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You must believe there is other life out there somewhere or that maybe we are transplants from another world or god did all of this. How big is this god guy anyway?
If you think you are a big shot or if s*** you worry about is a big deal check photos below
ANTARES IS THE 15TH BRIGHTEST STAR IN THE SKY.
BELOW IS A HUBBLE TELESCOPE ULTRA-DEEP-FIELD INFRARED VIEW OF COUNTLESS ENTIRE GALAXIES ... BILLIONS OF LIGHT YEARS AWAY.
BELOW IS A CLOSE UP OF ONE OF THE DARKEST REGIONS OF THE PHOTO ABOVE.
this sure does suck it out of you, hope you all enjoyed todays fun facts.
know it All
But just because the universe has been expanding since the big bang doesn't mean it only has a radius of 13.7 billion light-years, and a diameter of 27.4 billion light-years. That would presume that the universe can expand only as fast as the speed of light, and that would be wrong. The universal "speed limit" of the speed of light (c) only applies to matter within the universe. The universe itself, that is, the space-time fabric of the universe, is not bound by the speed of light, and in fact can expand much faster. During the "inflationary era" of universal expansion a split second after the big band, the universe actually expanded much much faster than the speed of light. What this implies is that the most distant objects that we can see in the visible universe are just the tip of the iceberg: much more lies outside of our view, on the other side of the horizon, because the light from these distant galaxies hasn't reached us yet. Cosmologists call this the horizon problem.
What lies beyond the horizon? Probably more of the same, out towards infinity. In fact, theorists can calculate the probability of an exact duplicate of our visible universe -- down to the last atom and subatomic particle -- existing in a far distant pocket of our infinite universe. It turns out that the probability, although vanishingly small, is real and finite; and in an infinite universe, anything that can happen, will happen. That means that far beyond the cosmic horizon, in a distant part of the universe that we physically have no means to observe or make contact with, there is a perfect clone of you and I and everything we know. Now that blows the mind. Welcome to the stranger-than-fiction world of cosmology.
By the way, although staring upwards always helps to put our relatively insignificant problems into perspective, that doesn't mean they are insignificant to us. All politics is local, as they say. The supernova in a galaxy 50 million light years away doesn't affect me much, but the nuclear explosion in the neighboring continent makes a world of difference for the people living on that world. Kind of like looking at geological history and noting that on a 24 hour clock, mankind came on the scene during the last second of the last minute of the last hour of the day. Our lifetimes are insignificant, but not to us.
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