Space, Never Ceases to Amaze Me...

fsscott

fsscott

Active member
So I didn't find anything on this, thought I might share it with you guys.

The thought of the nothingness of space, and the thought of everything that could be in space, just boggles my mind.

I always love to look up and think about something else out there looking up wondering the same thing.

Obviously it's not just me, here's a patch of space that the Hubble telescope looked at for 11 days...

hubble-deep-field-location.jpg


This is a picture of what it found inside of that little box...

Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg


(here's the link to the picture if you would like to DL it...)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

Here is a quick video of the passage from one to the other... (I would suggest turning off the volume)

And a video describing the picture, it also gives a lot of more info on space...

I just thought that NS might find this interesting as I can't stop thinking about it, sorry if it's a repost, and hope that some of you enjoy this.

 
i did not watch any of the videos but its funny that you posted this tonight. i was on my way home from getting some chinese food and i was listening to talk radio and some scientist guy show was talking about space and the wonders of light and light speed. he was explaining that the speed of light, remains pretty much the same over the course of our earths history.

he was also explaining how mabey not next century but the century after that we will have the technology to reach the stars.

little useless facts, haha but space is very interesting and i think every human being on earth is curious of the "unknown."
 
Hubble ultra deep field!

Space is amazing. Theres something sweet about being on a small oasis surrounded by the past.
 
There was another video someone posted a while back on the relative size of the earth to the universe using the ultra deep field image.
 
space is just ridiculous. Humans cannot even begin to understand or even comprehend at all what is out there. Or the distances. Just try to imagine how far the voyager spacecraft launched in the 70s are now...then think of that on the scale of everything else in space. The voyager trips so far have gone the equivalent of like...walking 30 feet away from house relative to the rest of the world.
 
Our planet is compareable to an atom, creating a cell. In then which the cell, is part of the organ. And so on and so forth.

Infinitely large.
 
each of the those galaxies contains billions of stars, each of which is capable of a solar system and the potential of life. Space blows my mind.

 
Not every star system could support a cornucopia of life. But I will concede that with the billions of galaxies and star systems, there must at least be one other system that mimics the conditions here in this one.
 
I'm glad you brought up Earth size cause now I can show you all this!

Again very interesting from my pov...
 
Thinking about space and the universe on a large scale is mind boggling.. However in a way it is rather boring - everything is large, empty, repetetive, dark and almost entirely predictable.

Looking at the universe on a very small scale is far more mind blowing.. Looking at space from a quantum perspective is IMO the most interesting part of physics. The quantum world is more bizzare than science fiction, I find that many of my friends with zero interest in physics are fascinated by the things I tell them about quantum physics.

If you find space and/or time interesting I highly recommend picking up anything by Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene.
 
Yea I agree, on a ride home from shredding, a buddy and I were talking about quantum physics or something around physics 30, he was telling me about how if your are travelling faster time goes slower, which I knew before but that it's like true and has been tested and such just blows me away, I could talk almost all day about stuff like this and it makes me actually wanna try on this last week of school haha
 
ya man i saw that and it blows my mind...

crazy to think about all of it and how many more planets there are...

but what blows my mind is how we live in the perfect enviroment in the "goldy lock zone"

soo weird to think about

+k for a good post!
 
Yea it is amazing that we live in a perfect environment, but it's also needed for our survival and such.

But in about 3 Billion years this might not be the best place to be...

We're crashing into Andromeda!

 
holly fuck space is ridiculous, i recently fell in love with its curiosity and endless space
 
I "discovered" space when I was in elementry school. We were playing hide and go seek on my farm at night and I was hiding under a pine tree away from any yard lights and starting looking at the stars and was struck both by the beauty and immensity of the night sky. I love finding a dark place on a clear night and just staring at the stars.
 
That's special relativity (Einstein's first big theory), which is quite interesting in itself. There are three aspects to it:

- time dilation, in which time slows down as you approach the speed of light

- length contraction (a metre when you're travelling near the speed of light is different to a metre when you're stationary)

- mass dilation (you become heavier when you're travelling faster). This means that as you approach the speed of light you are heavier and thus need more energy to continue accelerating. As you reach the speed of light your mass becomes infinite. This is the reason why any massive particle will never travel the speed of light.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, is much more bizarre. I havn't got time to go into it right now but I'll try to find some simple explanations or youtube videos etc.
 
The biggest trip for me with all this space malarkey is its infinite nature... bear with me... if space is infinite, anything within the laws of physics is possible. but not just possible. it is certain. If it is infinite then there has to be another earth, another new schoolers, another me typing the same post....fuck I've befuddled myself a bit.
 
yeah when you think about it, really there is almost no possible way that we are the only planet with life. even in our own tiny little solar system, there is another planet, mars, which some scientists believe could have held life, and mars is damn close to being able to when you think about it. i remember hearing that they found like fossilized tiny little microscopic organism's or something on a rock from mars that hit earth or something like that. so when there is a possibility for life on another planet in our little one solar system in our one in a trillion galaxy, it just seems 100% possible for other life, and there really probably are like millions of planets out there with life, and many of them could have life like ours. its so crazy to think about the possibilities, like what the organisms could be like, there could be one planet out there with human's that are exactly like us. there could be a place where everyone is 100% happy all the time, like heaven. there could be organisms that are 1000 times more intelegent than we are that can live for ever. like anything you can think of seems possible. its pretty crazy shit. and the worst part, is we probably wont ever know for sure or ever see an alien life form.
i really think more money needs to be spent exploring space, its pretty sad we have more interest in wars and shit rather than space. maybe we could find evidence of life, maybe in a very close solar system.
 
It's been a while since I've studied any of this, but I think space is more likely to be finite in size. (the following may be a little off the truth, its coming straight from my somewhat hazy mind) There are three models of the universe developed by Freidman which are largely accepted by cosmologists today. Of these three, one model is infinite in space and two are finite in space but wrap around on themselves.

This is similar to the earth - while it appears to be flat, if you keep walking on one direction for long enough you will eventually come back to where you started. If you expand this by one dimension, the universe similarly eventually wraps around on itself. This isn't of much practical significance - Stephen Hawking showed that even traveling at the speed of light, you could never get back to the same place before the universe has collapsed upon itself.

Getting back on point, if the universe is in fact finite but very very large (larger than could ever be observed in it's own lifetime) then it is no longer certain that another similar earth exists. Because of the overwhelming complexity of our earth, I would still say that there is a zero (or close enough) chance of another identical earth.
 
Sounds right, at least the way I understand it.

I could be wrong on this, but even if the universe was finite and flat (or not spherical/convex, which I think is one of the models you're referring to) would it make any difference? The universe now is expanding faster than the speed of light, meaning even if there is an "edge" of the universe we can never reach it or observe it due to relativity. So regardless of whether or not the universe is infinite, it is effectively infinite to us or any observer, at least at the current rate of expansion as we have measured it.

I'm not sure of the implications that this has on the idea of an "identical earth," though. All it means is that we probably would never know. That would make the chance effectively zero of us contacting an identical planet if it existed, so for our purposes it would not exist. Would it matter otherwise? Interesting.
 
I don't think it makes sense to propose an "edge" of space. Each of the models either wraps upon itself or is infinite in space.

The implications of finite/infinite universes is that in an infinite universe it is essentially certain that we will have another earth. In a finite universe this probability drops to almost zero. While you might say that it is irrelevant for practical purposes whether it is infinite or just so large that it appears infinite, however there is a big difference between certainty and zero. If that makes any sense...

As for whether or not it matters if we can't observe it, that is really a question of philosophy. My mind doesn't handle that question too well.. Intuitively I say that something must exist regardless of whether or not it is observed, but science says otherwise..
 
it's fun to sometimes just look at the stars, and think about how insanely big space is, and to think about if there really is other life out there, and stuff
 
holy facking shit.

and yea im just like you i always wonder about space and how big it is but the main thing that bothers the living fuck out of me is that if we know how big space is how can it jjust end like is there a fucking wall sayign dead end, like how can it end. there has to be something outside of it.

AHHHHHHHH it bothers me like crazy. FUCk
 
its also just wierd to think about how the universe can just go on for ever, like it doesnt seem like it could, but at the same time it has to. its just so fucking wierd to think that there is no limit, it never ends, it just keeps going. like that goes against everything we understand. like how does the universe even exist and why? does it make sense for it not to exist? how could there be absolutely nothing? it seems like something has to exist nomatter what, even if it was just empty space, but how does the empty space get there? is there a beginning? something had to exist before that beginning. and there is no way for us to actually know, there are literally millions of possibilities and we cant even come close to understanding any of them, because there is always something else, because its all infinite. its probably the one thing we cannot even slightly understand, because really there is no answer, and no way to understand. fuck this, im getting a headache, like my brain is about to explode.
 
i dont know if this is true but someone said that whe you look at the stars you are looking like 1000 years in the past because they are soo far away
 
True, I guess that's not really a scientific question, at least currently. Kinda strikes me as similar to the observer effect/wavefunction collapse in quantum mechanics, where it's impossible to tell whether quantum states are real or just a mathematical entity, because they don't exist aside from one point/measurement when actually observed. But that's kind-of off topic.

I guess it makes sense that space can't have a real edge, but it seems like I've heard of the possibility somewhere. If space is flat and finite, which is a possibility (I think, maybe not) it would have to end somewhere, wouldn't it? But then that begs the question of what (if anything) is outside of our universe, which is something of a moot point because it can't be observed. Theory would be the only way to address it, but as far as I know there is not much more than speculation now.

The finite/infinite thing makes sense from a mathematical standpoint, so I see what you mean. Sorry, I'm not arguing with you, just trying to learn more. Nobody I know will ever discuss this stuff, but you seem like you know what you're talking about.

 
what's insane is that waveform collapse is just a simplified way to explain the effects of [as of yet not really understood by ANYONE] quantum decoherence. the deeper you get into it, the crazier it gets.

 
space unites the world for a common goal. it shows us that we are all human, and no matter if your israeli or pakistani, no matter what tribe your from in africa. we are all the same.

shits nuts. peace on earth FTW
 
wavefunction collapse totally blows my mind.. i don't have any formal education in physics so my knowledge of quantum mechanics is pretty limited. i'm reading a book on it at the moment, once i'm done with that i might have some more useful input.
 
I've had my fair share of times just gazing up at the stars wondering about all of this....

Us, the human race, would probably look drastically differant to other life forms if they are out there... think of it as us being the wierd ass aliens. Crazy..
 
Haha yea so true man, like this is all crazy to me, and I just started to think that, since distances change when you get going faster, wouldn't that change what a light year and such would be measured as?

Fuck I'm confusing myself haha
 
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