what does it mean for the universe to be infinite?
In: Planetary Science
Open a 2 litter coke bottle and look into it, like put your eye ball to where you to took the cap off and see if you can see where the bottle ends, you know where it ends but your eye can’t see the end. Right now our eye is where we took the cap off but our hand hasn’t reach the bottom of the bottle
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
What does it “mean”? Everything in the universal context because it probably affects how the universe evolves over time (and how it eventually ends). In the human context, other than knowledge, the “meaning” is probably zero.
The earth will very likely be baked by the sun and become incapable of supporting life in a billion years or two (which is “nothing” in terms of any conceivable lifetime of the universe). If we progress to the point of being able to support humanity on other planets or colonies, then perhaps we’ll colonize/terraform and continue to survive as a species around this solar system. With enough time, perhaps we develop the technology to construct generational space travel that may allow us to colonize the nearby star systems. All of these are “temporary” in the sense that no star lives forever – so we will eventually have to learn how to spread out more.
Even given these assumptions, it is unlikely that our species ever leaves this galaxy (or this plus Andromeda which will likely merge with the Milky Way). With the most super optimistic projections, humans (or whatever we evolve to) might explore nearby galaxies in our local cluster. But that appears to be it. No matter how “finite” or “infinite” our universe is, most of it will forever (ie until the universe dies) be beyond humanity.
Latest Answers