Worthless Knowledge of the Week

The Universe is Shrinking!

Thousands of years ago I am sure that cavemen sat around a fire outside their cave and looked up to the bright pin pricks of light that dotted the sky and wondered what they were. I picture them making up stories, tall tales of the Saber Tooth they slayed that was “this big”. I’m sure that they were able to tell time and direction by the stars to get from cave to cave. Now fast forward to today. We rarely look up to see the stars anymore, of course maybe because there’s not much to look at. There so much light coming from the cities that last night I counted more planes in the sky than stars but none the less, our understanding of what these sparkling diamonds of the sky are has exponentially increased. So after thousands of years of asking why we are finally at a point where technology is helping us find answers and the universe does not seem as big as it used to be.

Case in point… There are nearly 7 Billion people on the planet right now and a few in orbit but outside of that there is no one…nothing but a few organic compounds floating around on comets (at least that we know of). Up until recently we only new of 8 planets and a few dwarf planets that circled our sun now we have discovered almost 400 planets orbiting nearby starts. The few we were actually able to see! The below infrared image shows 3 planets orbiting Fomalhaut, a star roughly sun-like that is about 25 light years away. The star has been artificially blotted out so that the planets could be found.



Now these planets are several times the size of Jupiter and orbit further out than Neptune orbits our sun but you can now imagine that within the next decade we will be looking at planets the size of Earth and withing our life time we should be able to see details such as oceans and continents if they exist. It makes you really wonder how much longer we'll have this universe to ourselves. Even if we just find bacteria on other planets then it means that life on Earth is not all that special and if we ever discover intelligent life then it will definitely through all of our perceptions about ourselves and our beliefs into the air.

What will it say about beliefs in god that there are other planets with life on them out there, how will it change religion? What will it say about the petty differences that we think separate us from those in other countries? If that life is more advanced than we are then how embarrassing will it be for us to let them to see how we treat each other and what we've done to our planet. Even worse, what if they are not advanced as we are, how will we treat them? From the Egyptians using slave labor to construct the pyramids to the Conquistadors that inadvertently nearly wiped out an entire culture, to American slave traders and Indian hunters...will we have learned from our past mistakes? I guess the good news is that space is a big place and we have time. Even if we were able to image an Earth-like planet tomorrow that had signs of intelligent life it would probably take at least 25 years to get a message to them and another 25 years to get a response, so we have time. Time to answer those questions before we have to, time to grow, time to learn from our mistakes and correct the wrongs that we've made.

The Visible Universe...those blobs of light are not stars, not even galaxies, they are galaxy clusters!

The universe is a big place but so was Earth once...