By Sadanand

4 Minutes Read

Ref: Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Brain Greene,  David Deutsch, JRE, David Aguilar

Probably not worth a read for Star-Wars/Star-Trek and other Science Fiction freaks

To Human eyes, The Universe beyond our Solar System looks like a few thousand dots in the night sky and gray paints of a milky way. But if you ask a Scientist or an Astronomer, what is out there? You will be told they are not dots but stars spheres powered by nuclear energy released by transmutations meaning converting one chemical into another. Mainly Hydrogen into Helium. Sun is a star, and it looks different because its distance is closer to us than other stars. However, it is a million miles away from us. And all stars constantly shine without falling. What holds Stars up in Sky? How do they refuel? It turns out they are in Free Fall and have a lot of fuel, but they do not refuel or last forever.

I was a little surprised that we know only 4-5% of the Universe so far. Maybe I am not up to date. With Science and Technology advanced so much, and it’s been around for the last ~500 years, if we consider Copernicus before Newton, we only know 4-5% of the Universe so far. Not sure how many years it will take to find out the rest? Black Holes 73% and Dark Matter 23% not considered as fully known Universe yet. Major part of it is still a mystery, and no laws have been invented. None of us currently living may know or experience the reality of the rest. But I am optimistic we will find out for sure soon. “Problems are Soluble”

So How big is this Universe? 

Despite the Milky way’s appearance, it is the biggest object we can see with our naked eye. It’s hard to imagine how far planets and stars are from us. Do you know the ancient Chinese built walls with stone towers to have a closer look at the stars? It’s natural to think Stars are closer to think them close than they are.

These large distances are hard to measure in feet or Miles. Instead, scientists use Light Years; The distance light travels in a Year. In one Second, a beam of light will travel ~186000 miles. So Light year is a vast distance. 1 Light Year is ~6 Trillion Miles. The nearest Star we have is Four light years away, called Proxima Centauri. Can you imagine how big this Universe is with these kind of distance? Let me further break it up for those who don’t know.

Only Milky Way Galaxy has 2 Billion Stars, and there are 2 Trillion Galaxies in an Observable Universe. How many stars do we have, all galaxies included? How freaking big is it? And one other estimate says there are around ~20 billion Earth-like planets. And our Sun is just one of about ~200 billion stars in the Galaxy. Can you picture an image of a Universe or something big like this in our Brains? Probably not. Scientists Strongly suspect it is much bigger than what we see now through our available technology. It is further expanding at extreme acceleration and possibly an infinite Universe.

Can you picture an image of the INFINITE Universe in your brain? No one Can

How Long has it been, and will it be there?

Scientists measured it based on many things and concluded that it is ~13.8 billion years old. But there is an idea that it’s been around forever and it will probably be forever based on the current expansion rate. Right now, Sun is in the middle of life. It’s been burning for ~4.5 Billion Years and will burn for the next ~5 Billion years. The Sun does not “burn” like we think of logs in a fire or paper burning. The Sun glows because it is a huge ball of gas, and a process called nuclear fusion is taking place in its core. No oxygen is required for it to burn. Sun is gradually getting hotter and brighter all the time. Sun’s temperature in the next ~5 Billion years will be near ~200 Billion Degrees. At this point, Earth will be an unrecognizable ball of Melted Rock. All life being long Vanished. This could be our planet’s unavoidable destiny. Don’t worry; we still have time. 

How did it all Happen?

The first thing that comes to our mind is the Big Bang. But what made an event like Big Bang happen? According to scientists Big Bang could be an interesting event but may not be the first one in the totality of reality. It could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of Our part of space. But In the cosmic scheme of things, in which we are a significantly smaller part, that bigger realm may have been there for a longer period and have experienced multiple Big Bangs of its own. Theories say that events like the Big Bang have numerous cycles of happening whenever space gets very hot and dense and filled with particles.

So Physicist’s like Stephen Hawkings insisted that, even if there were events before the Big Bang, we could not use them to determine what would happen afterward. And we know what has happened since the Big Bang; we cannot determine what happened before as far as we Humans concerning events before the Big Bang can have no consequences and should not be part of scientific models.

Do you know if the initial expansion rate of the Universe at the Big Bang had been slightly higher, no stars would have formed, and there would be nothing in Universe but hydrogen? And if the expansion rate is slightly lower, the Universe would have re-collapsed soon after Big Bang. How did it happen so perfectly? Isn’t it a remarkable fact that is evidence that these constants were intentionally fine-tuned/designed by a supernatural being?

As per Hawking, Big Bang happened in total darkness because light didn’t exist. We need light vision to see it. Space didn’t exist then. And Scientists said all the galaxies, in fact from every single point it was very tiny energy. Then it expanded with massive radiation from a size of an orange (in trillionth of second), and within ~100 seconds, it was big as our Solar System. 

What else was going on there?

The Second after the Big Bang, Universe was like a dot, which started expanding based on collisions between matter, particles, helium, etc. It was a very Violent event. And Stars are created simply by accident as giant factories. After they ran out of fire due to formed iron inside them and gravity takes over and finally collapses and explodes as  SuperNova. The death of Star and the birth of something new. In these Milli-seconds, a massive shock wave passes through the Star. The blast is so powerful that it forces some of the iron to fuse into even heavier elements like Gold and Platinum. This is the Physics behind how gold is being made other than transmutations that happen on Earth in the decay of radioactive elements. Alchemists had dreamed of transmuting base metals such as iron or lead into gold for centuries, but they never achieved it.

Black Holes: Black Holes are formed by colliding stars with gravity pull, and also when a large Star, say 20 times the mass of our Sun, comes to the end of its life. We think Black Holes are massive, but according to Einstein, if you take an Orange and Squash, it is down sufficiently small. It becomes a Black Hole. If you have any Mass M, whatever mass you squeeze into a radius less than two times becomes a Black Hole.

Black Holes become unstable the moment anything tries to go through. You get a feedback loop if it’s still going through and through and through. So finally, it collapses. Suppose you fall into a Black Hole. There will be a difference in gravitational pull across your body. So before you get into Singularity, it can get its cause Spaghettified, all your body. There will be a massive difference in gravitational pull from your head to your feet; it can stretch you out like crazy.. As soon as you try to transmit any kind of information, even light through them, and send a bit of light through, there will collapse.

To find more about BH’s we need what is called a Quantum Theory of Gravity. We don’t have one, and we don’t have the theoretical tools to be sure that these things would be unstable or don’t exist in nature. If they did, you could build a Time Machine.

And a bunch of other violent events, like Quasars, Massive Supernovae, One happened on March 2008 an X-Ray telescope on Earth detected an explosion known as ‘Gamma-Ray’ burst 7.5 billion light years away. A Single Star collapses to form a black hole. The explosion was brighter than a Million Supernova would have been visible from Earth for a few seconds. Very unlikely that anyone here saw it

What is our reaction to all these massive violent events happening in Universe?

So Now, what is the Role/Place of Earth in the Universe?  

What is the role of Earth in this massive Universe? Ancient Greeks like Aristotle thought “Earth is the Center of Universe” because it feels like not moving and everything falls back to Earth from space. Until Copernicus’s findings, Sun was the center of the Solar system, and planets like Earth moved in circular orbits around Sun. Galileo’s telescope and motion measurements invention helped Newton. The most significant breakthrough happened when Newton presented a law stating that all objects at rest naturally stay at rest unless a force acts upon them. And explained how the effects of force cause an object to move or change its motion. So why do planets move around the Sun? Newton said that a special force was responsible and claimed that it was the same force that made objects fall on Earth rather than remain at rest. He named that force called “GRAVITY” and invented the rest of his laws. And then Einstein’s General Relativity etc

Earth and human were never or will be the center of the Universe. Planet earth is an extremely fragile biosphere. It’s like a Spaceship, with every one of us onboard, taking us on a journey around the Sun, in turn, around the Galaxy into the future. Earth is not here to sustain us. We can say it’s a force for good or evil. We may have to believe it is pretty much Evil. We must do what we can to try and protect ourselves from the environment. Sure, it’s a friendly place for humans in all existence we know. But it’s a place of Hostile weather and climate, diseases, etc. it may drown us or burn us by all the natural disasters we know or do not know of. Even other organisms like snakes and wild animals are not friendly. Earth is a like a rock on the planet we survive. The majority of species of animals that ever existed have been wiped out by the very Earth that is supposed to be sustaining. A huge % of wildlife and other species’ existence is drastically reduced.

The only reason we humans have an exception and survived this long is by knowledge creation. Its human intelligence and knowledge made Earth suit us and became significant compared to other species. Martin Rees wrote in his book in 2003 suspected that civilization was lucky to survive till the 20th century and has only a 50% chance of surviving the 21st century. He also feared accidental catastrophes, such as the escape of genetic micro-organisms from a laboratory, resulting in a Pandemic. Which recently happened in 2019, and we survived it.

What was the Origin of Life?

There are many theories on evolution from Darwin and others, but one of the great unsolved mysteries in Biology is the origin of a multicellular life like us. One thing is true; we are all complex creatures formed by accident. We call eukaryotes cells and nuclei. They look like they are a merger between more superficial life-forms bacteria.

A thing called Archaea. So it looks like somewhere in two billion years ago, whatever it was in some ocean, the bacterial cell got inside the Archean and survived as a symbiotic organism essentially and then somehow unbelievably managed to reproduce and replicate in that configuration. And that seems to be the origin of all complex multicellular organisms or life on Earth, so it’s called Fateful Encounter Hypothesis. If it is true, it is just a bit of luck and only happens once.

Does any other Intelligent Life(Aliens) Exist?

Have you ever imagined life outside of this planet? The first thing it comes to our minds is Avatar and other science fiction movies. There must be life. Even in the solar system, I believe we shouldn’t be surprised if we find some form of life or Microbes on Mars or some of the Moons of Jupiter or Saturn, where ever liquid water is/was present.

The reason is if you look at the history of life on Earth, Earth formed. It was just there, no sign of life; it was a ball of rock, and almost as soon as earth temperatures cold down from a bang, we saw evidence of life, certainly ~3.8 billion years ago, possibly even further back than that we see evidence of life on Earth. So somewhere along the line, geochemistry and active geochemistry became biochemistry on Earth. Some idea is if you get gradients of temperature and conditions that are naturally present on the surface of the oceans, then complex carbon chemistry spontaneously happens, so we know that life almost certainly we know that life began on Earth.

So here on Earth, that happened. we know the conditions that led to the origin of life on Earth; the same conditions were present on Mars 3.8 billion years ago. Life is just Chemistry, and certain conditions lead to happen in life; it would be surprising to me that the same thing didn’t happen on Mars or Somewhere else.

So Aliens exists may most likely exist. It was a freaking repeated question for millennia.

Let’s assume that some intelligent life exists somewhere and if they plan to explore our planet and human. They probably will laugh at us, for the things we do here, Like Throwing Bombs at each other in the name of Countries, ideologies, and religions, messing up the planet with pollution and others, Caste, Color and all the rest.

And the Scary part is if Aliens has intelligent civilization than us and plan to visit our planet Earth. Our positions will be like  Native Americans when Christoper Columbus visited the United States.

What it takes to find the rest of Universr?

I am sure as Science progresses, it will help answer these questions. And we will figure out the rest of the 75% of the Universe and possibly all the rest of the questions. We, a multicellular bacteria/advanced monkey breed, whatever you want to call, we are now walking on the Moon, trying to colonize Mars; we figured out this much of Cosmology in one decade compared to the last few centuries. If we can do this much in the previous ~500 years, we may travel at the speed of light in the next thousands of years.

This is where Quantum Physics plays a key role. The eventual goal of any science is to provide a single Law/Theory/Model that describes the Universe. Today scientists describe the Universe in terms of two fundamental partial theories.

General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

They both are intellectual achievements. The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the Universe. Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, deals with the phenomenon of extremely small such as a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, these theories are known to be inconsistent with each other. They cannot be correct. Scientists are making progress towards this goal and inventing like String Theory and others and hopefully, Quantum Theory of Gravity will be developed in the future. We may still have a long way to go to get breakthroughs in these concepts.

That pretty much Covers the Scale of Universe in part-1. Now i'am going to deviate a little, Checkout Part-2

Peace!✌🏿