94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach

Post by undersuit » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 6:51 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #61

ajnin wrote: post #18

It's mind blowing to imagine that the observable universe is bigger than 90 billion light years, space-time expanding at multiple times the speed of light. If expansion keeps accelerating, then at some point gravity won't be able to keep the local cluster together and even those galaxies will drift away, then star systems, then planets, then matter itself will be torn apart until atoms and particles and quarks are de…

I saw a video proposing that it might be possible that the universe collapses on itself again and everything is reset. But there are more non reversible things going on than just expansion. I only just found out that all elements radioactively decay and will eventually be gone.

Post by undersuit » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

cbogie wrote: post #52

awb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the careful balance of universal constants that allow for matter and stars and life to exist surely would not allow it all to be destroyed forever in the end... Imagine a brute-force creation of x^y universes with varying cosmological constants. Surely some universes with the right ingredients for life also include a deep freeze or a Big Crunch. Or, maybe our universe was created in a lab somewhere and they’re tryi…

42 would be the answer, huh. and in which case, were it to be true, we'd have a mighty strange prophetic bible on our hands. on second thought, at least it was entitled to be a poor man's manual for gettin around these parts.

Post by koonsolo » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 7:54 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #58

koonsolo wrote: post #56

"most of the universe's galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light" Relativity theory: "It's impossible to go faster than the speed of light" WTF?

Expansion isn't objects in space moving farther apart through space it's the change in the geometry of space itself. A poor analogy might be a continuous zoom of a map map on your phone while something always moves less than a constant speed limit of pixels per second on the screen. It is easy to see this object can move around locations on the map but may not be able to reach most of the map if it is zooming in fast…

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 10:35 AM UTC

LinuxBender wrote: post #76

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point you're basically hoping for literal magic. It's nice to dream, but, well...

Everything is magic until we understand it. If one took a keychain flashlight back a few hundred years they might be burned as a witch. There are still tiny pockets of humans that believe if you take their picture, you are stealing their soul.

Post by techdragon » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #66

gremlinsinc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this fact makes you uneasy just know that (nearly) 100% of the galaxy's solar systems except the one we're currently in are (likely) unreachable within your lifetime. Though to be fair, I think the original title can't possibly know this, for instance if we live in a simulation, what's to say that some sort of algorithm (assuming we learn to meta-code our own existence) could put us in any galaxy we choose... Or w…

If we're in a simulation then there aren't any alien civilizations. No sense wasting computational resources on them. P.S. As far as I know, computational complexity is the only physical quantity that doesn't obey conservation laws. So we're probably not in a simulation. If we were, it would probably be the other way around.