If light-years dictate time in a sense of looking X years in the past, why is the Big Bang theory standard if we are essentially trying to discover space at the same time as our own ocean, which we know little? Does an overlap of capability not appear apparent, and if not why?
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I always understood light-year as a measure of distance. Since saying 9.46 Trillion Kilometers Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Astronomy is vastly more simple than geology or chemistry or biology.
Astronomy deals strictly with physics and mathematics. Everything can be calculated.
The oceans? They’re full of sciences that don’t have that benefit.
They’re full of complexity that makes even the most robust stellar orbits pale in comparison.
We cannot (until very recently and still not *really*) predict how 3 gravitational bodies attracted to one another will advance more than a few iterations in time.
Yet, the complexity of biology is one that requires us to sort through systems that are interacting in ways that are entirely alien to the rest of the Universe at the cosmic scales.
They’re at *our* scale. And our scale isn’t one that’s easily measured and calculated.
Light years are a measure of distance. Not time. Because of the vastness of space, the time it takes for that objects photons to hit our eyes is a measure of distance. Light travels at 9.46 trillion kilometers per year, so it’s easier to say the nearest star is about 4.35 light years, instead of however many millions of zeros are needed to get and answer of 4.35 x 9,460,000,000 kilometers. It’s a lot of zeroes.
Math and science help us put things that are vastly out of range for our minds to comprehend. From distances spanning farther than we can understand, into a number, or theory, or whatever. Time is one of these measurements. What you do with that time and how you choose to make it all make sense of it is up to you.
You can step out onto the observation deck of the Empire State building 1250 feet above the street and you’ll be fine. You can easily breathe the air. You won’t explode or be crushed by pressure or lack thereof. If you did that in the ocean you’d be crushed flat.
Space is easy compared to the ocean environment. Any airplane will get you a mile in the air. A military sub Sea Wolf class has an operational depth of only 787 feet, and a crush depth of less than 2,000 feet. It has another 0.7 miles deeper to go to get to a mile. The ocean basin is about 3.7 miles down.
The Big Bang Theory essentially states that everything we observe in the universe used to be densely packed together around 13.8 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. This is accepted as standard as you mentioned because of two main reasons:
1. Astronomers can see that, as time passes, galaxies keep expanding further away from each other and can easily predict the reverse direction of their movement.
2. The further away we look into outer space, and into the past, the more evidence we can observe of this tightly packed universe. We have even been able to create a [map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_background_radiation) of the structure of the early universe because we can see the light that was being emitted by the clumps of matter billions of years ago that eventually turned into galaxies, stars and planets.
Although there are still a lot of unanswered questions, as there always are with any complex subject, there hasn’t been any other evidence that disagrees with these observations.
Saying that we know “little” about our own ocean compared to space is just a poetic way of mentioning that we still have a lot to discover about the oceans in earth. It is in no way an objective scientific statement that is relevant in defining the capability and credibility of what is currently known about astronomy and the Big Bang Theory.
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