A thought provocing question.

[duke o' york]

To Padma: The poem is by Ogden Nash.

To Santo67: So the man who invented ballpoint pens on the Earth we know in fact is the creator of millions of universes and even more within each one? Were there ever alternative universes in quill nibs?

 

[polymath]

What happens if we reach the end of the universe?

Warp drives and other sci-fi apart, I doubt we could reach the end of the universe. We think we know the Universe is 15 billion years old - but it could be ten or twenty billion. So, if we see stars say ten billion light years away, all we know is that that is where they were ten billion years ago. They've probably gone another ten billion light years since then. So to get to the most distant stars we know (which doesn't necessarily mean that is where the edge of the universe is) we've got to go at the speed of light for 20 billion years. A long trip. It may be possible that you could chase the edge of the universe forever, and never get there. We could be destined always to be looking at the past, and never seeing the edge in the here-and-now.
So my guess is, we'll never ever get there, if it isn't going to callapse inwards.

 

[CivMonger]

I agree with Ozz. This whole discussion is leaving me a little but I under stand what he is saying. Human intelligence is debatable. Who here thinks that a species whose greatest ambition is to :die!: people and countries. I thihnk a smarter species is the cockroach, whom thrives off our waste, and looks forward to the day that we blast ourselves into oblivion, leaving it and few others in our wake. LONG LIVE THE COCKROACH!

 

[Morten Blaabjerg]

Haven't read the whole thread, but BlueMondays theory triggered an idea. Most of you guys think about this in a rational "scientific' manner. Another way of thinking about the universe is philosophical.

Our ways of thinking are very much limited to our own nature, limited to our own mind, and not the least, our own conceptions of ourselves, our language (words and concepts), our society and our universe. Maybe we need to expand our ways of thinking a bit more to be able to comprehend more about our universe.

But essentially, the universe, or our universe (because there may be others), is tied up on our own existence. If we do not exist, neither does the universe. Theres noone who'd know anyway. And chances are an alien species will have a completely different conception of what the universe is, connected to their life-cycle, nature and ways of thinking (if even thinking is a concept they'd use, if they use such things as concepts).

Guess what I'm saying is that life and universe might not be what we figure it to be... The universe could in fact be an advanced reflection of our own minds, of our own micro-cosmos, our own life-death cycle. We come from nothing and go back to nothing, just like the theories say about the universe. There was a Big Bang, a big source of light, that expanded and gave way to the universe. Now, doesn't this sound a bit like what happens when one is born?

Just a wild thought, might serve as some inspiration for ya.

 

[BlueMonday]

Good show, Morten. The question of whether or not we exist has been debated by philosphers for thousands of years. For instance, the critics (they were a philosophical sect) came along a few hundred years ago and said that you can't define reality by what you see or touch, taste or hear; all your senses can be decieved. Essentially, an early plot line for "The Matrix" saying that in that case reality is nothing more than electrical impulses interpreted by the brain.

And then DeCartes said something that changed everything: Cogito Ergo Sum. I think, therefore I am. Maybe the ciritcs were right, maybe we might be nothing more than a brain in a vat controlled by a mad scientist to buy into a reality that exists only in our minds. But, the mere fact that I'm able to concieve of such a concept proves that I exist. I may not have a body, I may not have anything I think I own, I may be just a brain in a vat somewhere but because I think, I exist somewhere.

Of course, Since DeCartes made his remarkable revelation no one has been able to prove the existence of anybody else. I know i exist, but what about you?

 

[G-Man]

Originally posted by santo67
Of course there are other 'civs' out there. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. There has to be. Even if the odds of life rising to intellignece to sentience to civilizations were infinitely small, there's plenty of Universe out there for it to happen more than once.

I wasn't talking about other stars in the universe. I was talking beyond these stars. As you know all stars were originated in a big exlosion of an extremely dense body. According to scientists this has also happened before. It explodes, then stars start moving away untill the gravity of the rest of the stars pulls them back in. This is our universe, including all stars and planets and sun and everything. I was thinking if there can be other universes, or at least other bodies somewhere that aren't a part of our universe's system.


"Our entire Universe exists within the tip of a ball-point pen sitting on some alien executive's desk, in our 'Parent' Universe. Right there in that little spherical ball on the end. Don't think of our Universe as the beginning or the end. The cycle of ball-point pen Universes extends forever in both directioins. Parallel or 'Sibling' Universes to us are from other ball point pens in our 'Parent' Universe. And, of course, we have our own 'Offspring' Universes within the tips of all the ball-point pens in our Universe. And so on and so forth ad infinitum."

I could very well be. The problem is that that alien can live according to different scales of the dimentions. If for us a year is a long time the alien's instincts need an almost infinate number of years to react. If for us a light-year is a long distance for him it's microscopical.

 

[History_Buff]

It probobly wont matter. The only way we could ever figure it out would be to go there, which isnt about to happen because only the US could ever fund a program like that, but it would leave them in googles of dollars of debt.( A google being 1 followed by a hundred zeros, for those who dont know)

And if the universe is expanding, eventually the Earth and every other cellestial body will fet so far away from everythiing else that all life will cease to exist.

If the universe is contracting, eventually, all life will be crushed, there will be a big bang, and this whole problem will be loked at again, probably very differently in other time and place.

And if the universe is doing niether, eventually, we'll all die of more nutaural causes, or start a big philosophical war about it, and end up destroying the world because nobody has any evidence or proof one way or the other, and nobody will ever admit to being wrong.

 

[baseballtwin86]

I couldn't help to become involved in this discussion.

Although I really have never studied theoretical physics and can't really much discuss the subject, I one time saw a show on TechTV called Big Thinkers. On the show was theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. He described many things that just went over my head like we are living in a ten dimensional universe. Well anyway, I found his webpage, and I quote...

One of the crowning achievements of 20th century science is that all the laws of physics, at a fundamental level, can be summarized by just two formalisms: (1) Einstein's theory of gravity, which gives us a cosmic description of the very large, i.e. galaxies, black holes and the Big Bang, and (2) the quantum theory, which gives us a microscopic description of the very small, i.e. the microcosm of sub-atomic particles and radiation.

But the supreme irony, and surely one of Nature's cosmic jokes, is that they look bewilderingly different; even the world's greatest physicists, including Einstein and Heisenberg, have failed to unify these into one. The two theories use different mathematics and different physical principles to describe the universe in their respective domains, the cosmic and the microscopic.

Fortunately, we now have a candidate for this theory. (In fact, it is the only candidate. Scores of rival proposals have all been shown to be inconsistent.) It's called "superstring theory," and almost effortlessly unites gravity with a theory of radiation, which is required to solve the problem of quantum wormholes.

The superstring theory can explain the mysterious quantum laws of sub-atomic physics by postulating that sub-atomic particles are really just resonances or vibrations of a tiny string. The vibrations of a violin string correspond to musical notes; likewise the vibrations of a superstring correspond to the particles found in nature. The universe is then a symphony of vibrating strings.

An added bonus is that, as a string moves in time, it warps the fabric of space around it, producing black holes, wormholes, and other exotic solutions of Einstein's equations. Thus, in one stroke, the superstring theory unites both the theory of Einstein and quantum physics into one coherent, compelling picture.

.........................................................................................................

To read more about this subject, got to http://www.mkaku.org and read some of the articles that this man has written

Quite fascinating stuff.