Have you really tried to imagine the pure vastness of our universe?

This will likely get moved to the Science section before long, but I wanted to put it here so a few more people may see it first. I took this clip from a Documentary series I'm currently uploading for my Video topic in the science section. This small clip does a great job of giving a good progressive view of just how vast the universe is.

YouTube - The Size of the Universe



I'll have the actually documentary series up as soon as possible and post the links in my normal topic. Enjoy.


Side note: How do you embed a youtube video onto the message board?

i didnt check out the youtube site yet
but i think about the universe alot
it just totaly boggle's my mind
i do believe there other inhabited planet's out there somewhere

Nice, thanks for adding these Melkane :) . What you said in the other thread about how if people realized how vast the universe was they wouldn't get so worked up over petty little earth matters made me really think.



To add Youtube videos
1. Copy the Random Numbers after http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
2. Hit the little YouTube button on the 2nd row, far right
3. now just past the random numbers that you copied


[youtube]EjVoUZL0KAI[/youtube]

nice vid

yeah i took an astronomy class last year, it was great, did a lto of shit that helped you see just how fucking HUGE space is... the professor I had was one of the heads of stronomy department for the whole state too so he knew his shit, his lessons and demonstrations were awesome.

Our monkey brains are waaaaaay too puny to begin to comprehend something like the vastness of the universe. I've tried, but it can't be done. The largest field of vision that I can really comprehend is the view from a mountaintop...maybe a few miles. I can't get a good mental image of how big my county is, or my state, or my country, or the planet. Over the distances I can imagine, light seems to move instantaneously. The farthest objects we can detect are 13.7 billion light years away. That's the distance light has traveled in 13.7 billion years, a stretch of time I cannot imagine for similar reasons. If my whole lifetime up until now (22 years) represented the age of the universe, my birth would have occurred a little over one second ago. There is no possible way any human could imagine that kind of vastness, so there's no point in trying. There was no evolutionary advantage in being able to wrap our minds around things larger than the environment we lived in. Some numbers are just too big for us. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for "million" was a man with his arms raised in astonishment (see pic).

78 billion light years.
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw[/YOUTUBE]
Dont worry about the numa numa shit in the middle... its only for a minute lol. Weird people...

Well yeah, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, but the light emitted from the farthest objects we can see was emitted 13.7 billion years ago so they have effectively traveled 13.7 billion light years.

When I was little I used to lie on my back in the yard and look at the sky like we all did, and I would try to imagine the infinity of space, and I would feel dizzy! It almost seemed like I could feel the earth spinning under me. Some days I still can:D
Our minds know so little of the universe/time, and are not equipped to know "everything" - but I like to think we are evolving to a state of understanding more.
It is wonderful to contemplate. I was watching a show recently about the rings of Saturn - manic superhighways of icerocks rollerderbying their way around the giant planet! And all of that going on behind the dark we see when we look up at the night sky.
It seems self-evident that in all this vastness, there are other beings similar to ourselves...how unlikely for us to be the only sentient ones? Certainly there are places with smarter and sweeter folks than the average human? I hope:hippy:

All the time. Miami has vast open skies at night and it's simple to stare out into the night. Especially, if you are smoking.
it's one of the biggest mysteries and we take it for granted.

and those were pretty cool videos.

Yeah. I think about it all the time. I always watch shows about the universe and space and stuff.

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Originally Posted by Demeter

It is wonderful to contemplate. I was watching a show recently about the rings of Saturn - manic superhighways of icerocks rollerderbying their way around the giant planet! And all of that going on behind the dark we see when we look up at the night sky.

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I saw that same show not too long ago! It explained something about how the rings are getting smaller, and one day, they might end up disappearing, or something to that degree.

I was on an airplane (red eye) back to DC from the West coast, and seeing all of the intricate spots of human lights and whatnot, from mid atmosphere (I saw the Perseid shower! Beautiful!" and it was just stunning to see how far my eyes could reach, it was breathtaking.

Yes I have.. but even more enthralling is considering the Nothing between the little balls of stuff we call matter. To consider the nothing is harder by far than considering the vastness of everything .. IMHO

I don't think our minds can totally concieve it.

And I think we can ..Its hard due to us being in the box so to speak but its the nothing that is the 98% of the universe we don't see and I see no reason that its not a view the mind can ponder..

Keep the vids coming melkane =)

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Originally Posted by Oneironaut

Well yeah, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, but the light emitted from the farthest objects we can see was emitted 13.7 billion years ago so they have effectively traveled 13.7 billion light years.

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I'm confused... how can we say the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, then set lightspeed as the universal speed limit?

i think that the universe aint expanding imagine the ocean it has a tide that flows in and out i think when the big bang and stuff happend there must have been more stuff floating around closer together ? now its just the reverse of it flowing back out i think with time it will reverse again and start coming back in if the universe was expanding as fast as they say for as long as they say would there be any planets in site of earth ?

for me its just one of those things where you just wanna say fuck it, because you know that youll never understand the answer, but im not willing to do that, for some reason part of me always wants to figure it all out. Im sure back in the day people said fuck it and thought it was impossible, but then found out later on it wasnt.

Im currently takinig an astronomy class and there is this one thing my teach said that boggled my mind. He said that eventually humans might be able to create other universes, which to me sounds totally bogus. But he is a totally gnarly dude and on his first week of teaching somone but LSD in his coffee without him knowing and he fucking tripped balls all day...so he has my automatic respect. Also we are one of the few highschools to have a planetarium aand we use that shit alot. I just happen to have first period free and astronomy 2nd so i can come to class well prepared on the days where we go under the dome. :stoned: Sorry for Rambling.

In the old days psychologists used to warn people from pondering the infinite vastness of the the cosmos, it is apparently known to literally drive people to the point of madness.