The Universe has a skeleton

[Max™]

Technically, ftl travel doesn't matter, unless you want to come back on Earth badly after.

I'd like to make significant progress through the large scale structure of the Universe, and an FTL ship could construct closed timelike curves into the past, making the heat death less of an issue.

Still don't see any methods by which it would be done, but here's hoping.



The pictures aren't new, but I love sharing them with new people.

Somewhere in a structure like that, you could put a "You are here" arrow.

[Takedown3]

Would have to be much faster than the SG:U ship, talking hundreds of thousands of light years per hour or more.

The Great Attractor would be the first landmark if I went exploring, but it is 150 million light years away.

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/ssc2gatt.jpg

WHAT ABOUT THE ZONE OF AVOIDANCE NOOOOooooooo

http://davidstoker.org/blog/wp-conte...ttractor-1.jpg

[Mizango]

I personally wouldn't mind seeing the Vela Pulsar up close and personal first If I were given the choice. As far as the ZoA goes that is just a clever name that best describes the dusty fringes of the Milky Way.

The name reeks of a harbinger of impending doom when in actuality is is probably as docile as any other part of our galaxy. I've always thought that was just a cool ass name and is always a favorite lol. Using Spitzer's IRAC we've found more galaxies on the other side as well as stars and star factories inside the ZoA.

Pretty cool that you brought up.

[Takedown3]

well to be honest all i did was wiki the great attractor because i was picturing a giant space version of Iga with super nova's for nipples and i saw the zone of avoidance link which i too think is a pretty cool name for something spacey

sounds like somewhere you would want to avoid, not like the great attractor which obviously has massive gazonga's

[Xno Kappa]

Hmmm. No bite I see.

[Khamsin]

Would be cool if the universe were a giant fractal, where all scales from big to small fundamentally look the same, from brain cells to city sprawls to the universe. And some form of sentient beings were living on the subatomic particles revolving around other particles deep within the cells of our brain but they can never hope to leave because it'd take them a trillionbillion times their lifespan to just move a millimeter.

[zoobernut]

Would be cool if the universe were a giant fractal, where all scales from big to small fundamentally look the same, from brain cells to city sprawls to the universe. And some form of sentient beings were living on the subatomic particles revolving around other particles deep within the cells of our brain but they can never hope to leave because it'd take them a trillionbillion times their lifespan to just move a millimeter.

I have always felt this was a possibility and thought it would be amazing if the entire universe was a fractal. That would mean that we could be living in the brain of some giant sentient species or maybe not sentient.

I wonder what would happen to the laws of physics on the scale of the extremely massively large. If our entire universe is the brain of another animal what would the physics they experience be?

[Yuri-G]

Oh, god damn it. Just wait for Kirk Cameron to get his nasty little dickfingers on this. It's deceptive wording at best. "Gravity workz, lul" isn't enough, apparently.

come on, look at a banana. just look at it. it has a neat little tab on top, so you can grab onto it and peel the banana. it has ridges in the skin where the peel separates easily, making it easy to eat. god created the banana just for man, senoska. the banana... and the universe.

[thebearofscience]

the skeleton of a beheaded rapist

[Max™]

I have always felt this was a possibility and thought it would be amazing if the entire universe was a fractal. That would mean that we could be living in the brain of some giant sentient species or maybe not sentient.

I wonder what would happen to the laws of physics on the scale of the extremely massively large. If our entire universe is the brain of another animal what would the physics they experience be?

I'm pretty sure if the animal moved it's head, thus moving the Universe, we'd be able to detect that, Mach's principle and such.

[zoobernut]

Ah pretty sure..... but not 100% sure. There very well could be forces at work that are on a scale above our universe that counteract it in some way.

If you were the size of a quark and you were sitting in the middle of an atom and that atom was part of an animal would you be able to sense the animal moving?

It could either be massively violent or on such a large scale that it is imperceptible from such a small vantage point.

If that theory were true then our universe would be at an extremely small scale and humans would be even smaller still.

[Max™]

Changes in motion would show as an acceleration for the contents, providing even weirder effects than those of Godel's rotating Universe model.

If the effects were pronounced enough, then perhaps moving to the right would head towards the future, and moving to the left would head towards the past.


It's a silly idea, there is obviously a hierarchy of scales above ours, but it isn't just a recursive structure ending with our universe being a subatomic particle in some supracosmic dogs foot. That isn't simple, and it is actually testable due to the principle of equivalence.

[zoobernut]

I know I was just wishing I could say one day that the milky way is the dogs anus of the known universe. That and we could then all have statues of the giant cosmic dog in our cities with a sign under it that said "The known universe"

[Shuvo]

Realistically I think the only thing we could do is build super-high resolution cameras to capture light from other galaxies. I don't think light quality deteriorates (does it?) so in theory we could see the surface of other planets, just by capturing light.

[Khamsin]

Realistically I think the only thing we could do is build super-high resolution cameras to capture light from other galaxies. I don't think light quality deteriorates (does it?) so in theory we could see the surface of other planets, just by capturing light.

Light can diffuse, though. It's not focused, like a laser. If you go far enough out, it's tough to figure out what something really looked like before the light diffused, ran into space dust, got warped around heavy bodies and black holes, etc.

[Shuvo]

Light can diffuse, though. It's not focused, like a laser. If you go far enough out, it's tough to figure out what something really looked like before the light diffused, ran into space dust, got warped around heavy bodies and black holes, etc.

Isn't that just a maths problem though? I.e. something that with enough research and money poured into it we could reverse back.

[Khamsin]

Isn't that just a maths problem though? I.e. something that with enough research and money poured into it we could reverse back.

If we had all the light that originally came from something.

By the time the photons get here, some may hit us, but others may miss us completely.

We also need accurate information of everything that influenced the light between here and there.

Also, instead of a star emitting it's own light, we're relying on some other light source hitting the planet and making it's way back to us, making it much weaker.

I'm sure if you just aimed a telescope at something and let it gather light for eternity, we could probably make out something. But I'm not sure we're going to get clear, detailed pictures of planet surfaces that way. If we can even see through the atmosphere of a given planet.

[Kaylia]

Isn't that just a maths problem though? I.e. something that with enough research and money poured into it we could reverse back.

No. There is many fundamental issue with this.


First of all, the smallest details you can see will always be proportional to the wavelength you're observing and the size of the lens/mirror. We can't even see a human on the moon with the biggest telescope on Earth. To see an human in another galaxy (or even a huge construction), you will need an angular resolution that is on a completely different order. I'm too lazy to do the maths, but you would probably need something much bigger than solar system, and probably more

Secondly, the amount of photon that reach us from a distant planet are most likely in the digit per minutes/hours..I dont know... Because there is so little and they had to go throuht at least 2 atmosphere, gravitional lensing, dust cloud...it's impossible to apply any form of statistic, since their path are completely random from our perspective. Without statistic, you can reverse engineer its path and figure out what it was..recomposing the scene would be even harder after.



[edit]
10meter item from a planet located in the closest galaxy (2.5m light years) give me a telecopse that is 4x10^12 meters, which is 10 times the distance between us and the sun. I might have fucked up with exponent somewhere, only did it once.

[Shuvo]

Isn't that just a maths problem though? I.e. something that with enough research and money poured into it we could reverse back.

No. There is many fundamental issue with this.


First of all, the smallest details you can see will always be proportional to the wavelength you're observing and the size of the lens/mirror. We can't even see a human on the moon with the biggest telescope on Earth. To see an human in another galaxy (or even a huge construction), you will need an angular resolution that is on a completely different order. I'm too lazy to do the maths, but you would probably need something much bigger than solar system, and probably more

Secondly, the amount of photon that reach us from a distant planet are most likely in the digit per minutes/hours..I dont know... Because there is so little and they had to go throuht at least 2 atmosphere, gravitional lensing, dust cloud...it's impossible to apply any form of statistic, since their path are completely random from our perspective. Without statistic, you can reverse engineer its path and figure out what it was..recomposing the scene would be even harder after.



[edit]
10meter item from a planet located in the closest galaxy (2.5m light years) give me a telecopse that is 4x10^12 meters, which is 10 times the distance between us and the sun. I might have fucked up with exponent somewhere, only did it once.

Ahh I see. That's a shame.

It would be interesting if their was some way we could exploit naturally occurring phenomena (e.g. Sun's gravitational or magnetic field, just pulling that out of my ass) as a ghetto lens in some way.

[Kaylia]

Ahh I see. That's a shame.

It would be interesting if their was some way we could exploit naturally occurring phenomena (e.g. Sun's gravitational or magnetic field, just pulling that out of my ass) as a ghetto lens in some way.

Gravitational lensing isn't so much of a lense, but a curve in space time (light that usually go in a straigth line will follow this curve)

Reproduction of the lensing around a black hole
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ensing_web.gif


There really isn't much to do about this. You can observe longer wave length, build a networks of smaller telescope (could in theory send a bunch of smaller satellite in differents direction to make a huge telecope), but you will never reach a level where you can see in details object from another galaxy.


Seeing directly close planets in our galaxy might be possible, but we arent even talking about the surface.