ok.. i didn't want to post this in the astro/cos topic, cuz they'd prolly laugh at me.....

if we live on earth
and earth is in our solar system
and our solar system is floating out on space.
where is space?

i was thinking about it one day.... and.... i was thinking about that men in black movie... and about the cat who had the necklace thing with little planets inside of it, and how small it was... what if we are tiny little creatures.......... and our solar system fits in the palm of a reegular persons hand... bt it is so big to us wed never know..... what if we finally had the technology to find the "end of the universe"... then what? do we just hit the glass wall? press our nose against it? just looking for a response.

Relative to our home city, we are tiny little creatures.
Relative to our home continent, we are tiny little creatures.
Relative to our planet, we are tiny little creatures.
Relative to our solar system, we are tiny little creatures.
Relative to our galaxy, we are tiny little creatures.
Relative to our universe, we are tiny little creatures.

Viewing it with honest perspective, you should gasp in awe at how small we truly are and at how truly large is the universe. The only thing we own which might compare is our imagination's ability to hold and see it within the human mind--your miniture universe in a bobble, I think.

so your saying im stuck ina big glass bottle?
hmph.
figures.
and i am little... wow..think about how little the little critters are then........... like.. little ants... and..fruit flies!!!! oh wow.......... fruit flies are tiny!

If you walk within your imagination, then yes, there you be.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/images/gal_Milky.gif

This is where your galactic hometown is at.

Not even visible by the biggest telescope, if you see it really that way.
Solarsysem is very little.
So is our Planet, called Earth.
On that Planet Earth we are little points, very, very, very little.
So, now I wonder.
In this whole big, great, enormous Universe we are nothing more then a very, very, very, little dot or maybe not even that.
:p
Now Imagine that!!!
;)

Compared to the universe you are small, but compared to bacteria you are a universe yourself.

Well, I don't know much about the universe, but I heard it's getting bigger and it has a form, so it has to be inside something else. Perhaps our whole universe is a bubble in the stomach of some odd super-beeing...:)

:eek: now that is definately the oddest one that i have hard yet!!!!

Blandine, that is really a great one, hahaha.
:p :p
You really make it very tasteful, in my imagination.
Be glad you don't have my imagination...
;)

Hi Banshee

Bacterias are not very tasteful.... :D

General Science & Technology!? Is that forum starving for threads?

I guess I prefer to be the bacteria then, in this paticular case.
:D Bacterias are very scientific Bowser, really.
Ever been in a test lab? Man, you don't want to be a bacteria then.
Haha.
:p

He gave man speech, and speech created thought, this is the measure of the universe.

on must watch one's self ...??same of them?????.... a long time?? before that??? to condemn people....??

(dont jugde others until you judge yourself?)
-Gives up and looks to Biggles-

Biggles?
What are you talking about?
I do not understand, really.
Who gave us speech.....????
I do not understand your reply.
Can you please explain????
Thank you.
Bye.
:)

Once we work out how large the universe is, we can work out how well our scientific notation works, and then we will know where we are.

Hello nightfall, watch "hyperspace" in TLC, that will give you some food for "where are We".....

Where are we? I always thought we were on Earth, 93 million miles from the sun, in a galaxy that exists among other galaxies, in a universe who, no one, really knows how large or old or how it's composed.

Where are we? What was I talking about? Notice I posted this without reading any replies, just going on the titile.

HELLO I'M HERE!

AND MY NAME IS CONGRATULATIONS!!

Congratiulations, Congratiulations with finding the Sci forums.
Good choice, nice forums.

For as far as where we are...
At this moment I am sitting behind my computer in my living room in the Netherlands.
My body is behind the computer and my mind is at Sci forums.
That is where I am, now.
But it changes, the place where I am.
Bye, have fun and good discussions here at Sci forums.
;)

lol banshee.

Again, nightfall, love your avatar.

If the universe is infinite then there is no center. Therefore we have no position. There are an infinite number of worlds exactly the same as Earth and an infinite number of people doing exactly the same thing as we are now, in an infinite universe. Any science fiction world exists. Anything imagined is reality. How's that for a headache?

Shrike, listen.
No headache, oh no...
I think you see the point, nice to hear that.
You are thinking in the right way, very right I guess.
Keep on thinking like this, I mean it really...
:)

We live in a galaxy called the milky way, it sits in space as you can see below.

<img src="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Cosmos/Images/att-graphic_lg.jpg">

As we move closer to the galaxy we can see that the sun resides in the Orion arm.

<img src=http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/images/milky_way_large.jpg>

A closer look shows details of the suns position in the arm.

<img src=http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys240/lectures/milky_way/mw_birds_eye.jpeg>

Moving even closer we see our local bubble of space.

<img src="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0004/localcloud_frisch.jpg">

Sorry that third picture should be this one.

A closer look shows details of the suns position in the arm.

<img src=http://www.astro.washington.edu/astro101v/images/nghbrhd.gif>



Here's a close up you may like too.

<img src="http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/p12396b.gif">

Very nice, John. I'm a sucker for this stuff.

I wish we were (huh huh-beavis and butthead laugh) bigger so we could look...bigger.

Sorry I'm in a funny mood. Just got back from babysitting. Made an easy twelve buckaroonees, which is like thirty in swedish fish and thirty three in australian oi's.

Great, great post, John Devers.

It is my hope that we find Earth like planets in the other arms of our galaxy about the same distance from our galactic center....

Beautiful pictures John, really.
But in reality we are a lot smaller, just as the Stars and Planets at your pictures.
It is really magnificent, but I don't see what your point is.
You can show the most beautiful pictures and what then? What are you prooving with this? I knew that all along, is not new.
Beautiful pictures, but not new...

I stay at my own point of vision, but please, keep on posting these pictures, they are great...

Scaling up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRU43nbVaz8

what if we finally had the technology to find the "end of the universe"... then what?

What ends begins and what begins ends. We are in a perpetual loop of cosmic time and space.

ok.. i didn't want to post this in the astro/cos topic, cuz they'd prolly laugh at me.....

if we live on earth
and earth is in our solar system
and our solar system is floating out on space.
where is space?

i was thinking about it one day.... and.... i was thinking about that men in black movie... and about the cat who had the necklace thing with little planets inside of it, and how small it was... what if we are tiny little creatures.......... and our solar system fits in the palm of a reegular persons hand... bt it is so big to us wed never know..... what if we finally had the technology to find the "end of the universe"... then what? do we just hit the glass wall? press our nose against it? just looking for a response.

It's all relative to what cosmic body of matter we are floating next to. If you look at it that way, we are now where, and going no where fast! :eek:

Swarm, WTF! with the thread necromancy?

what if we finally had the technology to find the "end of the universe"... then what? do we just hit the glass wall? press our nose against it? just looking for a response.This is a perfectly reasonable question which you really should have posted on the Astronomy board because it's about cosmology.

For starters, there's no simple answer to questions like "how big is the universe?" or "where does it end?" For practical purposes we generally define the universe as the volume of space which is occupied by matter. However, all the stars out at the very edge of that volume have been sending out electromagnetic radiation for billions of years in all directions, so their lightwaves have penetrated space far beyond their own position. Therefore there are photons out there and there's no good reason not to count them as "occupying space." This would make the radius of the "meaningful universe," if I may coin the term, about twelve light-years larger than the figure that is normally cited. (Unless that part of space is also "expanding," a concept that makes my head hurt.)

But for logical or philosophical or cosmological purposes, there's no good reason to define the universe in such a way that it has a boundary. The light waves emitted by the stars keep spreading outward at 3*10^8 m/sec with nothing stopping them. So if we, as you postulate, could invent a technology that would allow us to travel to the edge of the sphere that encloses all existing matter and energy (which BTW is impossible because we could never move fast enough to catch up with those light waves), then we too would keep going for the same reason: there's nothing there to stop us.

There is no "glass wall" there or anything else. The only reason we can define "the end of the universe" is that there's nothing beyond a certain distance--a distance which expands by about ten trillion kilometers every year.

Personally I find that defintion bogus because it's misleading. The universe can be better defined as infinite in spatial dimensions. The fact that only an infinitesimal fraction of it contains any matter or energy and the rest is totally empty, without so much as a stray photon, doesn't change that. Is there any reason that a well-defined universe can't consist mostly of empty space?

This is a perfectly reasonable question which you really should have posted on the Astronomy board because it's about cosmology.

For starters, there's no simple answer to questions like "how big is the universe?" or "where does it end?" For practical purposes we generally define the universe as the volume of space which is occupied by matter. However, all the stars out at the very edge of that volume have been sending out electromagnetic radiation for billions of years in all directions, so their lightwaves have penetrated space far beyond their own position. Therefore there are photons out there and there's no good reason not to count them as "occupying space." This would make the radius of the "meaningful universe," if I may coin the term, about twelve light-years larger than the figure that is normally cited. (Unless that part of space is also "expanding," a concept that makes my head hurt.)

But for logical or philosophical or cosmological purposes, there's no good reason to define the universe in such a way that it has a boundary. The light waves emitted by the stars keep spreading outward at 3*10^8 m/sec with nothing stopping them. So if we, as you postulate, could invent a technology that would allow us to travel to the edge of the sphere that encloses all existing matter and energy (which BTW is impossible because we could never move fast enough to catch up with those light waves), then we too would keep going for the same reason: there's nothing there to stop us.

There is no "glass wall" there or anything else. The only reason we can define "the end of the universe" is that there's nothing beyond a certain distance--a distance which expands by about ten trillion kilometers every year.

Personally I find that defintion bogus because it's misleading. The universe can be better defined as infinite in spatial dimensions. The fact that only an infinitesimal fraction of it contains any matter or energy and the rest is totally empty, without so much as a stray photon, doesn't change that. Is there any reason that a well-defined universe can't consist mostly of empty space?

More pure speculation, Fraggle? How can you or anyone talk about something like this with such a sense of factual info when neither you nor anyone else knows any-fuckin'-thing about it?

Amazing, humans are so fuckin' amazingly speculative ....when they ain't got no freakin' idea.

Baron Max

More pure speculation, Fraggle? How can you or anyone talk about something like this with such a sense of factual info when neither you nor anyone else knows any-fuckin'-thing about it? Amazing, humans are so fuckin' amazingly speculative ....when they ain't got no freakin' idea.Max, this was clearly labeled as speculation. None of it was presented as fact. It's full of qualifying verbs. Take a vacation and recharge your batteries; you're losing your edge. Reading your diatribes used to be entertaining and there was an occasional nugget of information or even actual wisdom lurking in them as a reward.

And in any case, why is the hypothesis that the universe is finite any less speculative? It strikes me as a classic manifestation of human hubris to assume that the universe ends precisely at the boundary of the sphere we're familiar with and that there's something there to stop things from moving beyond it. Especially since things have been pushing that putative boundary outward for billions of years without being slapped back.

Is this "space" that surrounds us a Euclidean space? If so, it's infinite. If not, then what kind of space is it? If it's a Lobachevskian space it's still infinite. It would have to be a Riemannian space to be finite. Apparently there's some evidence that space is curved, but which way? Like Riemann's ball or Lobachevsky's saddle?

If space does indeed turn out to be infinite, it will sure answer some important questions. Paramount of which is the often-posed one, "How could the visible part of the universe exist, since the probability of occurrence of the conditions necessary for it to come into being (i.e. the Big Bang) is infinitesimal?" Infinitesimal probability times infinite domain can equal any arbitrary number of occurrences. There could be a whole lot more "universes" like ours out there, quintillions or decillions or googols or googolplexes of light years beyond our range of observation. Especially if it turned out that time is infinite too!

Sure this is all speculation, but any hypothesis about the origin and nature of the universe is speculation. There's no reason to prefer one over the other so long as they are consistent with the natural laws that we have discovered so far.

I could even say that there's evidence to support my hypothesis. If the probability of the Big Bang occurring is really infinitesimal, as many people say, yet it actually occurred, then space must be infinite.