„Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly 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.”
Douglas Adams
Oh, BTW, you are an insignificant speck living on a rounding error on the universal scale, and nothing you do will ever matter, you know, in a cosmic sense… your entire species will probably be extinct long before its star burns out, and most likely none of them will even make it to the next nearest star…
Isn’t learning fun?
As a grown man who has always been into astronomy, have read books and magazines, watched series and documentaries for decades now, I recently felt this way again while delving into the geometries of cosmology.
Things like The Cosmic Horizon, the very far edge of light’s ability to reach us as it has travelled for 13.8 billion years, yet the source of that light is now 46.5 billion light years away from us. This is our largest cosmological compass, we can trace the circle and do some abstract math with it.
They have traced triangles inside the sphere of light that surrounds us and figured out the angles from that light, and there are two options:
- The Universe is flat and possibly infinite.
- If the Universe is curved, it is so incomprehensibly huge that we cannot detect its’ curvature even with our compass of 46.5 billion light years, must be at bare minimum 250 larger than what we can see, and that works out to 11.5 trillion light years in every direction from us, or a diameter of 23 trillion light years.
Yet the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old.
Haha
yeah
I mean, yeah, but do you know how far it is down the road to the chemist’s?
My god, it’s full of stars…
Me, a genius. “It’s big”
Astrophysicists with PHDs and decades of experience: “It’s big”
The universe. What a concept.
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