My thoughts on the universe..

[jayharry]

From time to time I've sat in work and pondered the workings of our universe. (often at times when i probably should have actually been doing work)
I thought seeing as i have some spare time i'd share them on here. Arent you lucky.

From what we are led to believe about the universe, it is endless. A vast ever expanding endless stretch of nothing.

But nearly all scientists agree, that if you were to travel in one direction long enough (forever) you would in fact come out the other side of the universe.
Now this statement to me, means the universe must surely be round? and if so, must therefore have something outside of it?

Also i've often given the whole "life on other plants" question some thought. if you consider our solar system - it has one single star and 9 planets orbiting that one star. One of these as i hope you will know is earth.. a diverse planet containing everything you could ever need. (Land, water, HD TV's, Kinder eggs etc. ) Anyway just take a moment to then consider the fact that in our galaxy there are approximately 200 billion other stars. If you then multiply this by the amount of glaxies there are in the universe (between 100 billion and 1 trillion) This gives a conservative answer of 1 sextillion stars. (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0) Just like ours. Each possibly with its own solar system. Just like ours.
Surely its almost mathematically impossible for their not to be life away from earth?

just some thoughts to chew upon.

Jay

 

[Tom Allen]

our solar system is contained by magnetic/gravitational pull from the sun to the planets, and from the planets to their moons. So we obviously have a circular system where all the bodies rotate around these forces. It's mind boggling to concieve that there could be millions of solar systems like ours, in such a space that could be infinite. Or is our sun rotating around with all the other suns/stars with their own systems around a main "sun" so far away it's impossible to measure or see.

Things tend to be rational, impossible or improbable ideas usually tend to be wrong or just fantasy. It is very probable that there would be another planet in another solar system that could provide life, if the same set of circumstances are present, as this planet had at it's birth/creation.

 

[Rebel Tackleberry]

From what we are led to believe about the universe, it is endless. A vast ever expanding endless stretch of nothing.

That all depends on context. Endless as in infinite, or endless as in no boundary? They are two totally different things

But nearly all scientists agree, that if you were to travel in one direction long enough (forever) you would in fact come out the other side of the universe.
Now this statement to me, means the universe must surely be round? and if so, must therefore have something outside of it?

Where is this said? Current theories seem to suggest that the Universe is finite but unbounded, in 4 or higher spatial dimensions (10 or 11 popular) with no centre or edge and expanding uniformly in every direction (on large scales of the size of Galactic Clusters).

If you wish an analogy then consider a loop of elastic with beads fixed at set intervals (representing galactic clusters). If you stretch the loop uniformly then every bead receeds from every other bead at a speed proportional to their distance apart. From any 1 dimensional point on that loop of elastic you appear to be at the 'centre' of that expansion, but that is merely an illusion as there is no centre.

Alternatively think of a balloon being blown up, with dots printed on it's surface. If you are constrained to the 2 dimensional surface of the balloon then it is space itself that expands; it doesn't expand into anything. This is analogous to us occupying the 3 dimensional 'surface' of a 4 dimensional hyper-sphere. If you travel forever in this universe then you will never 'come out' of an edge, you will simply travel round it forever, just like on the surface of the earth or driving around the M25! ;-)

What may be 'inside' or 'outside' that 'surface' is not something we can directly observe. Maybe it's some substance in a 4th or higher spatial dimension, maybe it really is nothing. There has been some suggestions that the weakness of gravity is due to the force 'leaking' into a 4th dimension; purely speculative. However, we CAN make deductions about the shape and curvature of the 'surface' by carrying out experiments within it, such as scribing a huge triangle and seeing whether the angles add up to 180 deg, or less/more than 180 deg. That tells us whether we are dealing with Euclidean or Non-Euclidean geometry (the basis of Einstein's SR and GR theories) and what the curvature of space-time is like over the scale of our experimental triangle. On the surface of the earth, a triangle drawn with it's tip at one of the poles and it's baseline along the equator will result in it having 3 x right angles, a total of 270 degrees. We are all taught in school that a triangle has three angles that total 180 degrees, but this is a special case confined to Euclidean, or flat, geometry. On a curved surface this does not hold true.

In Einsteins theories the distribution of mass and energy within this space-time distorts, or warps it, creating the appearance of a force we know as gravity.

Also i've often given the whole "life on other plants" question some thought. if you consider our solar system - it has one single star and 9 planets orbiting that one star. One of these as i hope you will know is earth.. a diverse planet containing everything you could ever need. (Land, water, HD TV's, Kinder eggs etc. ) Anyway just take a moment to then consider the fact that in our galaxy there are approximately 200 billion other stars. If you then multiply this by the amount of glaxies there are in the universe (between 100 billion and 1 trillion) This gives a conservative answer of 1 sextillion stars. (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0) Just like ours. Each possibly with its own solar system. Just like ours.
Surely its almost mathematically impossible for their not to be life away from earth?

Totally agree with you here. To me it seems almost mathematically impossible for life to have evolved on only one planet in the cosmos. One thing you have also forgotten is time itself. In almost 14 Billion years there has been time for every one of those planets to have evolved complex life several times over. Our own planet has had extinction events many times that have resulted in fresh starts.

The amount of space and time seem to me to virtually guarantee other life. There appears to be nothing unique about our tiny place in the universe, so why would there be anything unique about the emergence of life in the vast expanse of time and space that is our cosmos?

I also believe that there are probably types of life and environments that will make this even more likely. We tend to focus on just our own form of life and the conditions required for earthly forms. There could be many exotic forms of life floating about freely in space, living directly in the chronosphere of stars, in the atmospheres of gas giants or the frozen seas of planets far from their sun. We have plenty of extremophile examples on our own planet and there are estimates of only having discovered maybe 10% of the species on our home world.

just some thoughts to chew upon.

It certainly is.

 

[ShaineMali]

Or....... maybe we are just pieces of bacteria living on another bigger piece of bacteria, in some dirty things pocket.......

 

[Jlowe]

Or....... maybe we are just pieces of bacteria living on another bigger piece of bacteria, in some dirty things pocket.......

kind of like the end of one of the men in black films (i cant remember which one now) if anything ever reaches the edge of our universe we will justt find a big locker door leading to a big ass planet with alienss !!!!!!

 

[leachy]

At one time we thought the world was flat and if you went too far you would fall off the edge. Until someone goes out there and finds out, we will never be the wiser. I don't think I will be around long enough to find out and I ain't going out to look either.

 

[WihGlah]

The Drake equation states that:

where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space[3]

 

[Robbo]

The Drake equation has of late come under some serious criticism where the order of magnitude of some of the values used is brought into question which of course can make a massive difference to any result that function churns out.
This makes that function effectively useless other than being a very general guide to what factors need to be included which I suppose is better than nothing.
I don't need any function to know we are not sole residents of our cosmos; when you think we have hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and then you can multiply that number by the probable number of associated planets and then we have hundreds of billions of galaxies with all their associated stars and planetary systems.
It makes it nigh on impossible for there not to be other examples of what we describe as life.
And for anybody who then questions, 'why haven't we heard from them' .. really does not appreciate two major factors, time and cosmological numbers .... we have been monitoring space for say 50 years with the last 10 years making fantastic inroads into sensitivity of telescopes but it's an unbelievably small measure of time when compared to the age and diversity of our universe.

 

[Buddha 3]

Add to Pete's post the recent discovery of life being able to pop into existence in environments far more hostile than we ever imagined possible, and it's pretty much a statistical impossibility that there is no life outside of our planet. Just look at the diversity we have here: ranging from simple lichen to frikkin blue whales...

 

[P8ntballer.Com]

Jay, I'm pretty sure those life forms are called extremophiles and were discovered by people exploring the depths of the ocean where no light or oxygen was present.
This array of life forms were found around hot water vents thousands of feet under the sea and current thinking for marine biologists was that no life [as knew it] was ever gonna be posssible in that micro-environment.
It's quite ironic when a scientist noted that we seem to know more about the cosmos than we do about our own planet's life-types.