Did You Know - Share Interesting Facts About Our Universe...

SmoothSeas said:
Well, when creating this thread, I intended to post this at the top - so, here goes...



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Actually i did, family full of science geeks.

And BTW, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one my favorite living scientists, Michio Kaku is another and Brian Cox from the UK. A lot of my YouTube viewing is watching clips of them explaining, or asking thought provoking questions. Have watched a good bit of NDT's 'Star Talk' series as well as his update of Cosmos (originally done by Carl Sagan).
 
Alligatorob said:
Neil maybe right, but the operative word is "if". I don't think we have the power to do either...

Interesting statistics! Too bad its all so far away...
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Yeah and it may be part of motivation for the billionaires getting into space. The mining company premise from Sci-Fi movies could become a reality. Also part of the premise from Korean film "Space Sweepers" where salvaging space debris is a legit way to earn a living. They're logical extrapolations of of motivators like greed and just staying alive are, but will only come to pass if we survive long enough as a species.
 
feywon said:
Actually i did, family full of science geeks.

And BTW, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one my favorite living scientists, Michio Kaku is another and Brian Cox from the UK. A lot of my YouTube viewing is watching clips of them explaining, or asking thought provoking questions. Have watched a good bit of NDT's 'Star Talk' series as well as his update of Cosmos (originally done by Carl Sagan).
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I've been binging on Neil DeGrasse Tyson videos from way back. I've also been watching the third iteration of Cosmos (okay. so I'm a bit late). I was in a Zoom talk with Michio Kaku and am now reading one of his books. I, too, am a science geek.
 
Dancing_Queen said:
We have the power to save the Earth; we just don't have the will.
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Maybe, but I see a couple of probably insurmountable problems. I am sure I missed a bunch...
  • First we would have to agree on what "saving the Earth" means and what should be done. I don't see that happening, doubt we could get agreement on that here on this forum, let along worldwide.
  • Second, even if we could somehow get that agreement on what should be done I don't see us being able to convince enough people to do it for it to work. Again, just think about the people of this forum and multiply by about a billion!
So I am thinking the best strategy may just be to understand what's happening and try to figure out how to best live with and through it. Would not need so much agreement to do that.

However if someone appears to have solutions I've missed I am open to listening. Just don't want it to get in the way of my "plan B".
 
Launched in 1977, "the Voyager 1 spacecraft, is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri [our sun's closest neighbor], at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4.22 years to arrive!

"According to Special Relativity the mass of an object increases as its speed increases, and approaches infinity as the object's speed approaches the speed of light. This means that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object to the speed of light." - NASA

No warp speed for us for a long while, unfortunately.
 
Granny B. said:
Launched in 1977, "the Voyager 1 spacecraft, is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri [our sun's closest neighbor], at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4.22 years to arrive!

"According to Special Relativity the mass of an object increases as its speed increases, and approaches infinity as the object's speed approaches the speed of light. This means that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object to the speed of light." - NASA

No warp speed for us for a long while, unfortunately.
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We'd need to take a shortcut through a wormhole.
 
Granny B. said:
Launched in 1977, "the Voyager 1 spacecraft, is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri [our sun's closest neighbor], at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive
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Isn't Voyager going to get picked up by the Enterprise way before that?
 
Alligatorob said:
Maybe, but I see a couple of probably insurmountable problems. I am sure I missed a bunch...
  • First we would have to agree on what "saving the Earth" means and what should be done. I don't see that happening, doubt we could get agreement on that here on this forum, let along worldwide.
  • Second, even if we could somehow get that agreement on what should be done I don't see us being able to convince enough people to do it for it to work. Again, just think about the people of this forum and multiply by about a billion!
So I am thinking the best strategy may just be to understand what's happening and try to figure out how to best live with and through it. Would not need so much agreement to do that.

However if someone appears to have solutions I've missed I am open to listening. Just don't want it to get in the way of my "plan B".
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I can't speak to your first point, Rob. As for your second, that's what I was talking about -- the will to do what's necessary. Even if we could get agreement on what needs to be done, the will to do it since whatever will be costly, difficult, and inconvenient.
 
the farthest we have been able to see in the universe so far is 13 billion light years. since light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second that distance is a very very very very long long ways away,,,,and yet it is not the other side of the universe,,,, YET!
 
cdestroyer said:
the farthest we have been able to see in the universe so far is 13 billion light years. since light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second that distance is a very very very very long long ways away,,,,and yet it is not the other side of the universe,,,, YET!
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With the new gravity telescope (LISA) or its next iteration, we might be able to see right back to the Big Bang or maybe to just about 3 trillionths of a second afterward.
 
SmoothSeas said:
Never really considered this before. A possibility that merits further research...

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The theory that the Big Bang was the beginning has been challenged since it started. The idea is it explodes, expands and contracts to the point of nothing then the whole thing starts over. What has thrown a wrench in to this theory is the discovery the universe is expanding and no one knows why so they invented the term "dark energy". The further away the bodies are the faster the expansion is. Now the thinking is it will expand to the point where we will not see a single star in the sky some day.
 
fmdog44 said:
The theory that the Big Bang was the beginning has been challenged since it started. The idea is it explodes, expands and contracts to the point of nothing then the whole thing starts over. What has thrown a wrench in to this theory is the discovery the universe is expanding and no one knows why so they invented the term "dark energy". The further away the bodies are the faster the expansion is. Now the thinking is it will expand to the point where we will not see a single star in the sky some day.
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There's dark energy and dark matter which together make up about 96% of the universe. My pet "theory" (I got it from nowhere) is that there have been an infinite number of universes and what we can't "see" is the remnants of them. Since their physics could have been quite different from ours, we can't act on them.

And then there's string theory and the multiverse...
 
feywon said:
Actually i did, family full of science geeks.

And BTW, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one my favorite living scientists, Michio Kaku is another and Brian Cox from the UK. A lot of my YouTube viewing is watching clips of them explaining, or asking thought provoking questions. Have watched a good bit of NDT's 'Star Talk' series as well as his update of Cosmos (originally done by Carl Sagan).
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I love those guys! However, I do believe that theoretical physicists drink way too much, on their lunch hour. I mean, who the hell came up with String Theory??? Yea, somebody's smokin' something! šŸ˜œ
 

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