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blondgecko
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Apr 19, 2006, 12:43 AM
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I know it's old, but this is still worth thinking about every now and then.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/...es/a/formats/web.jpg
This picture contains almost 10,000 galaxies, at a distance of some 14 billion light years.
To get an idea of the scale of this image, take a ruler (metric, preferably) and place it a metre from your face. Now, look between two of the millimetre markings at the sky - this is approximately the fraction of the sky captured (approximately 3 arcminutes, or 0.05 degrees). It would take around 1.65 million of these images to capture the entire celestial sphere.
Now, our own (pretty average) galaxy contains somewhere around 100 billion stars. That puts the number of stars in the above image alone at somewhere around one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000). The number of stars in the visible universe is estimated at somewhere around a million times this - 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Ten to the power of 21 stars... 10^21 suns.
Some pretty big numbers, huh?
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jred
Apr 19, 2006, 1:38 AM
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Word! With those type of numbers we just can not be alone.
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tattooed_climber
Apr 19, 2006, 1:46 AM
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trippy picture....super cool too....that shit is just mind blowing, thanks for that dude
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tattooed_climber
Apr 19, 2006, 2:01 AM
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hummmm...1.0x10^21 suns out there eh????
lets put that in perspective, i just called my sis (med student) the average adult has the heart rate of under 100 (but for the sake of this, lets say a 100).. put it this way, if you live to be a 100, your heart wouldn't even come close to beating as many times as there is suns in the universe (100 yearsx365 daysx24 hoursx60 minutesx100 heart beats per min=5,256,000,000) in reality, this is a fuck alot less
ya!!! humans are insignificant :P
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wjca
Apr 19, 2006, 2:07 AM
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Wow!!! Its hard to believe God created all that in just six days. You gotta think that he did something on that seventh day besides just rest. Even if it was just to tiddy up a bit.
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carabiner96
Apr 19, 2006, 2:57 AM
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In reply to: Even if it was just to tiddy up a bit.
haha tiddy sounds like tittie... Oh LORD! TITS UP!
p.s. tidy ;)
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organic
Apr 19, 2006, 3:38 AM
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In about 10 million years the Earth will just be a giant ball of ice hurtling through space. How much does everything matter then? :cry:
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tattooed_climber
Apr 19, 2006, 3:58 AM
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
NOOO RELIGION!!!!!!!!!!!
THIS IS SCIENCE DAMNIT!!!
why must every thread be infected with religion :cry:
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carabiner96
Apr 19, 2006, 4:01 AM
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In reply to: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! NOOO RELIGION!!!!!!!!!!! THIS IS SCIENCE DAMNIT!!! why must every thread be infected with religion :cry:
because wjca sucks jesus nuts? no pun....
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blondgecko
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Apr 19, 2006, 4:31 AM
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In reply to: In about 10 million years the Earth will just be a giant ball of ice hurtling through space. How much does everything matter then? :cry:
Actually, around 6 billion years is closer to the mark, according to the life-cycle of stars like our sun. And it won't be a ball of ice, it'll be fried to a crisp as the sun turns red giant, expanding out to somewhere near the orbit of Mars.
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dingus
Apr 19, 2006, 4:49 AM
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There's a new book out, the Life and Death of Planet Earth that details current scientific consensus on the expected lifespan of the planet. Pretty interesting reading.
Deep time forward or back and numbers with lots of zeros on either side of the decimal place, are fairly incomprehensible, imo. Oh, we can pretend to understand... we like to use stupid analogys, "If the lifespan of the earth were compressed to a single day, that advent of primates would have happened in the last 2 minutes,' or what you.
And we all nod and go 'wow.'
And then we go on, barely able to count above 5 ourselves without computation. We are not equipped to consider these sorts of numbers viscerally, like we can a smell or looking these letters on the screen.
We have to pretend we understand what 10 or 15 billion years mean. We have to acknowledge intellectually that the Hubble photo of galaxys is 14 billions YEARS OLD. Its not so much looking out as it is LOOKING IN. If the expansive universe holds true, any look back is a look back toward the singularity, god, or whatever you call it. Back IN to when it was all just a point of nothingness.
Therefore, deep time astronomy is looking back, looking IN, toward conception.
It is a holy quest, to do that.
But humbly, I don't think one can extapolate a number of galaxys based upon that data and the represented slice of the sky, not without factoring in the expansion anyway.
DMT
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blondgecko
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Apr 19, 2006, 5:36 AM
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In reply to: There's a new book out, the Life and Death of Planet Earth that details current scientific consensus on the expected lifespan of the planet. Pretty interesting reading. Deep time forward or back and numbers with lots of zeros on either side of the decimal place, are fairly incomprehensible, imo. Oh, we can pretend to understand... we like to use stupid analogys, "If the lifespan of the earth were compressed to a single day, that advent of primates would have happened in the last 2 minutes,' or what you.
I know exactly what you mean. There's a few sci-fi authors out there who are very good at taking you into that realm - Steven Baxter, Greg Bear and others. They can often get quite depressing for that very reason - the numbers become so big that they lose all meaning.
The same thing happens when talking about the history of life on earth. You hear statements like "life appeared on Earth only about 400 million years after it formed." :wtf:
The best way I've found to try to get my head around numbers like these is to break them down into manageable bits. In terms of time, I think about what can happen in the space of a minute, then expand that to a day, a week, a year, a century. After that it inevitably starts to get a bit hazy... and there's still 6 or 7 orders of magnitude to go to reach the age of the earth. Distances get even more difficult.
In reply to: And we all nod and go 'wow.' And then we go on, barely able to count above 5 ourselves without computation.
Beautiful! :lol:
In reply to: We are not equipped to consider these sorts of numbers viscerally, like we can a smell or looking these letters on the screen. We have to pretend we understand what 10 or 15 billion years mean. We have to acknowledge intellectually that the Hubble photo of galaxys is 14 billions YEARS OLD. Its not so much looking out as it is LOOKING IN. If the expansive universe holds true, any look back is a look back toward the singularity, god, or whatever you call it. Back IN to when it was all just a point of nothingness. Therefore, deep time astronomy is looking back, looking IN, toward conception. It is a holy quest, to do that. But humbly, I don't think one can extapolate a number of galaxys based upon that data and the represented slice of the sky, not without factoring in the expansion anyway. DMT
Not my estimate. That came straight from NASA.
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bmxer
Apr 19, 2006, 6:23 AM
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Imagine all the oil out there. I want to be the first "space marine" because space needs liberating.
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petsfed
Apr 19, 2006, 8:00 AM
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The first time I really looked at the Hubble Deep Field image, it was in Astronomy Magazine and it was printed as large as possible. I had to go outside afterwards and just stare at the sky. It made me feel so small, but it was a comfortable kind of small.
FWIW, extrapolating that image onto every equivalently sized area on the sky is not only possible, but reasonable based on the Cosmological Principle, that space is (over large scales, eg what is shown in the HDF image) isotropic and homogenous. That means if you look any direction, you should see pretty much the same thing and that if you change positions and look again in any direction, you still see pretty much the same thing. Doesn't seem like much, but it allows us to make the assumption that the way gravity works on earth is the same as on the moon, on pluto, or billions of light years away in another galaxy. The net changes in the cosmic microwave background support this too, as they aren't large enough to dominate over local effects.
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organic
Apr 19, 2006, 12:37 PM
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In reply to: Imagine all the oil out there. I want to be the first "space marine" because space needs liberating.
OMG someone had to make a political innuendo didn't they?
The funny thing is for scientists lots of life is like this. I have really been getting into molecular dynamics and trying to visualise what water looks like on the molecular level is incomprehensible. We try and use crude ball and stick diagrams HAHA. I wouldn't even know what to say about the size of the universe I think light years help somewhat but again like ball and stick diagrams it is just crude and somewhat funny. We know the amount the speed of light can travel in a year is freaking huge, so take that and the distance to the nearest star(alpha centauri, correct?) and thats freaking huge so take two freaking huge numbers and say well it will only be like 10 light years to alpha centauri(this is just an example I dunno how far it is to alpha centauri), HAHA I can almost understand NOW!
PS. Even if the Earth is burnt to a crisp, it will eventually be a hurtling ball of ice, correct? I like hurtling balls of ice better. Makes me kind of think of planets as giant snowballs or something or maybe not...
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thorne
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Apr 19, 2006, 12:44 PM
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A few years back I was driving into Leadville, CO. My buddy was pointing out the 14ers to the west. Mt. Elbert - highest peak in the state, and it's neighbor Mt. Massive. I asked if the name was massif, as in Vinson Massif or massive, as in bigger 'n shit! Turns out, it was the later. From that point on, Elbert's neighbor is known as Mt. Bigger 'n Shit.
For some reason (which I can't recall) that story seemed relevant to this thread. :?
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dingus
Apr 19, 2006, 9:44 PM
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In reply to: (over large scales, eg what is shown in the HDF image) isotropic and homogenous. That means if you look any direction, you should see pretty much the same thing and that if you change positions and look again in any direction, you still see pretty much the same thing.
I recall watching a Nova special about galaxies. One of the featured scientists is a woman who showed that galaxies are not evenly distributed through space, but are rather like pearls on a string, or I think she used a soap bubble analogy... that galaxies cluster and string together (the soap)but are also separated from other groups by vasts distances of seemingly empty space (the bubble).
It was part of the same show that got into the Hubble Deep View I think.
DMT
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jumpingrock
Apr 19, 2006, 9:58 PM
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In reply to: PS. Even if the Earth is burnt to a crisp, it will eventually be a hurtling ball of ice, correct? I like hurtling balls of ice better. Makes me kind of think of planets as giant snowballs or something or maybe not...
Incorrect (technically). All liquid water will boil off and escape the atmosphere. However, once the sun cools down, the earth will cool to such a degree that the remaining gases will freeze. Thus it won't quite be ice. But close enough.
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tattooed_climber
Apr 20, 2006, 1:04 AM
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In reply to: In reply to: PS. Even if the Earth is burnt to a crisp, it will eventually be a hurtling ball of ice, correct? I like hurtling balls of ice better. Makes me kind of think of planets as giant snowballs or something or maybe not... Incorrect (technically). All liquid water will boil off and escape the atmosphere. However, once the sun cools down, the earth will cool to such a degree that the remaining gases will freeze. Thus it won't quite be ice. But close enough.
comon dav, let him believe.......
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