sj_zero on Nostr: There are between 200 billion and 1 trillion galaxies and the universe. In other ...
There are between 200 billion and 1 trillion galaxies and the universe. In other words, there are between 25 and 125 galaxies in the universe for every man woman and child on Earth today. The universe itself is unfathomably large. We believe that the age of the universe is about 13 billion years, and the current hypothesis of the universe is that reality races out to fill the void lacking in space and time at the speed of light, suggesting that the current universe is generally a sphere of about 26 billion light years across. If you were to look at a map of that universe, it would just look like a dull glow from all of the galaxies. And you might say "this is everything" and you would be right. As you start to zoom in, you might eventually start to see differentiation, so instead of a general Haze of galaxies, you might start to see the individual galaxies, and you might say "this is everything", and while you are missing the big picture you are still correct. As you keep on zooming in, eventually you zoom in on a single galaxy, and the tendrils of Stars look like they form lines in the sky, and if you were focusing on our own Galaxy you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. As you keep on zooming in, you start to see the individual Stars, and you see all of those individual stars. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. As you start to get down to of you close enough that we can start seeing individual stars, you might see all of these individual dots of light and assume "this is everything", and you'd be right. So you keep on zooming, keep on zooming, keep on zooming, and eventually you make it to our solar system. Planetoids, asteroids, planets, moons, meteors, and vast distances. You look at all of these things, and you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. Now from here, you might assume that we must be taking off to go take a look at one of those giant gas planets far from that massive Sun, but we're not, we're going to be heading for -- keep zooming in, keep zooming in, keep zooming in -- this tiny little clump of dirt called Earth. And for the purposes of visualization we're going to take the surface of that Earth and we're going to flatten it out into a map. So now you can see every continent, every ocean, and you might look at that and claim "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you zoom in just a little bit more, you start to see the lines between nations, and they seem very important. As you zoom in, you start to see the major rivers, you start to see provincial lines or state lines, and these also seem very important, and you might proudly proclaim "this is everything!", and you'd be right. If you keep on zooming in, you'll eventually reach a city, and you can zoom in on that city, and see all the streets, and you can state "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you keep on zooming in, eventually you're going to find your street, your neighborhood, and you can see where all the roads intersect in your neighborhood, and you might loudly proclaim "this is everything!" And you'd be right. And then you can travel down the street and look for your house, and open street maps happens to have individual buildings drawn, each individual house is placed on the map, and you will look at that map and you will think that you have finally reached it, you might finally say "this is everything", and you'd be right. But there's so much stuff that the map can't show. It doesn't show the people living in the house, it doesn't show the relationships between those people, you know inside of each person is an ecosystem of many different organisms which live in the gut. The yard is filled with soil which is filled with microorganisms, each speck of dust could contain all kinds of invisible organisms to the naked eye, and the yard is filled with them. Spots nobody thinks about, under the sink, there is a biofilm on the pipes and if you put that under a microscope every square millimeter is a fascinating story of biodiversity. And if you keep on going, you'll eventually reach the level that you can see viruses at, and there's a whole ecosystem of viruses and they behave in their own way we don't even think of them as life, and yet in some ways we consider them to be alive because of the way that they infect and spread to every corner of our Earth. And then you can keep on zooming in, and eventually orders of magnitude smaller you start to see individual atoms, and orders magnitude smaller still you start to see individual electrons, and nothing at this level behaves in a way that somebody who lives in the macro world would find remotely intuitive, but it follows its own set of rules, and you can keep on going to find subatomic particles that are even smaller than the atom, even smaller than the electron. and if there's anything smaller than that we don't know, because we can't measure that far. And you might think that that is everything, and it might not be we don't know.
So what does this view of the universe tell us? Before you answer that we need to understand, by the way, this is assuming that we are the only universe. Multiversal theory exists, and some theories exist that suggest that this is just the latest iteration of the universe and eventually everything will crunch down into another singularity that will eventually become another big bang and start a cycle again that's completely different from ours.
So the first thing is that there are unlimited pieces of information in the universe, and the idea that some laplace's demon could understand everything might feel realistic because we understand so much, but only if we don't understand how much there is to know.
There's a whole other layer of things that we haven't even explored yet, we have proven in a laboratory that energy is matter and matter is energy. We have managed to produce a very small amount of matter from nothing but energy. You took an overwhelming amount of energy to create that tiny piece of matter, but ultimately what that means is even the things we think of as real stuff are just a structured form of energy, and even though we understand that matter is energy we don't fully understand entirely how even that all works.
As something that looks like an aside for a minute, in World War ii, a cat's whisker radio was a very simple crystal radio where you would take crystal, and connect a couple of electrodes to it, and eventually be able to hear radio waves. Now, we knew that that worked, but we didn't really know why at all. And after the war we began investigating that phenomenon of being able to use a crystal to create a radio. Eventually, that led us to an understanding of semiconductors and it was also a major development in the field of quantum mechanics because you needed to understand the quantum mechanical systems in order to understand why the cat's whisker worked when the electrode was in one place but not another. Ultimately, this cat's whisker radio led the development of semiconductor such as transistors, which ultimately ended up leading to the development of microcomputers, and eventually the sort of incredible smartphones that we have today. The idea that placing a couple of electrodes on a piece of crystal relates to something as unimaginably complex as a smartphone is almost absurd, but it's true.
In this way to an extent, the scientific endeavor of the enlightenment has in a sense directly refuted the core conceits of modernity, that the universe can be understood rationally and logically, that everything can be measured, and once measured everything can be understood. Even within its own wheelhouse, modernity breaks down.
It's also important to note however, that pure relativism is also obviously incorrect. Every layer that we measure for the purposes of our thought experiment is absolutely and factually true. The fact that other things are also true doesn't change the fact for example that there is a planet called Earth in the solar system whose star is locally called Sol, in a relatively insignificant Galaxy called the Milky Way by many of the inhabitants of that Earth. This isn't a game of power, this isn't something to be constructed, notwithstanding the limitations of our models of viewing reality they are all absolutely true.
So what does this view of the universe tell us? Before you answer that we need to understand, by the way, this is assuming that we are the only universe. Multiversal theory exists, and some theories exist that suggest that this is just the latest iteration of the universe and eventually everything will crunch down into another singularity that will eventually become another big bang and start a cycle again that's completely different from ours.
So the first thing is that there are unlimited pieces of information in the universe, and the idea that some laplace's demon could understand everything might feel realistic because we understand so much, but only if we don't understand how much there is to know.
There's a whole other layer of things that we haven't even explored yet, we have proven in a laboratory that energy is matter and matter is energy. We have managed to produce a very small amount of matter from nothing but energy. You took an overwhelming amount of energy to create that tiny piece of matter, but ultimately what that means is even the things we think of as real stuff are just a structured form of energy, and even though we understand that matter is energy we don't fully understand entirely how even that all works.
As something that looks like an aside for a minute, in World War ii, a cat's whisker radio was a very simple crystal radio where you would take crystal, and connect a couple of electrodes to it, and eventually be able to hear radio waves. Now, we knew that that worked, but we didn't really know why at all. And after the war we began investigating that phenomenon of being able to use a crystal to create a radio. Eventually, that led us to an understanding of semiconductors and it was also a major development in the field of quantum mechanics because you needed to understand the quantum mechanical systems in order to understand why the cat's whisker worked when the electrode was in one place but not another. Ultimately, this cat's whisker radio led the development of semiconductor such as transistors, which ultimately ended up leading to the development of microcomputers, and eventually the sort of incredible smartphones that we have today. The idea that placing a couple of electrodes on a piece of crystal relates to something as unimaginably complex as a smartphone is almost absurd, but it's true.
In this way to an extent, the scientific endeavor of the enlightenment has in a sense directly refuted the core conceits of modernity, that the universe can be understood rationally and logically, that everything can be measured, and once measured everything can be understood. Even within its own wheelhouse, modernity breaks down.
It's also important to note however, that pure relativism is also obviously incorrect. Every layer that we measure for the purposes of our thought experiment is absolutely and factually true. The fact that other things are also true doesn't change the fact for example that there is a planet called Earth in the solar system whose star is locally called Sol, in a relatively insignificant Galaxy called the Milky Way by many of the inhabitants of that Earth. This isn't a game of power, this isn't something to be constructed, notwithstanding the limitations of our models of viewing reality they are all absolutely true.