Is Space Wasteful or do we live in a Goldilocks universe?

Challenge accepted.

The universe was created by a 3rd grader from an advanced civilization. He was supposed to create a universe filled with pretty galaxies and nebulae, but no intelligent life. This last part was very important. To ensure that he met the requirements the teacher placed radio detection stations every 300 light years apart throughout space, and if these stations detect signals from intelligent life the universe will be instantly destroyed. Not only was the universe not made for us, but it was specifically created to not have us. Worse still, that poor 3rd grader is probably going to get a failing grade.

Scarier?

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Pick your bias. Some biases are correct.

And a secular astronomer said near the period of the total solar eclipse in the U.S. in 2017 that the size of our moon was magical.

As far as imagining “big quantities” goes, here’s a way to imagine a billion of something - easily fitting in a pile on your living room floor: Imagine a cubic meter (a little more than a yard for you metricphobes). Now imagine that cube sliced into its 1000 flat layers each 1 mm thick (you can easily see the smallest markings, millimeters, on any meter stick). Slice it along the other two axes as well so that your 1 m^3 is now 1 billion cubic millimeters! - each one like a large grain of sand.

I know I’ve used this link before, but whenever anyone starts waxing poetic about us being the first to appreciate our “pale blue dot” insignificance, it’s always appropriate to keep Dennis Danielson’s “Great Copernican Cliche” article handy to provide corrective perspective. The entire pdf makes for an excellent educational hour or two of reading, but for those who don’t want to wade in… he shines light on the modern nonsense of imagining that we are the first centuries to realize how small the earth is or to realize “how humble” our position in the universe is. A lot of this comes from physicists who might be excused for their ignorance of history, but they cannot be excused for ignoring the painstaking correction to all this that historians and researchers like Danielson have since provided.

This is a bit esoteric, but one of the processes that still amazes me is cluster formation on flow cells used for DNA sequencing. Essentially, you dilute your DNA sample down to picomolar ranges which should contain a few hundred million DNA molecules in 1.5 ml or so. Each individual DNA molecule will bind to the solid substrate on the flow cell where it is copied many, many times. At this point, you get 200 million tiny but detectable (for the flow cell I use) dots that can be sequenced, each started by a single molecule. Molarity and Avogadro’s number were kind of abstract in Chem 101, so its kind of crazy to see them physically manifested in that way.

The sea change that I find more compelling is Hubble’s discovery that Andromeda was actually a distant galaxy, and that there were probably more out there. That was in 1924 or so. Before that, most thought that the Milky Way was perhaps the only galaxy. That’s just 100 years ago. How large has our universe grown in just the last century?

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So while our eclipse experience on Earth today is virtually unrivaled anywhere in the solar system, it is simply a temporary coincidence.

 
It is cool that it sure appears that the universe was designed to be discovered – from here, with our special moon. Huge amounts of knowledge about how stars work has been discovered – and more is still being discovered – during total solar eclipses. That is not to mention all of the other details about why so much of the cosmos is visible, unobstructed, from here.

…and during the brief tenure of humankind.

It would only be wasteful if we were the only world in ten to the twenty five

1 : 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

where God sprinkled magic life dust.

Maybe not wasteful but “generous.”

As it turns out the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but also 400x closer. Makes for awesome eclipses. Though I’d love to see something like Jupiter from Europa’s surface.

I always break out the meter sticks and make a meter cube after asking my students how many cm3 are in a meter cubed. But while we can show a billion grains of sand or even a billion grains of rice, I don’t think the concept of a billion miles means much except really far distance.

A lot of people thought there was one galaxy in the early 1900s. Having hard data on the actual extent of space…. Not that we even know that today… but intergalactic distances and so forth is new. But yeah, the other stuff may be overblown but I’m not sure a few examples from really educated people overturns the gist of the statements. I think the findings snowballed and we got smaller and smaller over time.

Touché. Wording will be altered.

I do wonder if a century from now, humans will be amazed at how we thought there was only one universe when in reality, there are gazillions.

Maybe but personally not a fan. Looks like philosophical, scientific speculation. Science requires testable predictions and the ability to be falsified. The universe very much looks fine tuned for life. I think the multiverse is the way around that via the inverse gambler’s fallacy.

Vinnie

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Saw a quote from Michael Shermer:

“Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us?”
― Michael Shermer, [Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design]

Multiverse theology is becoming creedal for some.

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I’m behind on my string theory homework. (You still can’t have an infinite regress into eternity past. Cats ya know.)

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Hawking wasn’t too intellectually impaired and said time had a beginning:

  The Beginning of Time

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’'Tain’t; 'cause I said so."
Q.E.D.

That’s the ratio of the ratios of their surface areas and volumes.

The moon’s SA (and disk to scale) is sixteen thousand times smaller and its volume sixty four million.

It’s part of rational faith.

Yeah - that probably added what … a half a dozen more zeroes on the ends of some already pretty big numbers?! A spatially significant change indeed! As to its psychological significance on us, it might be interesting to do this thought experiment (which maybe isn’t so psychologically hypothetical anyway, given our imaginations with multiverse stuff). But let’s just stick to this one physical cosmos here: What if we discovered the “edge” of our universe tomorrow? We finally found that elusive boundary beyond which there seemed to be comparative void. But then, a yet more powerful telescope spots a speck of light “out there”, and then another, and then a host, and we realize that those “specks” were entire other universes just like ours? …Bring out the next half a dozen or dozen zeros to tack onto our already big numbers! But here’s the thrust of my point: how would such a discovery impact you? Would you feel a “sea change” in how you thought of our place in the cosmos? When your “speck of dust” now gets reduced to something like atoms? My thought is that once something is already nearly zero as our portion of the cosmos is, then making it even closer to zero isn’t really that much of a change. Once the cookie you thought you had in your hand became a mere crumb, it’s probably of little additional consequence to you if I then show up with a razor blade and turn your possessed crumb into a microscopic speck. They already had enough geometrical awareness even as far back a Ptolemy (or even before - I can’t remember specifically) to know that earth is relatively small. And as far as them still psychologically clinging to their own personal significance in this vast cosmos - they certainly did, just as we continue to do in our own way now today. That bit, I don’t think we’ve left behind as much as we like to think. We may spatially be reduced to subatomic specks, … but … there always seems to be that eternal “but” that even now the most hard core skeptics can’t seem to quite dispose of.

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That’s desire, not evidence. And calling anyone who has a sense of proportion a hard core sceptic is like calling social justice extremely left wing.

I’m not following your logic there.

And in any case, my subject wasn’t “science” or “evidence”. It was “how we psychologically interact with such proportions”.

“hard core sceptics” was just my shorthand for referring to people who still today make much of how our relative smallness supposedly decimates all prior worldviews, as if our smallness was the provincial discovery of the last few centuries. I probably should have chosen a different term … perhaps “blissfully naive modernists” would have been a more descriptively accurate phrase.