Putting things into perspective....
 

Remember as a kid, the "WHOLE WIDE WORLD" was about the biggest thing you could imagine?
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182616666.jpg

Then, as we got a little older, we realized there are bigger things out there...
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182616790.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182616809.jpg

And at some point we realized things beyond our sun.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182616977.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182617007.jpg

Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky. It is more than 1,000 light years from Earth.

Now dwell on this picture. Ultra deep space infra-red photo by Hubbel of entire galaxies billions of light years away.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182617304.jpg

Kind of humbling when we consider the amount of small stuff we sweat about. Keep life in perspective. Have fun!

Add to that it is predicted that the earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old and the universe 10 to 15 billion and if we are lucky we as individuals might be around 100 years... most likely less.

Where is my gun? ;)

excellent post! kinda makes you see the "big picture" btw, the sun is bigger than I thought.

:eek:

Interesting to put things into perspective like this.
I don't know about the Sun, I had no idea Uranus was so big.

Holy Antares!!

***insert obligatory Uranus joke here***

Klingons, captain's log ;)

Takes light 8 minutes to travel the distance from the Sun to the Earth...at 2.9979 m/s/s!

We are insignificant in the universe. just enjoy the time you have walking around. then that's it. one day it's all over.

I thought this was going to be another 'My watch is bigger than your watch' thread.... you know feet and thumb sizes and all....

I don't think its m/s/s, that would imply its accelerating, which I don't believe it is. But it is 186,000 miles/sec.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182654656.jpg

Edit: From Wired Magazine

Wow, and to think. I am the greatest thing in the entire universe! I gonna ask for a raise come Monday!!!

OK, Zaphod, put the drink down

Has anyone seen the plans for the hyperspace bypass?

I like the opening pictures.
Really cool.


KT

Great post. I remember as kid being amazed that if you had a space rocket that would never run out of fuel, and you went straight up- and didn't hit anything- you'd just keep going. For ever. That was before my vocabulary included the word 'infinity'...

Love these scales. Somewhere online there's a page that explains it in terms of grains of sand in a sandbox. The Milky Way has about as many stars as a 20' diameter sandbox has grains of sand. The Earth is totally insignificant even in that one. And then picture that one sandbox surround by billions of others, spaced about two miles from each other. And that's how insignificant our own galaxy is. To think we're special is just the most arrogant notion I've ever heard of.

forever, huh? how do you know that sooner or later you won't hit a brick wall?

does the universe stretch out in every direction into infinity , ie. there is no end?

What about going in the other direction?

How small can you get?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182732250.jpg

In the Bohr model of an atom, electrons orbit about a fixed nucleas . This is the same as planets orbiting about a fixed "sun".
those two events happen at extraordinary scales from each other. Coincidence or an accident ?

How about a Googol?

It, of course, is a one followed by one hundred zeroes. It has been estimated by some that there are less than a googol particles in the observable universe.

And yet, as Carl Sagan once said, "A googol is precisely as far from infinity as is the number one."

Best,

Kurt

googol ? I hear there are some kind of internet search engine, no?

According to the Vogons, they've been on display for 50 earth years in the planning department on Alpha Centauri. ;)

Truly extraordinary scales and super-extraordinarily different properties between the "big and the "small". So different that a whole new field of physics was borne -> quantum mechanics.

And "unifying" the big and small remains the so called "holy grail" of physics.

Best,

Kurt

In a recent issue of Discover magazine, there was a fun facts article. It was about emptying a magnum of wine into the ocean, letting it mix thoroughly, then refilling that bottle with ocean water. The odds that there would be a wine molecule from that magnum was something like 90%? Not sure if that is exactly correct, but it was amazingly high when you consider how many magnums of ocean water there is out there.

I guess it also depends on the wine...some goes better with seafood.

Yet the odds of life originating by chance is an even higher number to 1.
( odds are 10¹¹³ to 1, Brah )


Not to mention the odds of the universe starting from nothing.

The universe is amazing. Beyond comprehension, really.


KT

How did we go from threads like this to talking about boobs and strippers every day? Am I responsible for the degradation? I mean, the intelligent thought ends around December 2007, so I'd like to think I had something to do with it.

I, alone, am responsible for lowering the collective IQ of Pelican OT. Not sure if that's something to brag about or hide from the neighbors.

When I was maybe 7 or 8 and starting to think about these kinds of concepts, I imagined the infinite universe to be this really huge place that had a really big concrete wall at the end. That satisfied me for a quite a while, until one night in bed it occurred to me, what's on the other side of that wall? It took me a while to fall asleep that night :)

It's truly awesome to consider just how insignificant our planet is, but the flipside to that is that this is all we know and can ever possibly know, at least in our lifetimes, so we may as well make the most of it.

In talking to my philosophy professor, he seems to think that no matter how big our universe is, it could fit under some ogre's fingernail.






Can I have another hit....

One of my favorites...
YouTube - The Known Universe

i'm just still pissed that pluto isn't a planet anymore

couldn't agree more! "have fun" ;)

I'm not so sure. I understand that, given the size of the Universe, how statistically unlikely it is that life would not exist somewhere else. And my belief system would be uninjured to find life elsewhere. And yet, I also believe we may be unique. We have been listening for radio signals for decades, and found none. The large, gaseous planets outside our orbit protect us from debris. So does our moon. The gentleness of Earth's climate over the past few million years, and few hundred million years, has allowed intelligent life to evolve. There are a myriad of considerations suggesting that intelligent life may be more unlikely than pure statistics would predict.

The amount of time we've been listening and the miniscule slice of one tiny part of the universe we've managed to observe are statisically irrelevant. Even when we've been listening for 1000 yrs., it would be still the equivalent of taking a drop of water out of the ocean and concluding the Earth had no fresh water to sustain humans.

Love their poetry.

Has anyone seen my towel?

The most complex thing that we know of in the Universe is the grey matter between our ears. ;)

Yes, but how many galaxies have we listened to, and how many solar systems would those galaxies collectively represent. I understand we're not taking a cosmic census, but we've been listening for a radio "carrier signal" for a LONG time, and heard nothing.

And again, what I am gleaning from astronomists and biologists is that the combination of cosmic and terrestrial events necessary for life to occur, then develop into intelligent life, may be much more unlikely than we already knew. We do not know how a DNA strand could have spontaneously occurred, which of course would be necessary in order for life to be created. That event is so unlikely (DNA is not a chemically "simple" thing) that we cannot even theorize how it might have happened. But now, some folks are beginning to wonder how likely, given a spontaneously-emerged DNA strand, it will evolve into a mouse, let alone a planet of sentient humans.

I don't know. And it doesn't matter to me. I'm just saying that whereas twenty years ago the folks promoting the idea of life on other planets could sneer down their noses at doubters......today, science is wondering that question anew.