So according to the explanation, this universe of ours is expanding, it's called the Big Bang Theory(BBT). There has to be more than one theory and why can't mine or yours be just as right as theirs?(or wrong)

My theory of the moment is kind of tied into theirs in that, sure, the stars/galaxies whatever ARE moving away from each other but we are limited to this earthly plane and what we can observe from this ball of dirt. So what if their BBT is actually just a drop in the ocean of galaxies and tracing back the expansion until the second after the "Big Bang" is actually just a ripple at this end of the pond(universe)? Did I explain that clearly?

What do some of you think of the state of the universe and how do you explain it? (CAUTION - no religion bashing wanted)

 

State of the universe ?

The figures would be astronomical

IMO,
Considering our planetary system is within "The Milky Way" (and we see how far a part of the milky way is from earth),the expanse of space is infinite

 

It's mind boggeling. For me anyway!
I sit out nights and look at all that.
I watch what they put on T.V. about the planets and the other stuff thats out there, and the ovriding question that comes to my mind....."Where were they standing when all this took place? How do they know?"

I think Buck Rodgers crashed in a Hay field on the back side of the moon!

 

with the telescopes we have now, we can actually see back to very close to the beginning of our universe. in fact a telescope is actually a time machine. remember that it takes 8 minutes for heat and light from the sun to reach earth. when you look at the stars in the sky, you are actually seeing them as they were anywhere from a few thousand, to a few millions years ago. but you are not seeing just stars, but galaxies as well.

my opinion is that our universe is just one of perhaps millions that occupy the same plane, but because they vibrate at different frequencies, we dont see or feel them. this has been theorized because particles that we can see under electron microscopes are affected by particles that cannot be seen.

 

one of the things I keep thinking is that the universe is so big that light from the furthest stars has not reached us yet, and that at light speed over 4 Billion years that this is one big universe. Man(the human race) is an ignorant/arrogant creature to declare "I can see back to the beginning of time" - well I say how do we know? we don't. the universe could really be bigger and stranger than we imagine. Remember at one point Man declared he would not sail to the ends of the earth for fear of falling off the edge because the world was flat

I too think there is more than one universe existing at the same time

 

I saw a cool show on the expanding universe the other week that said it is actually speeding up, or expanding at a faster rate because as the cosmic bodies move away from each other, they are influenced less by thier nieghbors gravitational pull.

my main problem with the BBT is the whole "first there was nothing and then it exploded." concept - don't quite get that....

 

Since ya'll wanna talk about big things,

Try this one on for size.

For something to be,something had to make it....

Well,What made space? Who gave birth to God?
This is something thats always been in the back of my mind.

Sorta like what rhw said,I don't get how there could be nothing then boom,everything.

And how do they know it takes exactly 8 minutes for sun light to reach earth?

 

If God has no beginning and no end, then I can understand why there are atheists in the world. The human brain is incapable of wrapping itself around that concept, so it must be untrue. (Not my belief, nor a religious topic, just making a statement) That being said, faith is the belief in things not yet seen.

As far as the light from the sun taking 8 minutes, it has been proven that light travels at a finite speed (186,000 miles per second ?). If the sun is 93 million miles away, 8 minutes is just about right. (actually 500 seconds, or 8 and 1/3 minutes).

 

The program I saw (graphically) displayed our 'MIlky Way' and we are at one side or edge of it, and 3 Trillion Light years away is the other side of it.
Beyond our milky way, going out in all directions is SPACE.
In that space is other Milky way's, and a lot of other stuff.

At the heart of the theory on what made us (planets, moons etc etc...) is Movement. They know how stars were made, and why some of the space debris wound up with an atmosphere, and all that kinda stuff already.
So Cruisamatic says "Who made all that?" What did it all start with?
Which gives a lot of credence to "Intelligent Design" Theory huh?

With the 'impossible to assimilate' amount of numbers involved, and no limits to Space that we can concieve, man's brain just cant grasp any idea that might be the start of all this, except to say that a supreme being did it!

Some guys may have gotten close. But they are still in the rest home with pablum dribbeling down thier chins!

It's the big eyeball we can't see. The one looking through the glass at us. Everyonce in awhile he shakes the glass to get all the stuff in the glass jar to start whirling in suspension again.

 

An educated guess becomes a hypothesis, a hypothesis becomes a theory, and theories become laws when there's enough substantiating evidence and data to support and advance those claims.

The BBT has a lot going for it, and there's more and more to support it every day.

What most folks refer to as theories, are nothing more than hunches or philosophical ponderings - legitimate theories are much, more than that.

Want to get into some interesting reading? Check out recent works relating to Gamma Ray Bursts, and the M-theory.

 

I am not yet qualified to call myself a scientist, but I'm working on it. Being a bad scientist is easy. Being a good scientist is hard. IMHO bad science is worse than no science, so one of my goals is to be a good scientist.

Scientists are deliberately skeptical. They require evidence. There are many kinds of evidence and various levels of reliability. You can create your own reliable evidence through exercise of the scientific method. You can also acquire reliable knowledge from other sources. Do you know how to determine the reliability of knowledge or sources?

There are things that we know about the universe with a very high level of reliability. There are many more things that we are only "pretty sure" about. Probably there are mostly things that we just don't know at all, some that we are not even aware that we don't know. I have noted that people just don't like not knowing things, and they often get into trouble when they rely on unscientific ways of getting answers. I prefer not to guess about astronomical matters. I also have not concluded FTE members to be a reliable source of knowledge on astronomical matters (but I come here first for automotive issues!).

According to SEDS (which references the NASA Astrophysics Data System at Harvard) the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years, NOT "3 Trillion" or 3 billion, or even 3 million. A light year is 5,878,625,373,184 miles so the Milky Way is roughly 587,862,537,318,400,000 miles across. We can't even agree on how big our galaxy is let alone the universe - I guess we won't soon to close the issue of how the whole thing came to be.

Experiments have suggested that the human mind is incapable of grasping a quantity like 1,000,000. We can do arithmetic on bigger numbers, but we don't really "get it". You can't even see a million. If you're close enough to see single elements then you're too close to see the whole set. 6 hundred quadrillion is just plain indigestable. No wonder some people give up and seek more convenient explanations of things.

The premis that the universe is so complex that it required a creator is something I expect to never beleive. I am aware of no scientifc support for the notion that complexity inherently requires omnipotence. I think I do understand why people might WANT to beleive in ID. To me, wanting will never be suficient cause for belief of anything in my universe.

 

Quote:. I also have not concluded FTE members to be a reliable source of knowledge on astronomical matters (but I come here first for automotive issues!).

Don't make that mistake

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Quote: You can't even see a million.



Come to Alberta..I'll show you a Mil1ion.

 

For me I am waiting for Newton's theroy to come full circle "For every action there is and equal and opposite reaction." At some point the universe's will have to stop expanding or they will eventualy colide with each other. I doubt we will ever have to worry about it in even our childerns,childerns lives.

 

" Cant even see a million...." HAH! You aint never come out of the woods with Chiggers have you?

Biker says our Milky way is just a few hundred thousand light years across.
This picture I saw was thing (Maybe it was a Nebula) that looked like a big starfish, with all it's legs turned at the end, in the same direction, as if this giant cloud of Sun's was spinning.
They pointed to a small pinpoint of light at the bottom of the photo, and then said "The earth's Sun is here", (and then pointing to the top of this big cloud of suns,) he said "the journey from our Sun to way up here, is 3 Trillion Light years".
So I'm OK with that. Like somebody said, Nobody we know is going up there!

What else intrigued me was a program on going to the nearest star or some such thing.
It was an Hour long program on what kind of a being would need to be in this Capsule for time travel survival.

We wont need to do much, so we found a Frog that sleeps half the winter. We have genetically isolated the parts we need to get that for Man.
We'd need to live longer. So we have Genetically absorbed whatever it is in Flies, and taught them to live a week or so.
They normally live ony a few hours.
So now with a little genetically creative breeding we have a man that lives hundreds of times longer than we do now, and can sleep most of it away.

But sitting in a Small Space capsule we dont need feet and legs. We also need lots of fingers and longer arms.
Once again the Genetisist's go to work.

Gathering DNA from whom ever they need to make what ever they want.

The program went on and on (ad nausuem) till I went to do something else.

I'll watch those scientific programs but they are getting a littl far out for my close in brain.

 

Of course all of the above theroys are assuming that universes are all the same scale... some people think atoms are little tiny universes... just a thought.