Striking view of 'Milky Way twin'

[neoadorable]

they must be enjoying the friggin Xbox 720 by now, or living on Mars. not stuck in this progress-resistant verse.

wait what, Doc, since when are parellel universes part of accepted physics? theoretical, yes, but there's no evidence or correlation! but then again i thought people were kidding when they were telling me about subspace ansibles and it turns out they're something we're quite able to achieve, and in the near future at that.

[DocM]

Many observations are easiest explained by multiple universes, and after the search for the Higgs boson searching for evidence is one of LHC's goals. Just last year an international analysis of cosmic background data from the WMAP satellite came back with evidence of four "scars" where our universe may have bumped into others.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1012.1995v2

Then there is the evidence tirned up during the searchgor gravity waves that our universe is quantized, a hologram whose 3D appearance is just a projection from its outward "surface." This evidence was so strong that Fermilab is building a new instrument, the Holometer, to explore it.

[DocM]

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If true then multiple universes could fit the M-theory model where each universe is an oscillating membrane who sometames collide, which takes us back to that WMAP data.

[Farstrider]

Our current state of understanding is that the universe is about 13 billion years old, our sun is about 4.57 billion years old, and Earth is about 4.53 billion years old. Life appeared at about 3.5 billion years ago. Stars like the sun live for about 10 billion years, but smaller stars called red dwarfs could live, and support life, for thousands of times longer. IMO they're the best bet fot earlier-than-us civilizations that are still around.

I find this stuff pretty fascinating and it sounds like you are well versed in some of this. Our Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G V), often (and imprecisely) called a yellow dwarf, is a main-sequence star of spectral type G and luminosity class V. Such a star has about 0.8 to 1.2 solar masses and surface temperature of between 5,300 and 6,000 K. Like other main-sequence stars, a G V star is in the process of converting hydrogen to helium in its core by means of nuclear fusion.[2] Our Sun is the best known (and most visible) example of a G V star. Each second, it fuses approximately 600 million tons of hydrogen to helium, converting about 4 million tons of matter to energy.

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If true then multiple universes could fit the M-theory model where each universe is an oscillating membrane who sometames collide, which takes us back to that WMAP data.

What you mention here is mind boggling and takes quite a bit to wrap your head (mine anyway) around! M-theory is an extension of String Theory in which 11 dimensions are identified. Because the dimensionality exceeds the dimensionality of superstring theories in 10 dimensions, proponents believe that the 11-dimensional theory unites all five string theories (and supersedes them).

[.Neo]

we are not alone. most definitely. but it is odd we're not getting any radio, TV and data from other civs. it would seem either people capable of such technology are rare and spread out, or that we've lucked out and are among the very first to have achieved these feats.

I've read somewhere recently that radio waves (for example) start to decay pretty quickly, so it could very well be that by the time we receive something it's just background noise. That fact alone makes me wonder why people still bother to listen to the starts because it seems highly unlikely we'll find out about other life this way.

Extremely doubtful we're the first to develop this technology, there are many other starts that are older than our own.

[mudslag]

I've read somewhere recently that radio waves (for example) start to decay pretty quickly, so it could very well be that by the time we receive something it's just background noise. That fact alone makes me wonder why people still bother to listen to the starts because it seems highly unlikely we'll find out about other life this way.

Extremely doubtful we're the first to develop this technology, there are many other starts that are older than our own.

Radio waves go in virtually forever, that's why radio telescopes can see billions of light years away, but cosmic rays do degrade because they are accelerated particles - mostly protons. They run into light, radio and x-ray frequency photons as they travel, losing energy over time until little is left. This is known as the Greisen?Zatsepin?Kuzmin (GZK) limit, and amounts to about 163 million light years.

As for why we havent heard from anyone else, from my understanding it works like this. We have only be transmitting for about a 100 yrs, not very long. The problem is, that we are slowly transmitting less and less as we move more into a digital world. I think it was Michio Kaku in some interview that said we will prob stop all radio transmissions within the next hundred yrs. If thats the case, then think of our radio transmission as a doughnut, the outer edge is when we started, everything within the substance of the doughnut as our radio waves and the inner circle is when we stop transmitting. As that doughnut grows as it spreads out, so does that non-transmission hole grows.

Now given how spaced out (no pun intended) we are from other systems, if another system, even remotely close to us, has intelligent life on it, they may be less advanced then us or more advanced that they are way past the radio stage. If they are less advanced they obviously havent started transmitting. The more advanced would have stop transmitting long ago. So if that inner "no radio zone" bubble is already past us, then we would essentially have missed it already. The radio waves degrade in the sense that as they spread out there is less energy within it but they dont degrade quickly. It also depends on the frequency as well.

Again this is just from what Iv gathered from other conversations like this in the past. It could be completely wrong.

[.Neo]

Either way the chances that we'll pick something up by listing to radio signals is pretty much non-existent. :p

[neoadorable]

hey mudslag, i said the exact same thing two pages ago :angry:

and yes, Doc is indeed well-versed in industrial science and physics. however, when he starts talking about our universe being a 3D hologram i start to wonder whether he may be another Hum persona.

EDIT: from a parallel universe

[Flawed]

The galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the constellation Pavo.

That number is so daunting. It takes light 30 million years just to travel the distance. The universe is so vast it's almost impossible to comprehend.

[DocM]

....and yes, Doc is indeed well-versed in industrial science and physics. however, when he starts talking about our universe being a 3D hologram i start to wonder whether he may be another Hum persona.

The idea's been around a while and made it into the public press with a 2003 Scientific American article. Wiki has a basic writeup, if a bit dated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

***less speculative now that results are coming in supporting the idea. One hint is that reality is granular - the smallest bits being the Planck Length, like pixels in a digital image.

Holographic principle

The holographic principle is a property of quantum gravity and string theories which states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region?preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind[1] who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn.[2] In fact, as pointed out by Bousso,[3] Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.

In a larger and more speculative sense***, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are only an effective description at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.[4][5]

The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which implies that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects which have fallen into the hole can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory.

>

[mudslag]

hey mudslag, i said the exact same thing two pages ago :angry:

Sorry didnt see your post

[Xilo]

PS: the editor timed out -

If true then multiple universes could fit the M-theory model where each universe is an oscillating membrane who sometames collide, which takes us back to that WMAP data.

This sounds exactly like from The Entire and the Rose series book series. :p

[neoadorable]

it's somewhat scary to think of the universe like that...i think they mean the holographic thing as a metaphor, not something very literal, otherwise it's all very Matrix-y.

[Growled Member]

That number is so daunting. It takes light 30 million years just to travel the distance. The universe is so vast it's almost impossible to comprehend.

It is. Those numbers boggle the mind. How could anyone ever cross such a vast expanse?

[DocM]

Absen some breakthrough in directly manipulating space-time, you wouldn't.