The Scale of the Universe

Post by **Richard S.** » Wed. Mar. 20, 2013 10:51 am

Lightning wrote: There could even be a ruler of the universe that just hasn't ran across us yet..

That reminds of the commercial for a movie years ago, they show the earth and slowly zoom out. Just the edge of a round disc many times bigger than earth appears. Then it blinks.

The one thing I often thought about is if intelligent life did show up here they are going to be so far advanced beyond us you have to wonder if they would just look at the earth as a place for resources and eradicate us with giant can of Galactic Raid ®.

Post by **ONEDOLLAR** » Wed. Mar. 20, 2013 11:17 am

Richard S. wrote:The one thing I often thought about is if intelligent life did show up here they are going to be so far advanced beyond us you have to wonder if they would just look at the earth as a place for resources and eradicate us with giant can of Galactic Raid ®.

Better hope they have some sort of "Prime Directive"..................

Post by **Lightning** » Wed. Mar. 20, 2013 11:44 am

Richard S. wrote:The one thing I often thought about is if intelligent life did show up here they are going to be so far advanced beyond us you have to wonder if they would just look at the earth as a place for resources and eradicate us with giant can of Galactic Raid ®.

Logic tells me that if a life form was able to "get past" the point of annihilating themselves and evolve further then they would not be hostile and would exhibit an appreciation for the value of life. Not saying they wouldn't take our resources lol... But I'm optimistic that they wouldn't wipe us out.. lol....

On second thought, I think they would just leave us alone.. Resources can be found anywhere in the universe. Why pick on a planet with life on it? UNless of course they need it to live on

coalkirk · Post by **coalkirk** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 11:37 am

To Serve Man.

IT'S A COOK BOOK!!!
classic Twilight zone

SMITTY · Post by **SMITTY** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 11:39 am

Maybe they'd take us with them to a bigger, better place?

I'd be the first on board, especially if the majority of MA, NY & CA stayed behind.

Post by **franco b** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 12:50 pm

How many species have existed or do exist on Earth? Many million?

Only one species has evolved to have enough intelligence to construct machines capable of leaving Earth. So the odds against intelligent life evolving are many million to one.

How many planets are capable of supporting life? Again the odds are many millions against.

When you multiply those very large numbers together you get an enormous figure against the possibility of other intelligent life.

Post by **Lightning** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 1:04 pm

I like to be more optimistic and think that if given time for life to evolve, it indeed will. After all, it happened here. So it willl somewhere else too

Post by **Richard S.** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 1:50 pm

franco b wrote: How many planets are capable of supporting life?

All the ingredients needed for life are present on not one but a few moons of planets in this solar system. It's been demonstrated by life on this planet they could exist in such conditions.

When you multiply those very large numbers together you get an enormous figure against the possibility of other intelligent life.

There might be as many as 400 billion stars in the milky way alone and there is one galaxy out there that might have as many as 100 trillion stars. There is an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the known universe. Franco these numbers are astronomical and it's impossible to wrap your head around. But perhaps this might help. This is one trillion dollars.... in $100 dollar bills.

If it were $1 bills you need to multiply the pile by 100, what's that? A stack of $1 roughly the size of both WTC buildings is one trillion? Stack 100 WTC buildings on top of each other for 100 trillion and that's just one galaxy albeit the largest one known.

Post by **Lightning** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 2:32 pm

There even could be an ocean under the ice on Europa thriving with its own indigenous life that has yet to be discovered. Just imagine what that would imply!

Post by **franco b** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 3:28 pm

We have yet to discover life in our own solar system outside of Earth.

Conditions under which some form of life similar to an Earth bound form may survive on another planet or moon means nothing since it skips over how life began in the first place; something we are ignorant of. With all the theory and the ability to create conditions at will in the laboratory we still can not create life in its simplest form.

The complexity of life creation may require a number of fortuitous happenings each of which may very well have astronomical odds against happening. The early Earth should have been an ice ball but something happened to move it closer to the Sun. One theory is that Venus was two planets that collided to form one.

Post by **Richard S.** » Thu. Mar. 21, 2013 10:24 pm

franco b wrote:We have yet to discover life in our own solar system outside of Earth.

Correct and it wasn't until recently they found out the potential was there, it going to be decades before we find out on way or the other. It certainly isn't going to support life like humans but the possibility to support rudimentary life forms is there.

With all the theory and the ability to create conditions at will in the laboratory we still can not create life in its simplest form.

Bu then again they haven't had billions of years to perform these experiments.

The complexity of life creation may require a number of fortuitous happenings each of which may very well have astronomical odds against happening. The early Earth should have been an ice ball but something happened to move it closer to the Sun. One theory is that Venus was two planets that collided to form one.

Yes as far as the earth goes and solar system it's an odd ball. For example our planets have a very stable and mostly circular orbit, the ones they are finding are mostly elliptical. We're the right distance from the sun. We have a large moon... Having said that it doesn't preclude similar circumstances from happening elsewhere in a very vast space.

lsayre · Post by **lsayre** » Fri. Mar. 22, 2013 6:17 am

A large moon is critical. Without it a planet is not stable and it tumbles around over a period of roughly 300-400 or million years. That would mean continents passing over the north and south poles every 150-200 million years or so.

Post by **Lightning** » Fri. Mar. 22, 2013 7:15 am

Richard, your example of a trillion is cool. That's a lot of one dollar bills lol. Here's another way. We think of one second as being a rather short period of time. But a trillion seconds works out to be just under 32 thousand years! A trillion of anything is pretty huge

Post by **Richard S.** » Fri. Mar. 22, 2013 9:21 am

Lightning wrote:Richard, your example of a trillion is cool. That's a lot of one dollar bills lol. Here's another way. We think of one second as being a rather short period of time. But a trillion seconds works out to be just under 32 thousand years! A trillion of anything is pretty huge

The numbers are hard to grasp even when using an example you're familiar with becsue they are exponentially bigger, people have no the relationship to what a trillion is let alone multiplying it by a few hundred billion. Total stars might be 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This is 1 million, it doesn't look like such a big pile. You would even expect it to be bigger but you wouldn't expect it to grow to the pile above when it's 1 trillion.

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

There was an example they did on one of those space shows that did a really good job of relating the the size of the solar system. They used a basketball to represent the sun, earth was smaller than a BB and hundreds of feet away from the basketball. When they got to the outer planets they were in the neighborhood of a mile away.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases ... 3/image/a/

What appear as individual grains of sand on a beach in this image obtained with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are actually myriads of stars embedded deep in the heart of the nearby galaxy NGC 300. The Hubble telescope's exquisite resolution enables it to see the stars as individual points of light, despite the fact that the galaxy is millions of light-years away.

NGC 300 is a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way. It is a member of a nearby collection of galaxies known as the Sculptor group, named for the southern constellation where the group can be found. The distance to NGC 300 is 6.5 million light-years, making it one of the Milky Way's closer neighbors. At this distance, only the brightest stars can be picked out from ground-based images. With a resolution some 10 times better than ground-based telescopes, Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) resolves many more stars in this galaxy than can be detected from the ground.

A ground-based Digitized Sky Survey image of the full field of NGC 300 is shown in the top left frame. An outline of the Hubble Heritage ACS image is marked and shown in the image in the top right frame. A detailed blowup of this image (in the bottom frame) shows individual stars in the galaxy. A background spiral galaxy is visible in the lower right corner. The individual Hubble ACS exposures were taken in July and September 2002.

Larger image: http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2004 ... -print.jpg

Post by **Lightning** » Wed. Apr. 24, 2013 7:21 am

This is what I'm talkin about right here!

http://www.space.com/20722-two-alien-oceanic-eart ... video.html