Question on the origin of the universe

This is Poly Dog's question and we should have an own thread for this. As this topic is really not related to language learning, it has a good place in the Off Topic - subforum.

Honestly, I first had to think about this question how it is meant exactly. One of my hobbies is astronomy and this natural science is devided into astrophysics and cosmology. Cosmologists study, explore and teach the whole development of the universe from the very beginning to its final end.

They can't explore what was there before the universe existed. It would be a religious statement to say that there is a God who created the universe. I don't make such a statement, but I wanted and still want to read about how natural scientists explain the whole development of the universe from its past into its future.

The main theory about how the universe started to exist is the "Big Bang" - theory. I would estimate that 95 % of the cosmologists nowadays are adepts of this Big Bang theory and for me - without having any university background in natural sciences - why should I not accept the explanations of this theory? I have the copy about a very interesting article from the German magazine "Sterne und Weltraum" here. Quote from this article: "Georges Lemaître (1894 - 1966) entdeckte die Expansion des Universums und begründete als Erster die Urknall - Theorie." My English translation of this quote: "G. L. (1894 - 1966) discovered the expansion of the universe and he was the founder of the Big Bang - theory." Georges Lemaître was a Belgian catholic priest and astronomer, publishing his scientific oevres in French.

So far my reply to your initial question, Big Dog! Religion is not my field of interest, but if it's about natural science, I am interested in further internet comunication about it.

Fasulye

To summarize a bit my background: My serious interest in astronomy started again as an adult in 2003 and I was an active member of the amateur astronomy club of my city from 2003 - 2010, where I regulary attended lectures once a month. 2-3 times per semester I attend the lectures of our "Volkshochschule" (= community college) about astronomy and space travel. And I am a regular reader of the German magazine "Sterne und Weltraum" (= Stars and Space). I don't do practical astronomy like observing the night sky with a teleskope of making astrophotos.

And I love to write about astronomy but I have never found a good place on the internet where to do it. On the astronomy fora it's all about practical astronomy /amateur astronomy, so people like me don't really fit in there.

Now you have the second interesting question for me!

So what do we have to take into account? Let's say that the lifespan of a human being has the maximum of 100-110 years.
It's now necessary that we talk about distances in space!

The nearest star to our system is the star Proxima Centauri (proximus = nearest) which has a distance from the sun of 4,22 lightyears (ly).
So what's a lightyear? = 9,46 x 10/12 km =9,46 x 10 000 000 000 000 km

In comparison: The moon has a distance from the earth of 384. 401 km as a middle distance.

Not every star has extra-solar planets. (= exoplanets). Multiple star sytems of 2-3 stars circulating around each other are quite common. For multiple star stytems it's not impossible but extremely unlikely that they have planets at all. It's not so usual that a star is isolated like our sun.

So now you have some hard facts to think about!

My conlusion is: The life span of a human being is too short whereas the distances from our earth / our sun to even the nearest stars are too long to make space travel to these stars possible at all. And it's also the question whether the - let's say - 10 nearest isolated stars or star systems have exoplanets at all.

So according to my calculation earthlings will never be able to migrate to extrasolar planets!

Fasulye

I appreciate your reply, Big Dog! I enjoy our little exchange of ideas very much. When I was a child attending the American Elementary School we had "Science" as a school subject and at that age it was my favourite subject. At age 7-8 I read children books about the solar system in English. When we moved back to Germany in 1971, I heard nothing = 0 % about astronomy or space travel in 9 school years. So my interest in these topics had fallen asleep. And it came black to life only from 2003 on, when I was already 42.

The life on our planet is naturally liminted because the sun will evolve to a red giant and finally to a white dwarf. So there are dicussions among astronomers, whether the earthlings (or at least some of them) could populate a different planet. As far as I am concerned, I take only the discussion about options within our own solar system seriously. I have seen already 2-3 TV docu's about that. Moving to some expolanet seems completely utopical for me. So I don't "waste" my thoughts on such options. I would love to see more money be spent on avoiding the total climate kollaps of the earth in the future and to save the biodiversity of our own fragile planet.

Fasulye

I think "Big Bang" was an inside joke some astrophysicists had about when Mom and Dad "did it".

Indeed, and all the major world religions have gone through periods of intense scientific study with the specific goal of understanding their god's works.

It is my view that the people doing the most damage to scientific knowledge at present are the atheists, as they present science as the enemy of religion, and therefore discourage religious people from engaging with it.

(I'm agnostic.)

There was a large body of people who thought that a specific subset of scientific activity was immoral, not that science itself was intrinsically wrong.

History is full of moral judgements about science, some of which we disagree with and some of which we agree with. The long-held taboo against post-mortem anatomical studies certainly held back medicine, for example.

On the other extreme, consider how much science would advance if scientists were free to experiment on living human beings at will -- perhaps as part of capital punishment for heinous crimes. But we do not allow it because it offends our moral sensibilities.

In the middle ground, there is the question of animal experimentation, which is decreasing constantly due again to moral objections.

Those who object to stem cell research are functioning on the same "respect for life" spectrum. Now, I am not asking to accept that their definition of a human embryo as "life" is correct, but I am suggesting that you should see it as a legitimate opinion. To them, they weren't "endangering" anything, but rather protecting what they saw as needing protected.

I can't see any reason to involve superconscious beings into the creation and further development of the universe - saying that a god did it is just giving up all hope of understanding the laws of nature, including the laws that governed the evolution of the universe from the beginning and onwards. And the point is that we still can't say why something exploded and how it came there (although 'brane' theorists have theories about colliding mega-sheets), but from a few seconds after that event and onwards the developments can be explained with physical laws that to a large extent can be tested here on Earth or by astronomical research. Like the studies of the socalled background radiation, which can give clues about the early history of the universe, including a inflationary phase which is responsible for the general uniformity of the universe, but with a large-scale structure that looks like a mesh of soap bubbles.

Of course there are conflicting theories, but the point is that even these have to explain a bewildering amount of factual knowledge - and to supersede the big bang theory they have to explain those fact better than the big bang theory, which so far hasn't happened. It is not just a question of posing some critical questions concerning the big bang itself and why it came about - we don't have to fall back to clearly erroneous myths from old cultures just because science can't answer all questions.

As for the question about extraterrestrials and going to exoplanets when the Earth becomes inhabitable - the distances involved makes it virtually impossible to visit any exoplanets. Even if there is some other planet with lifeforms on it it is clear that 'we' can't reach them within the life time of a human - and even if we managed to send an expedition to some other Earth-like planet we wouldn't live long enough the receive a postcard or e-mail from the expedition members. So why bother? "Il faut cultiver son jardin", as Voltaire wrote in Candide. It would be more relevant to find out what to do about plastic bags, global warming and real visitors from space (luckily it seems that Apophis won't hit us in 2029 or 2036, but other big lumps of rock have passed us at a short distance, some even below our own satellites).

It is also quite relevant to discuss why all terrestrial life apparently is based on RNA and DNA. It is almost certain that some kind of life evolved more than 3 billion years ago (although the earliest traces aren't really fossils, but more like changed isotope ratios and things like that). We still don't know whether the first DNA bearer faced competition from competing systems, and we don't know whether the earlists life forms evolved in mud pools or at the bottom of the sea around gushing hot streams. We do however know that there are living archaic bacteria in rocks far below the surfaces, and also in geysirs with boiling water or strong saline waterholes, so in principle it can have happened in many kinds of environments. The surprising thing is that it apparently happened fairly soon after the creation of the Earth while it still was a fairly inhospitable place according to our standard. Some say that life came with meteorites from outer space, but that's not an explanation - it just moves the problem to another place. And saying that some intelligence did it doesn't explain anything at all, because where did that intelligence then come from? It must be easier to explain (or even create) a archaeote bacteria then it is to explain and create a god with the capability to create life. And who did THAT?

One final thing: there are so many stars and planets in the universe that it is likely that life evolved in more than one place. But it may still be an exceedingly rare event. To give our Earth the conditions for life it took a whole lot of unlikely events. We needed a planet with a size that allowed for plate techtonics, a decent atmosphere and a magnet field (otherwise we would be bombarded by particles from space), that planet has to be at a reasonable distance from a reasonably stable star, we needed at least one big planet further away to suck up or divert marauding asteroids, we needed a collision with some other object to give us the moon (no moon, no tide) and we needed some place where random events could create proteins, RNA and DNA in that order. So yes, there may be a second Earth somewhere with life and internet forums, but it could be billions of light years away. Or it could have destroyed itself even before the Earth came into being.

It seems weird that the humans have visited the moon (it is alleged) in the 1960s but now they haven't done more. only send some things for make some photos, but not travelled. The technology is much more advanced now, in comparison with the 1960s therefoe I find it weird. My twin brother is mechanical engineer and pilot student and he love to fly the planes but he wouldn't like to travel to more distances.

Genetic engineering is dangerous, in many respects, of course, but with the genome's basic discovery now it will be the medicine's future , or at least some things like the choise of the meds or some explanations why.

Hi Iversen, you haven't put your nice avatar, you must upload the photo of you with the leopards (or cheetahs or those large spotty cats) in your avatar on the nameless nasty-evil-mod-admin-banning-secret-deleting forum.

I agree that living beings live on some other places. the humans always expect that they can see the "aliens" as if they were similar with their own self. this is the problem because of course they exist, but they have different forms and this depend of their origins. The official decree if the aliens exist or not completely depend of the humans' senses and perceptions, and of course the current technology, but this is limited for example the visibility of the extremely little forms or the differnet kHz, MHz, ghz.

First, I do know what "nameless nasty-evil-mod-admin-banning-secret-deleting forum" refers to, and I do know your reasons for calling it like that, but maybe "nameless" would be enough? After all I still have an existence in that part of the universe. I'll have to think about an avatar, but the result will probably be different from the one I use in 'the other' place.

As for the looks of aliens it is pure guesswork, but after a period where the aliens typically were seen as humanoid there has been a period where it flatly was denied that any intelligent being in any way could resemble us. But a general plan with locomotion limbs in one end, manipulatory limbs and digestion system somewhere in the middle and a control unit at the other end is not totally out the the question - and the useful characteristics of carbon might also come in handy if you wanted to be an extraterrestrial being far from the Sun. So in principle an extraterrestrial could look surprisingly like us without in any way being related to us. On the other hand the dolphins and squids are also quite intelligent, and their bodyplan is not quite like our bodyplan.

If cephalopods had developed a longer lifespan and a more social behaviour they might have built whole civilizations at the bottom of the oceans here, and you could imagine watery planets 'out there' where the dominant intelligent species looked more like squids than like human beings. One thing that would be hard to avoid for such a species was some kind of language. Sound is a smart vehicle for language systems, but if you were a hyperintelligent octopus species you would probably have developed an writing system with signs written on your body rather than a system built on sound. The one thing we can be sure of is that no intelligent species from outside Terra would arrive here in a UFO, open the door, jump out and demand the attention of the local rulers in impeccable English.

Ok.

yes, the aliens can have this form (different limbs, digestion, control unit) but their energy can be so different that the humans can't perceive them at all, generally, or only partially. unfortuantely, my knowledge of physics and mathematic is not good, therefore not sufficient for truly understand or explain about them.

I've heard that the squids and octopus are very intelligent. the dolphins are beautiful and cute. Their sound system is advanced I think, but yes, they havnet developed some writing. The most intellgient and advanced are the birds, whose communications system use telepathy for when they learn a thing, for communicate this with the others. Therefore also, writing is not necessary at all. But they are of course not aliens, but have lived on this planet before the humans.

I feed crows. Normally they are very skittish, at first this was true, but now it seems anywhere in my small city the crows know I'm the guy who brings cashews to them and they have become bolder and more approachable. Occasionally they fly very close to me whilst swooping down to land. I'm not sure if it is just that they've all had a personal prior experience with me, or if the word got out in their community and they've learned at a remove that I'm reliably friendly. Crows are territorial in the city, but they will congregate en masse on occasion. They all seem to recognize my car if I'm driving, or my person if I'm out for a walk. My favorite scenario is when they alight silently on a tree near me and wait for some nuts. I always look for their shadows on the pavement or sidewalk to know that they've arrived from above, exactly what they rely upon to spot me so readily is unknown to me. Could be the sound of my sneakers, haha.

This isn't true. Some species of bird are simply very good at mimicking and copying the behaviour of other members of the same species - this has been observed in the "cultural" spread of the pecking of milk-bottle tops in the UK for example.

We even have a probable mechanism for this - birds flocking behaviour long puzzled scientists as they react as a flock faster than they can react to other stimuli; this was considered thinking "faster than the speed of thought", but modern thinking puts it down to mirror neurones - brain structures that automatically "reflect" observation into experience, or indeed action. Seemingly identical structures are thought to be vital to human learning.

Not necessarily. There is a thread within all major religious traditions that says you should seek to understand how the creator created the universe. A great deal of pre-Enlightenment science was the result of such a process.

Crows are extremely intelligent and great birds. Yes, for sure they have informed all the crows that you are friendly and give them food.