reply to post by muse7
Sort of.
We stay here too long and we'll get cabin fever.
We instinctively always expand.
We can't expand at the rate necessary if we stay here.
Space is so big that it's easy to feel trapped.
And cosmology says the universe will just keep on expanding.
We can only see some 46 billion lights years in technical terms. If we were 10 billion light years closer to the edges of hte observable universe, how
much further would we see? Tough to say since we know that expansion is not uniform. And we're unsure exactly when they occurred. But it's very
possible that if we were 10 billion light years closer to the edges that our observable universe would be equal in size to this one. All of this is a
consequence of the expanding universe being greater in size than the speed of light can transmit to our telescopes. It truly is a big universe. But
this doesn't tell us what the concentration of matter or life would be (it just tells us about the size). I think that life needs enough time. So this
means that stars have to supernova and so on. There has to be enough of the right elements. This isn't the case in the very very very young
universe.
Of course, what I just said is a review of something I read the other day. I'm not a professional scientist. All I know is that the actual universe is
bigger than what we can possibly see with light.
This is a nice link:
en.wikipedia.org...
I love that comment someone made about the age just before/after sailing. How there were maps that showed that the world ended in a bottomless abyss.
We haven't yet ventured out past the orbit of the moon (manned). And yet we're already claiming to know about the probabilities of going out further
beyond into the universe. It's kind of funny, if you have some humor. We know so little.
edit on 3-5-2012 by jonnywhite because: (no reason
given)
