched Event Horizon again....for some reason I find it intriguing. Anyways my Q: is; is the universe essentially in the center of alternate dimensions ie: heaven and hell?

I like to think of it as a multiverse, universe upon universe but that I will contemplate when I channel my inner rasta, da 'erb nevah lies m'aan.

 

[Fenderman]

"The Universe appears to be'
an interlocking puzzle before me.
I can't decide what it is about it and
I want to get off and look at it,
but I can't because I am it,
and if I did ... get out of it,
well, then that would be it."
copyright ©1976

 

[Bill Boddy]

Wednesday I decided to unclutter my video recorder and recover some disk space. One of the things which had been lying around for a few weeks was "The Joy of Statistics" (or similar name). Towards the end the presenter was talking about the vast amount of data about the universe gathered together by telescopes and how discoveries could be made by searching this in the right ways.

As an example he told the story of one astronomer who has a theory that galaxies can grow larger by "stealing" stars from other nearby smaller galaxies, eventually the larger one would be big enough to suck in the smaller one. So he set up a search for the type of data he would expect to see. Sure enough a dataset turned up, it looked like two circles of light of differing sizes connected together by a venturi which was fainter due to the lower number of stars.

So there may be hope. Instead of a collision of galaxies the Milky Way may become part of a larger galaxy. Watch this space.

 

[Fenderman]

... or it may suck material out of other galaxies and itself enlarge.

 

[tooncheese]

Have we actually got any cosmologist on this forum or are we all drivers and engineers?

I'm no expert in any of them!

However I have my own theory (I await Stephen Hawkings reply to my e-mail). The singularity inside every black hole is infinitely dense. So why not have a universe in there? This makes universe-hopping impossible, whilst the Doppler-effect is problematic in this theory. In the new universe everything starts off like how we think of the big bang. Then for some reason everything inside it gets smaller (although nothing exists), but the universe stays the same size. Then everything starts existing as it gets smaller - quarks, electrons, neutrinos...

Universes end (but still have universes inside them) When everything gets really small and starts taking the piss a bit.

Make sense?

© Dr Prof the RH Tooncheese pHD cMi SaG ODN

 

[Fenderman]

.... which makes me wonder about String Theory. I mean, are they tuned? Microtonal perhaps? Assuming an infinate Cosmos, there must be pitches both infinately low and high. Since, nothing exists, apparently, if it hasn't been observed, does this mean that aliens (to us) of infinately large and small size must exist in order to ensure that all this infinity can be observed and for the cosmic music of the strings to be heard?

 

[Sarinaide]

Age dating the heavens Fact or Fiction? can anyone really conclussively say that the sun is x billion years old? The best thing about science of this nature is that when the crunch time comes, nobody is around to dispute it or it has been extrapolated into other theories and sciences.