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originally posted by: Quantum12
a reply to: lagnar
You make sense, I just want to know where the universe is expanding to! That blows my mind.
originally posted by: Quantum12
a reply to: neoholographic
It makes me feel like we are in a big fish tank and someone above is looking at us laughing. Saying these humans can't figure out the secrets. If they really knew what was going on they could figure out how to travel at light speed.
Black holes form via gravity and I don't see anything in that article to suggest that black holes won't still dominate at some point in the future. All that article suggests to me is the spaces between galaxies are increasing faster. The galaxies themselves don't appear to be expanding, and in the future, it's thought that much of the matter in the galaxies will end up in their central supermassive black holes, via gravity.
originally posted by: neoholographic
So expansion starts to speed up and it will eventually pull everything apart and gravity will not be strong enough in any region of space to hold anything together.
I'd be more worried about how we are going to travel to other star systems, forget about other galaxies.
originally posted by: Swills
a reply to: neoholographic
What's sad about this expansion is that we'll never be able to go to other galaxies because even at the speed of light we will still be slower than the expansion of the universe. In the far distant future, humankind won't even be able to see the creation of the universe because we've moved so far away from it but thank god for recorded data so let's just hope it all lasts and we do kill each other off.
We can't see beyond the observable universe so there's not much hope that question will ever have any answer based on observation. Probably all we will ever be able to do is speculate.
originally posted by: Quantum12
a reply to: neoholographic
Nice thread, it boggles my mind about the universe. If it is expanding where is it going?
Observations don't seem to support that. People have asked, "if the universe is expanding, does that mean everything is getting bigger?". As far as we can tell, the answer is, no. Atoms and molecules aren't getting any bigger.
originally posted by: MamaJ
Meaning.... maybe everything expands, grows, and evolves to the next level of perfection.
originally posted by: lagnar
Okay, maybe I was just spewing pretensions (apologies, I get that way after reading this stuff too much), but what I was trying to remark on is that if the Universe seems to be expanding faster than first thought, then maybe we are just moving through the tunnel faster than that first calculation would produce, in my admittedly naive theory.
But, when moving through any tunnel at a constant rate of speed, any point on the inside wall of that tunnel (or any point apart from the actual trajectory) would seem to expand faster and faster, the closer you got to it if looking at it with only one eye or in two dimensions (limited). And maybe the sheer size of the Universe forces a limited perception on something so small (Humans)...when the dimension of time (4th dimension?) is so huge (larger than our 3 dimensional universe - everything we could possibly ever see with all our technology, past, present or future).
Like we are 2 dimensional beings trying to imagine the 3rd dimension by seeing the "thickness" of the pencil lead we were drawn on the piece of paper with.
Am I making any sense, or is this as ridiculous as it seems in my own head right now?
Nailing down the mass of the top quark could reveal to researchers one of two ghastly scenarios: that the universe could end in 10 billion years, or that people could materialize out of nowhere. If the top quark is heavier than expected, energy carried through the vacuum of space could collapse. If it's lower than expected, an unlikely scenario called "Boltzmann brain" could see self-aware entities come out of random collections of atoms. (While this isn't a part of the Standard Model, the theory – framed as a paradox – goes that it would be more likely to see organized groups of atoms as the random ones observed in the universe.)