Why The Universe Is Destined To Be A Lonely Place
Whenever I look up at the night sky, I can't help but imagine the sheer size of the universe and try to comprehend the enormity of everything and while I do know the numbers, it's just impossible to quite picture it in my mind.
We human beings are truly small. Heck, even the Earth is like a speck of dust among other specks of dust in our solar system. To give you a perspective, consider our place in the cosmos.
There is the Earth, which is just one of the eight planets in the solar system with the sun at the centre. The sun is a star and there are hundreds of billions of such stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Then there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars in them. And these are the galaxies that we've just been able to observe. Who knows what infinite number of them are out there still.
All this makes the universe so enigmatically beautiful. But one day, billions of years from now, any would be observer of the cosmos will find that the universe is just a cold and lonely place.
Lonely Existence
You might already know that the universe is expanding. Basically that means that more and more of space is being created which leads to the distance between the various objects in the universe to increase.
This expansion of the universe is happening at an accelerating speed and is caused due to a mysterious energy called 'dark energy' that we still do not understand fully. Scientists estimate that roughly 68% of the universe is made up of dark energy and this is the reason behind the accelerated expansion.
So, basically all the galaxies in the universe are being distanced from one another. When we are able to see a galaxy today, it's because its light has reached us over a certain period of time. But if the speed of the expansion of the universe continues to increase, it will outpace the speed of light itself.
This means, after hundreds of millions of years, no light from a galaxy will be able to reach us or any other far off galaxy for that matter. So, any observer at that time, will see nothing beyond their own galaxy and would come to a conclusion that their galaxy is the only one in the entire universe and could end up coming to all the wrong conclusions about existence and how it all started.
I wonder what a lonely existence that would be. Today, we see such a huge amount of reality any directions we look and to have it all convert to darkness at some point in the future, is just bleak.
With the way we're handling conflict now, it's doubtful we'd be around too much longer unless we get our act together. The way things look currently, I think our future is underground.
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Yeah, we definitely need to get a lot of things right in order to survive as a species. Hopefully we see some progress in the coming decades. Too much to deal with.
Our conclusions can and are likely wrong also. Right now the conclusion is we started with nothing, it could be equally possible that there has never been nothing and that the universe just has always been.
With the expansion of the universe, and it's perceived increase in the speed of expansion, is it not possible that what we view as a singularity to start the universe was just a burst of colliding energies from different directions of the expansion of other parts of the universe. After all it is said that nature abhors a vacuum. So at some point in our ever expanding universe, one super explosion in a somewhat empty place of space, it sets shock waves up, those shock waves run into other shock waves from other unrelated empty space explosions and boom we have a perceived singularity event. Kind of like how the re-started the earths rotation in that movie "the Core"
Oh yes, it's definitely possible that what we are seeing is only a tiny fraction of the bigger picture and that we might be coming to the wrong conclusions based on what we observe. The thing is, we have had such little time as a species to study the nature of reality and know anything for sure.
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Even so, hundreds of billions of solar systems isn't a lonely place ;).
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Yeah it definitely isn't lonely. But to a species that would be really, really advanced, such that they could easily travel from one end to the galaxy to the other, just as we travel from one country to another, it could seem as a small place indeed :D
In about 5 billion years our Sun will expand and consume the Earth.
So maybe it's best not to think about it to much ☺
Will there be any humans alive in a million years to be lonely? I doubt it.
U+R
I was not talking about the million years time frame from a human perspective, but from any intelligent living being that would be alive at that point.
I doubt that there will be any intelligent life form to witness anything in the far flung future. As you mentioned.
This assumes that someone will survive...no?
If this galaxy that they witness is all they can observe then of course they will have to come to the wrong conclusion. They have no way of knowing of things beyond their comprehension.
Interesting thought experiment though.
Not necessarily. Hundreds of millions of years is a huge time frame. I think it is possible that civilisations can start and end within a certain period of time. So, we can assume that some civilisation could sprout up a hundred million years from now or at any point in the future.
Anything is possible for sure.
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