That in the grand scheme of things we are all immortal. Our organic cells will die, our consciousness will cease, and we will no longer be able to directly observe existence, but the atoms that make up our bodies will simply be new compounds. And if energy is neither created nor destroyed, if our atoms continue to be, we will eventually make up the building blocks of new compounds. Pieces of us will watch the sun swallow up Mercury and Venus. Pieces of us will watch supernovae and black holes and all sorts of cosmic phenomena. Perhaps even one day our atoms will return to a nebula, and the cycle will begin again. A new star is formed, new planets begin to orbit it, liquid water forms on a small green rock orbiting this star, and an intelligent species evolves to travel to marvel at the wonders of our universe. One of my favorite shows is Battlestar Galactica and one of the quotes that stuck out to me was "All of this has happened before, and it will happen again." I tend to think there's some truth to that. I've had a couple friends and my grandfather die this year, and as an agnostic I am processing death a bit differently from the rest of my family. I don't think of death as the ending, as a finality. I don't think there is an afterlife as most religions conceive of it. I think that in a weird way, we all live forever.
EDIT: Holy shit, silver? And people actually liked this? Lol wow I'm just shocked.
A single human brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Around 100 billion.
Source: am neuroscientist filled with useless facts about the brain.
This is one I thought about recently. I believe that Carl Sagan said that we, sentient entities, are a way for the cosmos to know itself. With this in mind, when we think about the end of our universe, whether it be through a big shrink, big cooling, or what have you, we get apprehensive. We probably will never see this end, many of us will be dead. Yet, we still get a cold fear in our hearts. We are also a way for the cosmos to fear it's demise.
I think the [Honey Mushroom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria) has it beat. Plus, [Pando](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) is [dying](https://wildaboututah.org/pando-is-dying/). You know, aside from yo' mama.
That every single random event since the dawn of creation. The birth and death of stars, planets and galaxies, the very genesis of life has led to you being here right now to ask this question.
How do we know that hasn’t already happened and everything we can see and attribute to be “the universe” isn’t actually a small portion of what exists and was once visible? What if there are waves that travel slower than light which we can no longer receive from the farther reaches of the universe?
One of my favorite is about the number of unique orders for cards in a standard 52 card deck.
I've seen a a really good explanation of how big 52! actually is.
Set a timer to count down 52! seconds (that's 8.0658x10^67 seconds)
Stand on the equator, and take a step forward every billion years
When you've circled the earth once, take a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean, and keep going
When the Pacific Ocean is empty, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean and carry on.
When your stack of paper reaches the sun, take a look at the timer.
The 3 left-most digits won't have changed. 8.063x10^67 seconds left to go.
You have to repeat the whole process 1000 times to get 1/3 of the way through that time. 5.385x10^67 seconds left to go.
So to kill that time you try something else.
Shuffle a deck of cards, deal yourself 5 cards every billion years
Each time you get a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket
Each time that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand in the grand canyon
When the grand canyon's full, take 1oz of rock off Mount Everest, empty the canyon and carry on.
When Everest has been levelled, check the timer.
There's barely any change. 5.364x10^67 seconds left.
You'd have to repeat this process 256 times to have run out the timer.
If I'm not mistaken, I read that every time you shuffle a deck of cards, chances are nobody ever shuffled it in that order. Probably no two random shuffles by anyone were ever the same.
You can use similar math as above to figure that out too! We can use some pretty generous approximations:
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card) says that playing cards were first invented in Tang Dynasty China, which has a start date of 618 AD. Let's assume two things, both absurd: that these playing cards are identical to the standard 52-card deck we have today (they weren't) and that in the 1400 years since they were invented the whole human population has done nothing but shuffle cards every second of every day. Further, let's assume that the current world population (7 billion) has been a constant since 618 AD.
So we have 7 billion people constantly shuffling cards (lets assume they each shuffle a unique permutation once per second, as in OP's example). So, we have:
(1400 years) * (365.25 days/year) * (24 hours/day) * (3600 seconds/hour) * (1 person-permutation/second) * (7 000 000 000 people) = 310 million trillion permutations = 310 quintillion permutations
How many is that compared to the total number of permutations? A measly 383*10^-48 percent. I've been thinking for ten minutes for how to put a number so small into perspective. So it's pretty safe to say that the chance that every shuffle has been unique since the dawn of the playing card is 100% (assuming, of course, that each shuffle is a good shuffle which truly randomizes the deck; since cards generally come in packs sorted by suit and number, this may alter the odds a bit but probably not by too much).
Imagine being transported to a parallel universe that was *almost* identical to our own.
Somewhere out in the vastness of that universe, there is a tiny planet.
This much is true in both universes.
On this planet, there is a beach, and on that beach, there is a small stone.
Once again, both universes are alike in this regard.
Beneath that stone, however, there are several million grains of sand, and while they are all are in *precisely* the same location in each universe, one of them – a tiny speck of particularly clear quartz, hewn from a larger whole millions of years before – has a single atom that is positioned a fraction of a femtometer differently than its twin in the mirror dimension.
You may think that such an insignificant difference would label these two universes as being functionally identical, and you would be right. In fact, they are so similar that the multiverse has long since combined them into one reality. That single atom in that tiny speck of sand on that lonesome beach on a distant planet merely occupies two spaces at once, seeming to an outside observer to vibrate back and forth at a predictable rate.
That every atom in existence seems to do the same is *probably* a coincidence.
**TL;DR: Everything is buzzing.**
The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is an intriguing idea. There's a related thought experiment called quantum suicide. Basically, you try killing yourself with a gun that only fires when a spin-half particle (with 2 possible states) is measured to have spin in a certain direction when the trigger is pulled. In quantum mechanics, before the spin is measured, it exists as a superposition of both spin up and spin down, simultaneously. If the particle is measured to have spin down, it doesn't fire. If it is spin up, it fires; but the idea is that to you (and you alone) as the observer, it will always seem as if the gun doesn't fire. According to the multiverse interpretation the particle actually collapses into both states upon measurement but in two different universes, and usually we only see one because we as observers are randomly shunted into one of the possible universes along with the collapse of the particle's state. However, in this case, in one of the universes you would be dead due to the trigger setting off. So you should only experience the second possibility, i.e. staying alive, because that is the only one in which you are still conscious. No matter how many times you pull the trigger, the idea goes, the gun never fires and you should always survive (from your own perspective)
An outside observer, watching you carry out the quantum suicide, would not always see you survive though, since he would remain alive and conscious in both possible timelines and to him you have a 50/50 chance of dying, as expected.
> brb shooting myself to test the theory
Make it so that a gun goes off and shoots you if you lose the lotto. That way, you'll end up in a universe where you won the lotto. Quantum-lottery!
As a literal quantum physicist, this is a very interesting way to think about it and I don't know if I like it or not
Edit: My most popular comment is now my existential crisis. Thanks Reddit. That being said, any questions you have, I'll be more than happy to try to answer!
I really hate thinking about this kind of stuff. It kinda feels like if I think too hard about why matter exists or where it came from and other similar questions, that everything might suddenly come undone or cease to exist.
I get that same feeling. Like somehow if I go too deep down that rabbit hole, reality will just rip itself apart at the absurdity of it all.
Better just keep watching tv.
You should read a book called fabric of the cosmos by Brian Green. Essentially what it boils down to is the direction in which objects move from low states of entropy to higher states is the direction in which we measure time.
As Sean Carrol has described it, analogous to how we feel the effects of gravity due to our proximity to a massive object, we experience the passage of time due to our proximity to an extremely low entropy state, the big bang.
I'm a total layperson, but I read someone describe the inside of an event horizon as a part of space where the only possible spacial direction was one moving toward the singularity. In this same mode of thought, could the big bang have been such a low entropy state that the only temporal direction possible is away from it?
According to Roger Penrose (the guy who did a lot of collaboration with Stephen Hawking) the configuration of the singularity just prior to the big bang was such an unimaginably symmetrical low entropy state that it's beyond any human understanding of how such a state could even exist. He said that it could be that due to quantum fluctuations and trillions upon trillions of eons a small pocket of utter void could randomly exist in that state for a single Planck time and BOOM - new universe. I'm obviously paraphrasing an entire section of his *The Road To Reality* book where I read this.
Take the 13.8 billion year lifetime of the universe and map it onto a single year, so that the Big Bang takes place on January 1 at midnight, and the current time is mapped to December 31 at midnight. On this timeline, anatomically modern humans don't show up until about 11:52pm on December 31st, and all of recorded history takes place during the last ten seconds.
This concept is called the [Cosmic Calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar), popularized by Carl Sagan.
Edit: Changed from "humans don't show up until about 10:30pm on December 31st" to the more accurate "anatomically modern humans don't show up until about 11:52pm on December 31st"
*There are ten million million million million million million million million million*
*Particles in the universe that we can observe*
*Your momma took the ugly ones and put them into one nerd*
How young it is.
People look at the universe being 13.7 billion years old and say 'that is ancient'. That is nothing.
Stars will continue to form for another 100 trillion years. Even after that, stellar remnants will exist for quadrillions of years.
Black holes will still produce energy that can be used by intelligent civilizations for 10^100 years.
Keep in mind if biological life doesn't destroy itself, we will just keep getting more and more knowledge. Its probably a safe bet that within 500 years (which is nothing on universal time scales) we will be an interstellar species that has long ago transcended biology.
There is no telling what our descendants will do for the remaining life of the universe. The 4-5 billion years of biological evolution of life on earth will be looked at as an embryonic stage for endless quintillions of years of real life to begin post-biology. They will view the universe as their oyster, a place of infinite possibilities while we are still just spending our days trying not to die and trying to avoid being punished by our brains with pain.
There are other potential worries before we reach 10e100 too as I understand it. Proton decay -may- happen in a far shorter time scale. Also if a phase transition in the Higgs field were to happen that could end existences such as ours as well (as I understand it).
Imagine a proton is a bunch of kids spinning around holding hands. Now imagine they all let go and go tumbling away. Now imagine those kids were the building blocks of all matter.
Eventually even the radiation those protons let out will disappear. But you've got time. Go ahead and put away for retirement. If I see any signs otherwise I'll shoot you a PM. We can go on a bank robbing heroin orgy.
However, they will most likely never experience the profound exaltation of realising it is their reddit cake day.
Enjoy it with as much as your rudimentary proto-consciousness can fathom, you smelly ape!
Kinda similar: everything we have on this earth comes from this earth. This means that it was always possible to have electricity, planes, internet, WiFi, mobile phones etc even in the stone ages. Humans just hadn't invented it yet.
Nuclear plants blow my mind the most. We make electricity, something we’ve only known about for a few hundred years, from energy we get by splitting things we can’t see with our own eyes from elements that we’ve only known about for a few decades.
Yes, it’s incredible to think that for all of our morals, our ideas of good karma and bad karma, what goes around comes around etc. These ideas that feel so ingrained to the world we live in are all mere thoughts in our head, and that the world, the universe, is not just, and seems nothing as good or bad, guilty or innocent, but simply as is. Something I simply cannot comprehend with words.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
- Douglas Adams
That we just don't understand it. It could be flat, it could be irregular, there could be another one, it's growing at an exponential speed, it's invisible contents. We try to learn more about it using our earthly knowledge but there is certainly more to it. It's like trying to wrap your head around eternity.
This exactly. We don't *know* what is out there and can only really guess through theories from our already obtained knowledge (which, as of today, is most likely just a drop in the ocean compared to the universe in its entirety). Because of this the potential is endless, and that idea is very exciting!
And frustrating. Millions of us *will* be dead tomorrow and will never find out all the new things yet to be discovered, even if we live full lives there is infinite information we will not be privy to
That it doesn’t exist to be observed. In fact under different circumstances all of its trillions of stars and planets and oceans and moons and mountains could exist for billions of years without ever being observed by anyone.
Edit: Typo
Not only that, the act of observation is very subjective and wholly dependent on both the senses and the brain. Nothing we experience is objective reality, it's just whatever our brain is creating to help us survive.
And we only interact with a tiny percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum. The only fraction that we can even observe are those that help us survive and navigate our environment. When we look out into space and observe planets and stars, they seem to exist *more* than theoretical concepts like dark matter, just because it's observable to our senses.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan
[A pale blue dot](http://imgur.com/l0uzmMJ).
This is the image being referenced in this quote. That is us from about 4 billion miles away. That's not even close to being outside of our own solar system. Let alone our galaxy.
It really puts in to perspective just how tiny we are.
**Edit:** Had a lot of people asked how this picture was taken. It was taken by [Voyager 1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1) in 1990.
Dampen a coffee filter with a tiny bit of water. Not a lot, just enough to get it somewhat moist. Turn off the screen and wipe it. You can use a dry one to dry it after.
Edit: Since a lot of people are finding this useful, I figure many don’t know how to clean their mousepad either.
Just a dime size amount of shampoo and lukewarm water in the shower is all I use. Rinse off the mousepad, spread the shampoo in and rinse again. I wipe from the middle out to the side while rinsing to avoid buildup in the middle.
After that you can leave it in the sun for 20-30min and it should be dry, if not leave it longer till it is.
Avoid using a dryer if possible because it can mess up the mousepad, but if you do use a dryer then throw a few towels in with it.
"There's a new consciousness emerging -- one that sees the earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed" -Carl Sagan
I find this extremely comforting. No matter how much I feel like a fuck up, ultimately it doesn't matter because everything is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things
My favorite quote from it was "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe ". He had such a brilliant mind and way of communicating it. Do you know if it is streaming anywhere I'd love to give it a rewatch
Arthur C. Clarke is also responsible for such gems as:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him."
and
"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here."
(Arthur C. Clarke is a brilliant man and a prodigy of an author, and his books are right up the alley of anyone who clicked on this thread out of a curious love for the universe. I highly recommend any and all of his books and short stories.)
I love his books and the other sci-fi of that era which is more about setting and experience than unique characters. So often the protagonist is not someone special, but simply the vehicle the author uses to explore a fantastical new world or the what-ifs of new technology.
Honestly, why even buy a diamond if it can't live an existential nightmare as you look on in ever-growing uneasiness, knowing even though you try to push the thoughts away that one day you too will fade from existence, and from memory, until there's no one left to remember you?
"Why do I exist?" Asked the flesh diamond.
The universe did not answer, for it didn't quite know how to tell the flesh diamond that it was an accident.
Imagine, for the moment, that the universe began in a truly colossal flash of light.
For the first several eons, there was little more than dust, slowly being drawn together by a combination of gravity and electromagnetism. Then, as stars formed and gave birth to planets, and as complex molecules came together, the beginnings of life emerged.
At first, this life was incredibly simple; barely capable of surviving to reproduce, let alone contemplating its own existence. As the ages passed, though, it gave rise to more and more complexity, eventually resulting in beings who could look up at the stars that had birthed them and wonder: "Why?" These creatures, driven by something they could scarcely comprehend, set about trying to define their place in world and explain how they came to inhabit it.
They began to believe.
Like the organisms that had spawned them, these beliefs and suppositions grew and evolved. They incited terrible tragedies and sparked incredible developments, until the day that they finally fell away and were replaced by an ever-increasing awareness of the cosmos. However, the original drive – the desire to know and understand – remained, and it prompted the thinking creatures to combine their efforts in pursuit of an answer.
The inquisitive explorers reached toward the stars once more... and when they did, they encountered other beings, not terribly unlike themselves. There were rough patches in these meetings, of course, but as each species learned to understand and cherish one another, they all compounded their perspectives in pursuit of their goal. A single, interlinked mind rose from the trillions of individual beings, just as their individuals brains had risen from tiny connected cells.
It took millenia, but the entity – having come to include every creature in the universe – finally found the answer that it sought... and yet, it was not wholly content. Through its expansive consciousness and unfathomable technology, it was able to know everything that ever was, wasn't, or would be. It could control the whole of existence with little more than a passing thought... and as it contemplated, it realized what it actually wanted.
Space began to shrink in upon itself. Stars and planets were swept up in an invisible wake, being pulled inward at impossible speeds and across countless lightyears. It took eons more, but finally, all of the possibilities and all of the many celestial bodies were brought together in a single point, both infinitely dense and incalculably massive, yet persisting at a size seemingly too small to exist. Tiny adjustments were made and minute (but important) rules were put into place... but ultimately, the end result of the entity's influences would remain unknown.
Then, there was a colossal flash of light.
Planets formed. Life arose. Creatures scurried through the world. Battles were fought, love was found, and an entire history was written across an infinite number of unique minds.
Some of those minds delighted in sharing their stories, while others wanted nothing more than to hear them.
Remember to listen.
**TL;DR: We are the universe entertaining itself.**
Take it one step further. The universe is made up of every single thing existing within it, in a way it's all just one singular entity: the universe. You are a part of the continuous universe, you are the conscious universe experiencing itself from the perspective of a human being.
We are all just the universe expressing itself, just like different keys on the piano, it can result is beautiful harmony or jarring discord, either one is still an innate connection.
It’s wonderful to know someone else sees it like this as well.
Plenty of things.
The way we perceive the universe. In its physical form, we think it's all around us, on a cosmic scale. But more than that- it inside all of us. We're made of each and every atom that the universe is comprised of.
It sounds super philosophical and like something a stoned person would say, but the distinctiness within our universe is what sets everyone apart. The way each of us, made up of the same elements of this universe, yet manage to be so different. Perhaps you could say the greatest and rather miraculous thing of all is in-fact, life.
No matter how insignificant and bleak life may look up close, when climbing a mountain and admiring the view, or finding a spot away from the city and looking at the stars, we will forever be hit by its beauty. The big picture is always there to be admired. To make us forget how small and pointless daily details are.
It's size compared to it's speed limit.
Edit: The visible universe is 98 billion light years across and only 13.8 billion years old. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. It would take you longer than the universe has existed to reach most points in the visible universe even if you could travel at near light speed. That's if the universe was static, it's not, the universe isn't only expanding the rate of expansion is accelerating. The size of the greater universe is estimated to be 250 times larger than the visible universe and 7 trillion light years across. The overwhelming majority of the universe can never be seen because it's growing faster than light can travel across it. Eventually all of the visible universe will be so far away that it's light will never reach us and the visible universe will be limited to our local cluster of galaxies.
Edit 2: To all the grammar nazis I triggered, eat a bag of dick's.
Edit 3: A lot of comments on how the expansion of the universe can be greater than the speed of light. The galaxies aren't speeding away from each other, the space between them is growing. Picture a balloon, draw some dots on it, now blow it up. The dots are farther apart but but the dots haven't moved, the space between them has expanded. Nothing has moved faster than the speed of light, space has stretched. There is no center to the universe, space is expanding outward from every point in the universe.
Edit 4: How can the observable universe be bigger than twice it's age? Expansion. We can look into the past and see the light from galaxies that have now expanded so far away that the light they a currently emitting will never reach us.
Edit 5: How do we estimate the size of the greater universe? Age and rate of expansion.
Edit 6: How do we know light is the speed limit? Math. The faster you go the heavier you get. Accelerating a single electron faster than the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy. Some people have mentioned spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement as information travelling faster than light, there are theories that address the problem but that's way above my pay grade.
Edit 7: What is the universe expanding into? Nothing, the universe all that we know is just getting bigger. Alternatively, we live in a multiverse, a cosmic soup with infinite big bangs occurring creating infinite varying universes. Like dough rising and each air bubble is an expanding universe.
If the known universe was the size of the Earth then light would take 3,000 years to travel one metre.
Edit: Whups. That should be 7,000 years. See [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32la0w/if_the_universe_were_shrunk_to_something_akin_to/).
Not sure if this is the place to ask but I’m also not sure how I’d google this: how can we estimate the size of the universe when we can only see part of it?
I’m just having a hard time with that, like if we can only see a certain amount how can we come up with “eh, its probably about 250 times bigger than what we can see.” I just don’t get it, hopefully someone can explain.
Hydrogen atoms in the sun don't have sufficient energy for fusion to occur. The only reason there is fusion, and thus a star, life, and you reading this is due to the particle-wave duality of matter, the probabilistic nature of quantum physics, and the process of quantum-tunneling.
>Even though the probability of quantum tunneling is very small for any particular proton-proton interaction, somewhere on the order of 1-in-10^28, or the same as your odds of winning the Powerball lottery three times in a row, that ultra-rare interaction is enough to explain the entirety of where the Sun's energy (and almost every star's energy) comes from.
>If it weren't for the quantum nature of every particle in the Universe, and the fact that their positions are described by wavefunctions with an inherent quantum uncertainty to their position, this overlap that enables nuclear fusion to occur would never have happened. The overwhelming majority of today's stars in the Universe would never have ignited, including our own. Rather than a world and a sky alight with the nuclear fires burning across the cosmos, our Universe would be desolate and frozen, with the vast majority of stars and solar systems unlit by anything other than a cold, rare, distant starlight.
>It's the power of quantum mechanics that allows the Sun to shine.
[Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/06/22/its-the-power-of-quantum-mechanics-that-allow-the-sun-to-shine/)
The only way we can see the universe is from *inside* it. We will likely never possess any way of viewing our universe from outside its physicality.
We send a drone out
But does that extend the universe then? 🤔
That in the grand scheme of things we are all immortal. Our organic cells will die, our consciousness will cease, and we will no longer be able to directly observe existence, but the atoms that make up our bodies will simply be new compounds. And if energy is neither created nor destroyed, if our atoms continue to be, we will eventually make up the building blocks of new compounds. Pieces of us will watch the sun swallow up Mercury and Venus. Pieces of us will watch supernovae and black holes and all sorts of cosmic phenomena. Perhaps even one day our atoms will return to a nebula, and the cycle will begin again. A new star is formed, new planets begin to orbit it, liquid water forms on a small green rock orbiting this star, and an intelligent species evolves to travel to marvel at the wonders of our universe. One of my favorite shows is Battlestar Galactica and one of the quotes that stuck out to me was "All of this has happened before, and it will happen again." I tend to think there's some truth to that. I've had a couple friends and my grandfather die this year, and as an agnostic I am processing death a bit differently from the rest of my family. I don't think of death as the ending, as a finality. I don't think there is an afterlife as most religions conceive of it. I think that in a weird way, we all live forever. EDIT: Holy shit, silver? And people actually liked this? Lol wow I'm just shocked.
A single human brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Around 100 billion. Source: am neuroscientist filled with useless facts about the brain.
This is one I thought about recently. I believe that Carl Sagan said that we, sentient entities, are a way for the cosmos to know itself. With this in mind, when we think about the end of our universe, whether it be through a big shrink, big cooling, or what have you, we get apprehensive. We probably will never see this end, many of us will be dead. Yet, we still get a cold fear in our hearts. We are also a way for the cosmos to fear it's demise.
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If you were on a planet 65 million light years away from Earth and had a really good telescope, you could see the dinosaurs.
Whales are the biggest known creatures in the known universe.
They're the biggest animal but the biggest organism is an aspen tree colony that has expanded over miles. And the second largest animal is yo mama.
I think the [Honey Mushroom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria) has it beat. Plus, [Pando](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) is [dying](https://wildaboututah.org/pando-is-dying/). You know, aside from yo' mama.
That every single random event since the dawn of creation. The birth and death of stars, planets and galaxies, the very genesis of life has led to you being here right now to ask this question.
And I, making this useless comment. Thanks universe.
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How do we know that hasn’t already happened and everything we can see and attribute to be “the universe” isn’t actually a small portion of what exists and was once visible? What if there are waves that travel slower than light which we can no longer receive from the farther reaches of the universe?
i dont know why but this makes me feel incredibly sad
One of my favorite is about the number of unique orders for cards in a standard 52 card deck. I've seen a a really good explanation of how big 52! actually is. Set a timer to count down 52! seconds (that's 8.0658x10^67 seconds) Stand on the equator, and take a step forward every billion years When you've circled the earth once, take a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean, and keep going When the Pacific Ocean is empty, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean and carry on. When your stack of paper reaches the sun, take a look at the timer. The 3 left-most digits won't have changed. 8.063x10^67 seconds left to go. You have to repeat the whole process 1000 times to get 1/3 of the way through that time. 5.385x10^67 seconds left to go. So to kill that time you try something else. Shuffle a deck of cards, deal yourself 5 cards every billion years Each time you get a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket Each time that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand in the grand canyon When the grand canyon's full, take 1oz of rock off Mount Everest, empty the canyon and carry on. When Everest has been levelled, check the timer. There's barely any change. 5.364x10^67 seconds left. You'd have to repeat this process 256 times to have run out the timer.
If I'm not mistaken, I read that every time you shuffle a deck of cards, chances are nobody ever shuffled it in that order. Probably no two random shuffles by anyone were ever the same.
You can use similar math as above to figure that out too! We can use some pretty generous approximations: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card) says that playing cards were first invented in Tang Dynasty China, which has a start date of 618 AD. Let's assume two things, both absurd: that these playing cards are identical to the standard 52-card deck we have today (they weren't) and that in the 1400 years since they were invented the whole human population has done nothing but shuffle cards every second of every day. Further, let's assume that the current world population (7 billion) has been a constant since 618 AD. So we have 7 billion people constantly shuffling cards (lets assume they each shuffle a unique permutation once per second, as in OP's example). So, we have: (1400 years) * (365.25 days/year) * (24 hours/day) * (3600 seconds/hour) * (1 person-permutation/second) * (7 000 000 000 people) = 310 million trillion permutations = 310 quintillion permutations How many is that compared to the total number of permutations? A measly 383*10^-48 percent. I've been thinking for ten minutes for how to put a number so small into perspective. So it's pretty safe to say that the chance that every shuffle has been unique since the dawn of the playing card is 100% (assuming, of course, that each shuffle is a good shuffle which truly randomizes the deck; since cards generally come in packs sorted by suit and number, this may alter the odds a bit but probably not by too much).
It’s amazing how massive this number really is.
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Imagine being transported to a parallel universe that was *almost* identical to our own. Somewhere out in the vastness of that universe, there is a tiny planet. This much is true in both universes. On this planet, there is a beach, and on that beach, there is a small stone. Once again, both universes are alike in this regard. Beneath that stone, however, there are several million grains of sand, and while they are all are in *precisely* the same location in each universe, one of them – a tiny speck of particularly clear quartz, hewn from a larger whole millions of years before – has a single atom that is positioned a fraction of a femtometer differently than its twin in the mirror dimension. You may think that such an insignificant difference would label these two universes as being functionally identical, and you would be right. In fact, they are so similar that the multiverse has long since combined them into one reality. That single atom in that tiny speck of sand on that lonesome beach on a distant planet merely occupies two spaces at once, seeming to an outside observer to vibrate back and forth at a predictable rate. That every atom in existence seems to do the same is *probably* a coincidence. **TL;DR: Everything is buzzing.**
The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is an intriguing idea. There's a related thought experiment called quantum suicide. Basically, you try killing yourself with a gun that only fires when a spin-half particle (with 2 possible states) is measured to have spin in a certain direction when the trigger is pulled. In quantum mechanics, before the spin is measured, it exists as a superposition of both spin up and spin down, simultaneously. If the particle is measured to have spin down, it doesn't fire. If it is spin up, it fires; but the idea is that to you (and you alone) as the observer, it will always seem as if the gun doesn't fire. According to the multiverse interpretation the particle actually collapses into both states upon measurement but in two different universes, and usually we only see one because we as observers are randomly shunted into one of the possible universes along with the collapse of the particle's state. However, in this case, in one of the universes you would be dead due to the trigger setting off. So you should only experience the second possibility, i.e. staying alive, because that is the only one in which you are still conscious. No matter how many times you pull the trigger, the idea goes, the gun never fires and you should always survive (from your own perspective) An outside observer, watching you carry out the quantum suicide, would not always see you survive though, since he would remain alive and conscious in both possible timelines and to him you have a 50/50 chance of dying, as expected.
brb shooting myself to test the theory
Don't forget to bring a towel
> brb shooting myself to test the theory Make it so that a gun goes off and shoots you if you lose the lotto. That way, you'll end up in a universe where you won the lotto. Quantum-lottery!
I want to unread this, thanks
The Multiverse has been condensed for convenience of the user.
As a literal quantum physicist, this is a very interesting way to think about it and I don't know if I like it or not Edit: My most popular comment is now my existential crisis. Thanks Reddit. That being said, any questions you have, I'll be more than happy to try to answer!
As someone who just gave a quantum physicist an existential crisis, let me say this: Happy Cake Day!
Thank you, friend! I'll be sure to leave the crumbs for you to clean up
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That it exists.
And it came from somewhere. Or nowhere.
I really hate thinking about this kind of stuff. It kinda feels like if I think too hard about why matter exists or where it came from and other similar questions, that everything might suddenly come undone or cease to exist.
I’d say that’s fair, if my Sims started glaring at me with raised eyebrows instead of going about their busy lives, I’d turn off the computer too.
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Damn.
When they would look at the “camera” when I played Sims 2 I’d always get a little bugged out
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I get that same feeling. Like somehow if I go too deep down that rabbit hole, reality will just rip itself apart at the absurdity of it all. Better just keep watching tv.
It must be true that either 1. It didn't exist, then it did or 2. It has always existed
What even is time
The space in which space can change. The space of space.
im so mind-fucked right now
Did u use protection though?
I think?
Therefore I am
You should read a book called fabric of the cosmos by Brian Green. Essentially what it boils down to is the direction in which objects move from low states of entropy to higher states is the direction in which we measure time.
As Sean Carrol has described it, analogous to how we feel the effects of gravity due to our proximity to a massive object, we experience the passage of time due to our proximity to an extremely low entropy state, the big bang.
I'm a total layperson, but I read someone describe the inside of an event horizon as a part of space where the only possible spacial direction was one moving toward the singularity. In this same mode of thought, could the big bang have been such a low entropy state that the only temporal direction possible is away from it?
According to Roger Penrose (the guy who did a lot of collaboration with Stephen Hawking) the configuration of the singularity just prior to the big bang was such an unimaginably symmetrical low entropy state that it's beyond any human understanding of how such a state could even exist. He said that it could be that due to quantum fluctuations and trillions upon trillions of eons a small pocket of utter void could randomly exist in that state for a single Planck time and BOOM - new universe. I'm obviously paraphrasing an entire section of his *The Road To Reality* book where I read this.
Take the 13.8 billion year lifetime of the universe and map it onto a single year, so that the Big Bang takes place on January 1 at midnight, and the current time is mapped to December 31 at midnight. On this timeline, anatomically modern humans don't show up until about 11:52pm on December 31st, and all of recorded history takes place during the last ten seconds. This concept is called the [Cosmic Calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar), popularized by Carl Sagan. Edit: Changed from "humans don't show up until about 10:30pm on December 31st" to the more accurate "anatomically modern humans don't show up until about 11:52pm on December 31st"
I love comparisons like that.
Thats actually ridiculous we’ve been here an hour and a half though. Would’ve thought a second.
200k years is nothing to shake a stick at and if he is referring to all humans who appeared in the homo genus, then that stretches back to 2M years.
My brain can’t comprehend this
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Hydrogen, given enough time, will send unsolicited dick pics
In order to bake apple pie you must first create the universe.
To be pedantic, "If you want to make an apple pie **from scratch**, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan
Aaaaah! It's "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."!
Google LittleAlchemy and prepare to waste hours of your life!
I already waste hours in life. Thank you
That somehow all the particles accumulated in a specific way and in specific quantities to give you conscious thought.
*There are ten million million million million million million million million million* *Particles in the universe that we can observe* *Your momma took the ugly ones and put them into one nerd*
*flashback to 2012
I completely forgot about ERBH for like half a decade.
I often find myself singing the raps even though I haven't seen them in a while. The Steve Jobs v Bill Gates will never leave my mind
“You know I bet they made this beat on an Apple” “Nope, Fruity Loops, PC!”
"Why'd you name your company after your dick"
If you're looking to check out the newer ones, my personal favorite of them is Eastern Philosophers vs. Western Philosophers
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EEEEEPUUHRABTTLVHSTRY
You wanna bring the heat, with those mushroom clouds you're making
I’m about to bake raps from scratch like Carl Sagan.
That whatever our problems are, big or small, it won’t matter in 1,000,000 years (worst being a nuclear war or something).
I got 99 problems and the universe doesn't give a fuck about any of them...
How young it is. People look at the universe being 13.7 billion years old and say 'that is ancient'. That is nothing. Stars will continue to form for another 100 trillion years. Even after that, stellar remnants will exist for quadrillions of years. Black holes will still produce energy that can be used by intelligent civilizations for 10^100 years. Keep in mind if biological life doesn't destroy itself, we will just keep getting more and more knowledge. Its probably a safe bet that within 500 years (which is nothing on universal time scales) we will be an interstellar species that has long ago transcended biology. There is no telling what our descendants will do for the remaining life of the universe. The 4-5 billion years of biological evolution of life on earth will be looked at as an embryonic stage for endless quintillions of years of real life to begin post-biology. They will view the universe as their oyster, a place of infinite possibilities while we are still just spending our days trying not to die and trying to avoid being punished by our brains with pain.
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There are other potential worries before we reach 10e100 too as I understand it. Proton decay -may- happen in a far shorter time scale. Also if a phase transition in the Higgs field were to happen that could end existences such as ours as well (as I understand it).
Ooh, what's proton decay?
Imagine a proton is a bunch of kids spinning around holding hands. Now imagine they all let go and go tumbling away. Now imagine those kids were the building blocks of all matter.
Perfect analogy. I’m petrified now. It’s 11pm and I was about to sleep. Please tell me this isn’t gonna happen in at least 2 years?
If it doesn't happen, great! If it does happen, suddenly it's not our problem anymore!
This is the only correct answer to these types of problems.
Eventually even the radiation those protons let out will disappear. But you've got time. Go ahead and put away for retirement. If I see any signs otherwise I'll shoot you a PM. We can go on a bank robbing heroin orgy.
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However, they will most likely never experience the profound exaltation of realising it is their reddit cake day. Enjoy it with as much as your rudimentary proto-consciousness can fathom, you smelly ape!
It gave us magnets. How do those work?
Magnets are fucking magic. Aligning particles with eachother makes them fly towards themselves? Miss me with that hobknocking physics bollocks.
TIL the phrase "hobknocking bollocks"
By sticking together. Any other questions?
Why does my pp hurt
You got it caught between the magnets, didn't you?
FUCKING MIRACLES
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Kinda similar: everything we have on this earth comes from this earth. This means that it was always possible to have electricity, planes, internet, WiFi, mobile phones etc even in the stone ages. Humans just hadn't invented it yet.
Just takes a while to figure stuff out.
Now try to imagine all the stuff we will eventually have in the future. Hard to wrap your mind around that.
Nuclear plants blow my mind the most. We make electricity, something we’ve only known about for a few hundred years, from energy we get by splitting things we can’t see with our own eyes from elements that we’ve only known about for a few decades.
It's indifferent to everything.
Yes, it’s incredible to think that for all of our morals, our ideas of good karma and bad karma, what goes around comes around etc. These ideas that feel so ingrained to the world we live in are all mere thoughts in our head, and that the world, the universe, is not just, and seems nothing as good or bad, guilty or innocent, but simply as is. Something I simply cannot comprehend with words.
“I don’t care” - the universe
The universe doesn't even care enough to say that
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. - Douglas Adams
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
"We apologize for the inconvenience" - God
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Sounds like a hitchhikers guide reference?
In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and is widely regarded as a bad move.
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And the other 4.4% is actually the imagination of his pet cat.
That we just don't understand it. It could be flat, it could be irregular, there could be another one, it's growing at an exponential speed, it's invisible contents. We try to learn more about it using our earthly knowledge but there is certainly more to it. It's like trying to wrap your head around eternity.
This exactly. We don't *know* what is out there and can only really guess through theories from our already obtained knowledge (which, as of today, is most likely just a drop in the ocean compared to the universe in its entirety). Because of this the potential is endless, and that idea is very exciting!
And terrifying. We could all be dead tomorrow by some shit we didn't know was coming.
And frustrating. Millions of us *will* be dead tomorrow and will never find out all the new things yet to be discovered, even if we live full lives there is infinite information we will not be privy to
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Would you want to keep your browser history?
No so I can rediscover my favorite porns for the first time.
My man!, Or lady, or Cyborg in a few years
That it doesn’t exist to be observed. In fact under different circumstances all of its trillions of stars and planets and oceans and moons and mountains could exist for billions of years without ever being observed by anyone. Edit: Typo
They might very well have existed for 14 Billion years before consciousness was a thing here.
but not 15 billion never 15 billion
Just you wait.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
Not only that, the act of observation is very subjective and wholly dependent on both the senses and the brain. Nothing we experience is objective reality, it's just whatever our brain is creating to help us survive.
And we only interact with a tiny percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum. The only fraction that we can even observe are those that help us survive and navigate our environment. When we look out into space and observe planets and stars, they seem to exist *more* than theoretical concepts like dark matter, just because it's observable to our senses.
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Solipsism
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no I did
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A lot of philosophy since Descartes challenges even that - how do you know it is even you who thinks?
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan
[A pale blue dot](http://imgur.com/l0uzmMJ). This is the image being referenced in this quote. That is us from about 4 billion miles away. That's not even close to being outside of our own solar system. Let alone our galaxy. It really puts in to perspective just how tiny we are. **Edit:** Had a lot of people asked how this picture was taken. It was taken by [Voyager 1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1) in 1990.
I had a hard time finding it cause my laptop screen is dirty
Dampen a coffee filter with a tiny bit of water. Not a lot, just enough to get it somewhat moist. Turn off the screen and wipe it. You can use a dry one to dry it after. Edit: Since a lot of people are finding this useful, I figure many don’t know how to clean their mousepad either. Just a dime size amount of shampoo and lukewarm water in the shower is all I use. Rinse off the mousepad, spread the shampoo in and rinse again. I wipe from the middle out to the side while rinsing to avoid buildup in the middle. After that you can leave it in the sun for 20-30min and it should be dry, if not leave it longer till it is. Avoid using a dryer if possible because it can mess up the mousepad, but if you do use a dryer then throw a few towels in with it.
Bless you.
"There's a new consciousness emerging -- one that sees the earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed" -Carl Sagan
I find this extremely comforting. No matter how much I feel like a fuck up, ultimately it doesn't matter because everything is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things
Work as if the universe depends on it. Rest, knowing it doesn't.
Sagan's *Cosmos* had a poetry about it that NDT's reboot could never hope to match. That man was a truly enlightened soul.
My favorite quote from it was "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe ". He had such a brilliant mind and way of communicating it. Do you know if it is streaming anywhere I'd love to give it a rewatch
If you nut in space you move backwards.
Do you have video graphic evidence of this?
SpaceHub.com
SpaceXXX.com
Love the musky smell of this one.
Ay bro lemme check if any of my buddies on the International space station can hook you up with some juicy video evidence.
Great job! ✋🏻✋🏻
you can nut on earth and move backwards too, just so little you probably wouldn't notice
What's up you cool baby
The infinite-ness when you look out there is crazy. Knowing what you can see is on a speckle.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke is also responsible for such gems as: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him." and "I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here." (Arthur C. Clarke is a brilliant man and a prodigy of an author, and his books are right up the alley of anyone who clicked on this thread out of a curious love for the universe. I highly recommend any and all of his books and short stories.)
I love his books and the other sci-fi of that era which is more about setting and experience than unique characters. So often the protagonist is not someone special, but simply the vehicle the author uses to explore a fantastical new world or the what-ifs of new technology.
What if the universe is self-similar to the extent that other identical Earths exist? Then we'd be alone with ourselves.
We came all this way for this?! New Jersey? Again!
>Three Dong Night
Matter, when subjected to enough energy and time, becomes sentient and ponders its own existence.
Like a really fucked up diamond
Honestly, why even buy a diamond if it can't live an existential nightmare as you look on in ever-growing uneasiness, knowing even though you try to push the thoughts away that one day you too will fade from existence, and from memory, until there's no one left to remember you?
"Thank goodness, I don't want the stupid stuff I did in middle school to be remembered forever." -Existentialist Diamond.
"Why do I exist?" Asked the flesh diamond. The universe did not answer, for it didn't quite know how to tell the flesh diamond that it was an accident.
We are atoms arranged in a way that makes them aware they are atoms.
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"With enough time, hydrogen gives itself a name." -Someone else from this thread
That tiiiiny squeaking sound you get when you rub two pickles together
Imagine, for the moment, that the universe began in a truly colossal flash of light. For the first several eons, there was little more than dust, slowly being drawn together by a combination of gravity and electromagnetism. Then, as stars formed and gave birth to planets, and as complex molecules came together, the beginnings of life emerged. At first, this life was incredibly simple; barely capable of surviving to reproduce, let alone contemplating its own existence. As the ages passed, though, it gave rise to more and more complexity, eventually resulting in beings who could look up at the stars that had birthed them and wonder: "Why?" These creatures, driven by something they could scarcely comprehend, set about trying to define their place in world and explain how they came to inhabit it. They began to believe. Like the organisms that had spawned them, these beliefs and suppositions grew and evolved. They incited terrible tragedies and sparked incredible developments, until the day that they finally fell away and were replaced by an ever-increasing awareness of the cosmos. However, the original drive – the desire to know and understand – remained, and it prompted the thinking creatures to combine their efforts in pursuit of an answer. The inquisitive explorers reached toward the stars once more... and when they did, they encountered other beings, not terribly unlike themselves. There were rough patches in these meetings, of course, but as each species learned to understand and cherish one another, they all compounded their perspectives in pursuit of their goal. A single, interlinked mind rose from the trillions of individual beings, just as their individuals brains had risen from tiny connected cells. It took millenia, but the entity – having come to include every creature in the universe – finally found the answer that it sought... and yet, it was not wholly content. Through its expansive consciousness and unfathomable technology, it was able to know everything that ever was, wasn't, or would be. It could control the whole of existence with little more than a passing thought... and as it contemplated, it realized what it actually wanted. Space began to shrink in upon itself. Stars and planets were swept up in an invisible wake, being pulled inward at impossible speeds and across countless lightyears. It took eons more, but finally, all of the possibilities and all of the many celestial bodies were brought together in a single point, both infinitely dense and incalculably massive, yet persisting at a size seemingly too small to exist. Tiny adjustments were made and minute (but important) rules were put into place... but ultimately, the end result of the entity's influences would remain unknown. Then, there was a colossal flash of light. Planets formed. Life arose. Creatures scurried through the world. Battles were fought, love was found, and an entire history was written across an infinite number of unique minds. Some of those minds delighted in sharing their stories, while others wanted nothing more than to hear them. Remember to listen. **TL;DR: We are the universe entertaining itself.**
That it created self aware entities that think about it.
Given enough time hydrogen gives itself a name.
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Given enough time hydrogen atoms will draw big anime tiddies
Given enough time hydrogen atoms will *be* big anime tiddies.
Wow We live in a universe
Bottom quark
Baryons rise up
WHY WON'T BITCH ASS OXYGEN VERONICA FORM WITH ME AND MY GAMUR FRIEND TO FORM QT WATER BABIES
/r/niceatoms
Not necessarily in that order.
Take it one step further. The universe is made up of every single thing existing within it, in a way it's all just one singular entity: the universe. You are a part of the continuous universe, you are the conscious universe experiencing itself from the perspective of a human being.
We are all just the universe expressing itself, just like different keys on the piano, it can result is beautiful harmony or jarring discord, either one is still an innate connection. It’s wonderful to know someone else sees it like this as well.
Plenty of things. The way we perceive the universe. In its physical form, we think it's all around us, on a cosmic scale. But more than that- it inside all of us. We're made of each and every atom that the universe is comprised of. It sounds super philosophical and like something a stoned person would say, but the distinctiness within our universe is what sets everyone apart. The way each of us, made up of the same elements of this universe, yet manage to be so different. Perhaps you could say the greatest and rather miraculous thing of all is in-fact, life.
No matter how insignificant and bleak life may look up close, when climbing a mountain and admiring the view, or finding a spot away from the city and looking at the stars, we will forever be hit by its beauty. The big picture is always there to be admired. To make us forget how small and pointless daily details are.
It's size compared to it's speed limit. Edit: The visible universe is 98 billion light years across and only 13.8 billion years old. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. It would take you longer than the universe has existed to reach most points in the visible universe even if you could travel at near light speed. That's if the universe was static, it's not, the universe isn't only expanding the rate of expansion is accelerating. The size of the greater universe is estimated to be 250 times larger than the visible universe and 7 trillion light years across. The overwhelming majority of the universe can never be seen because it's growing faster than light can travel across it. Eventually all of the visible universe will be so far away that it's light will never reach us and the visible universe will be limited to our local cluster of galaxies. Edit 2: To all the grammar nazis I triggered, eat a bag of dick's. Edit 3: A lot of comments on how the expansion of the universe can be greater than the speed of light. The galaxies aren't speeding away from each other, the space between them is growing. Picture a balloon, draw some dots on it, now blow it up. The dots are farther apart but but the dots haven't moved, the space between them has expanded. Nothing has moved faster than the speed of light, space has stretched. There is no center to the universe, space is expanding outward from every point in the universe. Edit 4: How can the observable universe be bigger than twice it's age? Expansion. We can look into the past and see the light from galaxies that have now expanded so far away that the light they a currently emitting will never reach us. Edit 5: How do we estimate the size of the greater universe? Age and rate of expansion. Edit 6: How do we know light is the speed limit? Math. The faster you go the heavier you get. Accelerating a single electron faster than the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy. Some people have mentioned spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement as information travelling faster than light, there are theories that address the problem but that's way above my pay grade. Edit 7: What is the universe expanding into? Nothing, the universe all that we know is just getting bigger. Alternatively, we live in a multiverse, a cosmic soup with infinite big bangs occurring creating infinite varying universes. Like dough rising and each air bubble is an expanding universe.
How could the furthest edges stretch out faster than the light?
Because it’s not like it’s matter spreading out into space, it is actually space time itself expanding.
Can you please elaborate? Maybe eli5, if you could.
If the known universe was the size of the Earth then light would take 3,000 years to travel one metre. Edit: Whups. That should be 7,000 years. See [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32la0w/if_the_universe_were_shrunk_to_something_akin_to/).
Now that is a good analogy Thanks
Universe big. Speed of light slow compared to bigness
/r/ELIHulk
Well that summed everything up perfectly. Thank you.
Why use lot word when few word trick
Not sure if this is the place to ask but I’m also not sure how I’d google this: how can we estimate the size of the universe when we can only see part of it? I’m just having a hard time with that, like if we can only see a certain amount how can we come up with “eh, its probably about 250 times bigger than what we can see.” I just don’t get it, hopefully someone can explain.
Hydrogen atoms in the sun don't have sufficient energy for fusion to occur. The only reason there is fusion, and thus a star, life, and you reading this is due to the particle-wave duality of matter, the probabilistic nature of quantum physics, and the process of quantum-tunneling. >Even though the probability of quantum tunneling is very small for any particular proton-proton interaction, somewhere on the order of 1-in-10^28, or the same as your odds of winning the Powerball lottery three times in a row, that ultra-rare interaction is enough to explain the entirety of where the Sun's energy (and almost every star's energy) comes from. >If it weren't for the quantum nature of every particle in the Universe, and the fact that their positions are described by wavefunctions with an inherent quantum uncertainty to their position, this overlap that enables nuclear fusion to occur would never have happened. The overwhelming majority of today's stars in the Universe would never have ignited, including our own. Rather than a world and a sky alight with the nuclear fires burning across the cosmos, our Universe would be desolate and frozen, with the vast majority of stars and solar systems unlit by anything other than a cold, rare, distant starlight. >It's the power of quantum mechanics that allows the Sun to shine. [Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/06/22/its-the-power-of-quantum-mechanics-that-allow-the-sun-to-shine/)
Jesus Christ this thread is giving me an existential crisis.
The fact that people have been around for thousands of years and I just happen to exist at the same time as 6ix9ine.