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

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.

Yes, volume-wise you could fit 1.3 million earths in the sun and the moon is smaller than the earth. The context is “appearance in the sky” and NASA uses this language but I just realized how misleading that probably is to a lot of people when they hear it…

Nowhere does 400 figure as a factor in “appearance in the sky", where does NASA use it?

The full moon is a million times dimmer than the sun too.

I guess “esoterism” is in the eye of the beholder. Because the example you give sounds incredibly interesting - and yet remains beyond my comprehension (and therefore beyond my full appreciation - even with the very helpful looking diagrams) simply because of the complexity of your subject matter. We mathematicians and physical science people have such simple subject matter compared to the complexity you bio folks have to deal with. Math and unit multipliers are so elementary compared to biology, much less genetics.

Thanks for trying, though!

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I’m not aware of any. King David obviously felt insignificant under the Milky - Gk. galaxías - Way. But a bit of quantification goes a long way.

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During a total solar eclipse, the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. This completely blocks out the Sun’s light. However, the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun. How can it block all of that light?

Even though the Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun, it’s also about 400 times closer to Earth than the Sun is. This means that from Earth, the Moon and the Sun appear to be roughly the same size in the sky.

I believe the missing word is diameter but that may be a kids page.

SUn = 865370mi
Moon = 2159mi

Divide = 400.

400x smaller is common and is from the perspective of a disc in the sky but more precise language should include the word diameter.

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very good.

And then just remember, that ratio (400) applies to linear measurements only.

For any area measurements (like … area of visible-to-us disk) has a ratio of 400^2 (although the angular area to our vision presents as the same due to different distances), and for anything volumetric, the ratio must then get cubed (400^3). Hence the many millions of moons needed to equal the volume of the sun.

You had better take a quick photo and get back in your radiation-proof spaceship.

Leaded glass might be able to block the radiation, but the heft of the spacecraft needed will probably preclude human visits in the foreseeable future. That’s one of the reasons people had a bit of a chuckle about Elon Musk’s picture of one of his manned rockets on Europa with a person walking out on the surface.

Since I am an atheist I would feel the same as I do now with regards to my place in the universe. Putting more zeros on the end of the number of stars wouldn’t impact me much more than the numbers we already have.

Steven Weinberg had an interesting parable dealing with this question. It is aimed more at a multiverse, which I am apathetic towards, but it can be applied to our universe as well. He spoke about a place called Earthprime, a world just like ours but with one difference. Earthprime was always covered in clouds so that no one could see past them. They believed that Earthprime was all there was, and that it must have been made just for them because the sky gave them just the right amount of heat that they needed, along with all of the other factors they required. Then one day they made their first spacecraft and flew above those clouds. What they found out is that the heat was supplied by a star, one of billions in their own galaxy which was itself one of billions. They also saw that there were other planets in their solar system that weren’t as lucky as Earthprime. That would be a sea change.

I should have twigged that.

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Yes, very true. Though I haven’t taught it yet, I prepared a unit for my high school physics students on scale analysis and surface area to volume ratios. Its fun stuff for me. Simple unit, why king kong would crumble under his own weight if his linear dimensions were increased as such (150 ft from 5) . One measure of bone strength goes up with the square (cross sectional area) but mass and volume with the cube.

Vinnie

I think the key to the “sea change” for us is in this expectation: that we are the darlings of the entire cosmos rather than in religion or Christianity per se (although, theism has often been coupled with that very expectation - so the confusion on the part of others is understandable). But there are and have been many Christians that do not package that attitude in with their theism, and I - like them and you, have yet to see any compelling reason why such magnitudes are supposed to be disturbing to our various worldviews - theistic or not. So to us, it remains an incoherence on the part of Weinberg that applies only to those who can’t or won’t decouple that particular perspective from their theism.

So your faith isn’t touched by there being a trillion inhabited worlds in this infinitesimal universe? What part (whither) theism?

Not in any destructive (or de-constructive) way.

?

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What part does it have, make, play.

Any constructive way?

The bigger the cosmos, the more breathtakingly awesome it is to even just try to imagine it. For those of us who relate to a Creator - one who transcends the cosmos - the bigger the cosmos, the bigger our parochial conceptions of God are forced to get.

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I think it has more to do with the idea of an interventionist God. On one extreme end you have YEC’s who think the entire universe was created 6,000 years ago in its current state. That really begs the question of why there is so much stuff in the universe since it isn’t needed for humans to exist and thrive on Earth. Beyond YEC there are probably more levels of how much God directly created in our universe. These ideas all seem to orbit around the idea that humans were the purpose of the not entirely naturally produced creation, and if so, why all the other stuff?

If we extend the theistic evolution position a bit wider to encompass the creation of the universe, it can make a lot more sense. This would be more of a non-interventionist process, because why would God need to intervene and change the natural processes he already put into place.

I also think this topic touches on the concepts of intrinsic purpose and meaning. For many Christians, the idea of an interventionist God creating a universe for them means that the universe intrinsically gives their lives meaning and purpose. Some Christians don’t seem to be as comfortable with the idea of their existence being the outcome of natural processes because to them this doesn’t have the same power to create intrinsic meaning in the universe, at least from what I have observed. From my own interactions with other atheists, one of the hurdles they ran into was this loss of intrinsic meaning in the universe that they had previously derived from more creationist perspectives.

In a lot of ways, the amount of stuff in the universe seems to touch on the same discomforts that underlie the problems some Christians have with theistic evolution or evolutionary creationism. For them, this may take away some of the intrinsic meaning that they find in the universe, and it may come to close to us atheists who share the acceptance of natural processes and don’t find intrinsic meaning in the universe.

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That’s when the Earthprime Inteligent Design-Fine Tuning fans doubled down on their “theory”: “See? Proves there’s a God, just like we’ve been saying all along.” Meanwhile, the Earthprime Sam Harris went on Youtube to explain how a Lucky Earthprime supports even more “godless determinism”.

And Earthprime Van Til-ian Presuppositionalists and Atheists continued to agree that, without God, a bigger universe is just as meaningless as a smaller universe.

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