Quote Originally Posted by pepurr
Once when stoned I was thinking about the universe. I thought, if the universe is 13.5 billion years old, then we couldn't see any light source more than 13.5 billion light-years away because the light hasn't had time to reach us. (see diagram)

I guess that isn't really that much philosophical, but it does drive home how small we really are.
Actually, it's even crazier than that. Astronomers and Cosmologists now believe that not only is the universe expanding from the initial big bang, but the rate of its expansion is increasing. Object are not just moving apart from a central point, as one is sort of intuitively led to believe from the idea of the Big Bang, rather everything is moving away from everything else in the universe, and the speed it all moves at is increasing!

What this means is that as billions of years pass EVERYTHING will get farther and farther apart and we will be able to see the light from fewer and fewer distant objects, as it all moves away.

Eventually, they now believe, all of everything is so far away from everything else that no light will be able to pass between anything at all. Everything will be uniformly cooled down and spread out and the universe will simply sink into a stasis where nothing happens at all and everything is dark.

Pretty sobering, huh? :wtf:

Astronomy is a trip.