Fun Facts - The Universe

Love trying to understand our magnificent Universe. Amazing how many people almost ignore its presence. Think it is because it is hard to get your head around - & can mess up a religious belief system pretty easily. Anyhow you may want to post great Universe stuff  - size, creation, black holes, gravity, multiple universes, time, time travelling..........

... and to think that there are people who assume that man can somehow control the climate.

Not so much Universe - but still amazing "if you unravelled all the DNA in your body it would span 50,000 km - reaching to Pluto & back 13 times"

I thought Pluto was further away than that.

Ok oneone, I’ll bite. What’s the sheer immense scale of the universe have to do with the 10-12km of stratosphere where greenhouse gases are accumulating?

http://lightexhibit.org/earth_atmosphere.html

Just beacaue were tiny (and we are) and we’ve been around a while, doesn’t mean we still can’t f$&k things up in our own back yard. Ozone depletion and countless other more localised environmental catastrophes have shown us that.

Well if we can it is only on the fringe. Whether our planet survives, or life as we know it, is well & truly beyond our control. Are you suggesting that if man was around since 4.5 million years ago we would have changed any of the "catastrophes" that we have had ? And this planet has had plenty - all without anything man has done. And even if we are proven to be the major reason in the short-term for a rise in temperature of a few degrees - in context with what mother Universe has up its sleeve for us it is next to no consequence

oneonesit wrote: On average we can only see 0.0000002% of the stars in our galaxy The Milky Way. The Milky Way is one of an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

Just read that this number was further advanced in 2016 (more refined Hubble info). Now believed to be out by a mere factor of 10 - so now 20 trillion galaxies

JudgeHolden wrote: We can’t control anything outside that thin blue line, but we can influence what happens within it. Again ozone depletion. And there are plenty of well documented man made local disasters. Google Ural Sea, or Oklahoma dust bowl. But you’re point is a poor one, and strangely nihilistic- just because we cant influence what we can’t, we shouldn’t worry about what we can.

Fair enough. However it has become an almost religious belief system for many. Kids are being indoctrinated with over zealous crap. In many cases it is elitism - in that those "well off white privileged" types that you often refer too have a cause in life. You wont find too many in the developing countries putting it at the top of their concerns thats for sure. I think in 20 years or so it will go down in history as a furphy - too make room for the next belief system.

Our galaxy The Milky Way is estimated to have upto 400 billion stars ( star = sun). It is estimated that for every person on Earth there are 285 galaxies in the Universe.

And before you start on projections, 2-3 is the very optimistic end of the scale.

oneonesit wrote: Well if we can it is only on the fringe. Whether our planet survives, or life as we know it, is well & truly beyond our control. Are you suggesting that if man was around since 4.5 million years ago we would have changed any of the "catastrophes" that we have had ? And this planet has had plenty - all without anything man has done. And even if we are proven to be the major reason in the short-term for a rise in temperature of a few degrees - in context with what mother Universe has up its sleeve for us it is next to no consequence

Just rereading posts - that should obviously read 4.5 billion years.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old. It was created in less than a second. The earth was a late bloomer  - being only 4.5 billion years old. Which leads to the obvious question - what was our creator doing for 9.2 billion years ?

oneonesit wrote: The first "human" is credited to coming about approximately 7 million years ago. As a % of age of planet earth (4.5 billion years old) that represents human presence at 0.000000156 %. As a % of the universe it is obviously considerably less.