Why is the universe so ridiculous vast?

In school I was tought that everything in nature has an explanation for its shape or appearance.

Because there is an universe I think it is a legitimate question to ask why it is so very big.

I am aware that formulating the only right answer will be difficult and hard to prove but it would be interesting to hear other peoples thoughts about it.

Maybe there is more than one reason for its vastness. Maybe it is so big so no intelligent species will ever meet an other one. Or is it this big because if it was smaller it would be unstable and not able to function as it does. Maybe it appears only for us this big.

Do you guys have an idea why the universe is this ridiculous vast?

the obvious answer to your question "who knows". when talking about the universe, man is simply incapable of giving any type of reasonable "truths" about the universe, due to it's unending size and "imagined" structure. i say this because man is only able to use the present day tools of measurement. and even using those, when you're talking about defining something that is billions of light years away, you are only analyzing light waves from billions of years in the past. our window of observation has been at the most a few thousand years, less than the width of one spiral leg of our own galaxy, if measured in light years of distance. we here on earth are "seeing" our own sun as it was 6 minutes ago in real time. if our sun were to blow up into a supernova, we would see a normal sun for the first 6 minutes even AFTER it happened.

Originally posted by zatara
In school I was tought that everything in nature has an explanation for its shape or appearance.

Guess you should demand your money back then...
There are a lot of arbitrary "design choices" in Nature! For example: Cows dont have a blind spot. Their optic nerve connects to the retina from behind, instead of going through and to the top as in humans.
I also cant think of any reason for spiders having 8 legs, and insects having 6.

Originally posted by debunky

Originally posted by zatara
In school I was tought that everything in nature has an explanation for its shape or appearance.

Guess you should demand your money back then...

I also cant think of any reason for spiders having 8 legs, and insects having 6.

Spiders are maybe more important for the food chain than 6-legged creatures.......they can lose more legs and still move around....

Just a thought...it all depends on your perspective.

It COULD be that we are rediculously small...like ants in an ant farm...or even smaller...as in part of an atomic structure of another thing...

We just don't know.

Originally posted by zatara
Do you guys have an idea why the universe is this ridiculous vast?

Is it? Or is it just our perception of it?
Maybe we are just to small?

A good book to start with would be The quantum world.

It deals partially with the simple question ofhow small is small?

A little mindgame:
Imagine our world as an little electron
the galaxy maybe as a human cell
the human body as the universe

Now, why is the human body so vast?
It's just a matter of perspective.

/slap wiseone11 - you were quicker

[edit on 16-5-2010 by Iluna]

It is hard to imagine that the universe is infinite. That you can get into a fast ship and start flying in one direction, and that you will fly forever, and it will never end.

It can drive you mad thinking about it.
I read somewhere once that the human brain isn't advanced enough to be able to understand the concept of an infinite universe, so there is no point in worrying yourself about it.
And I agree.

I forget what it is called, I am sure an atser knows, but instead of being infinite, the universe loops back on itself. IF you go far enough, you eventually come back to where you started.

But of course the next line of thinking is: well then what is outside of that?

I worry about what we have to worry about for now, the solar system, and surrounding galaxies. Because that is all we can learn about for now.

I will leave the infinite universe for my greatX25 grandchild.

And hopefully they will invent time travel and they can come back and tell me about it.

Oh, I just thought of a new thread.

[edit on 16-5-2010 by nixie_nox]

Originally posted by nixie_nox
It is hard to imagine that the universe is infinite. That you can get into a fast ship and start flying in one direction, and that you will fly forever, and it will never end.

It can drive you mad thinking about it.
I read somewhere once that the human brain isn't advanced enough to be able to understand the concept of an infinite universe, so there is no point in worrying yourself about it.
And I agree.

I forget what it is called, I am sure an atser knows, but instead of being infinite, the universe loops back on itself. IF you go far enough, you eventually come back to where you started.

But of course the next line of thinking is: well then what is outside of that?

I worry about what we have to worry about for now, the solar system, and surrounding galaxies. Because that is all we can learn about for now.

I will leave the infinite universe for my greatX25 grandchild.

And hopefully they will invent time travel and they can come back and tell me about it.

Oh, I just thought of a new thread.

[edit on 16-5-2010 by nixie_nox]

Actually there is a good reason to think about it, though I would not "worry" about it. The more of us that ponder these unknowns the more likely our offspring will evolve to be able to solve these unknowns someday.

Do you guys have an idea why the universe is this ridiculous vast?

Interesting question.
I am atheist, but there's catch:
laws of nature(i.e. physics) are not without puropse. Biology, physics and chemistry rules are not random.
There's something very intentional in vast universe:
imagine planet and its surroundings as an aquarium.
It's simple.
Catch is: who cares so much to separate aquariums.

Sorry for poor english, it's hard to articulate thought, that might give some light to UFO-pseudo-research/disclosure thoughts.

[edit on 16-5-2010 by potential_problem]

Maybe the whole universe is a sub(infinity)-atomic particle. And our sub(infinity)-atomic particles may also be universes.

Anything's possible.

its called perception. I believe that the universe is part of a larger structure, and that just like we see micro-specimens and very small particles, we could be seen as such.

so in essence, the space is just our perception of the density of what we exist in.

The universe is not "so ridiculous vast" to any species that develops advanced technology. Unfortunately... the 'rocket-powered' humans, are not among them.

I was just thinking about this the other day.. I think the error might be in thinking that any of this matters. So our creator creating the vastness of the universe is likely a very trivial thing. So what if the whole of the universe is necessary just for our creation?

So think of it like some kind of random number generator. What if our creator created the whole of the universe so that within the entire universe it created one perfect planet in which no disaster would every strike in our species' lifetime. So this planet was chosen to put us on because at no point in history will our planet ever have a massive meteor hit it or no rogue planet will ever collide with our solar system etc etc.

Think of it like an artist working their whole life to create their one masterpiece almost by accident. That's the rest of the universe to our creator.

I had this idea from something Stephen Hawking said about how randomly perfect the earth and our position in the solar system was for creating life.



[edit on 16-5-2010 by 8311-XHT]

reply to post by 8311-XHT


Yeah,... I like your answer...it is a plausible explanation because it fits well in the violent and dangerous univers we live in.

It so big because now we can have a good chance to evolve without being consumed by a blackhole or get fataly struck by a meteorite.

Thx

reply to post by zatara


One reason I find this plausible is because the idea of having multiple humanoid lifeforms on different planets in different galaxies seems like over-kill. It seems redundant to me.. even though I hope there is more out there just because it would be cool. heh

I turned away when you started mentioning the creator.

I was afraid someone would take it that way. I don't believe in a "creator" like a god... but I just mean whatever it is that is capable of making everything.

I hope that the universe is full of life and different species but I just don't understand the purpose of it all.

Ayn Rand had a similar kind of philosophy, I believe. Why should we assume or believe there is anything outside of our existence? It's here that is all that matters because it's all we know.

[edit on 16-5-2010 by 8311-XHT]

reply to post by Judohawk


This line of thinking is also plausible without mentioning any creator. The answer could be quite simple then - universe is so big because if it were small, there would be little chance of intelligent life appearing in it. Maybe there are other universes, big and small, but life tends to develop in bigger ones with greater probability.

Well acording to some forms of inflation theory the little 26 billion lightyear bubble we see may in fact be only as a single water molecule to an entire drop of water of the full Universe.

As if what we see wasn't terrifying huge enough.

In a weird & perhaps logical way it implies that space, nothingness is the predominant form of things, or certainly in the domain we see.

Warning: Circuitous tangent follows.

I was thinking the other day that perhaps the reason one can not go faster than light without going back in time is because the past is linked with the idea/notion/production of length. You can't travel faster than light because there is no length in the future or even sufficient length locally available in the present, so only the vast realms of the past are left to traverse [eat up all that distance] Which would correlate to space, volume, physical dimension. Also i was thinking perhaps the future might be sort of coalesced, gathered, centric, while the past may be disparate, spreading [physically dissociative?].
They say when we look out into space we are looking into the past.
Maybe that is true in another sense as well?
Also think, if you add to the 26 billion lightyear sphere the almost as big 26 billion lightyear sphere bubble from the previous instant & the instant before that & so on, be glad you are only looking at one of those puppies, because back in time there are a whole lot more of those out there.

There seems to be a great deal of empty 'was' & much less 'is' & we can't even find the 'what will be'. But i think that may be the essentially constant state of things.

reply to post by Maslo


What I was trying to express, though probably poorly, is that it was a conscious decision by whoever or whatever created us.

So the entity creates the whole universe randomly.. and the size of the universe is irrelevant because it is meaningless -- size or amount is meaningless.

So it's like a random number generator. Everything in the universe is created with the goal of randomly creating one perfect solar system in which to put "his" "it's" experiment.. us.

When "god" created the universe it identified the one perfect spot in which to put it's creation in the random chaos.. or maybe even we are god -- we are all god and this is all about experiencing "life" from all angles.

Maybe our planet is as close to perfect as you can get. The one planet perfect for life which will never suffer some random fate.