When I read articles that discuss the vastness of the cosmos and the trillions upon trillions of stars that inhabit our universe, and the likelihood that there are perhaps billions of inhabited planets out there teeming with life, the emotion I feel most is not awe, but a deep sadness for all that we’ll never know or understand about the universe. Many of these galaxies are tens of billions of light years away, so unless there’s some pretty impressive loopholes in the laws of physics as we understand them today, we as a species will never know what lies beyond the tiniest fraction of our little corner of the universe.
And that’s depressing.
Related posts:
It might cheer you up to imagine that, in all likelihood, there isn’t life on those other worlds, and that most of them are pretty boring. We’re already on the most awesome planet in the universe.
Plus, you don’t have enough time in your life to explore and know everything here. That’s what puts me off, that there are mysteries to life hidden right in front of our noses that we’ll never understand.
Thanks for the comments, and I agree that there are a lot of mysteries right under our noses that wait to be solved, but I have faith that we’ll solve those eventually.
The problem with the universe at large is that the scale is so big that our species won’t be around for the billions of years necessary to travel to those distant galaxies, let alone explore them all.
And in terms of the odds, it’s virtually certain that there’s life on those other worlds.
The observable universe contains about 3 to 7 × 10^22 stars (30 to 70 sextillion stars), organized in more than 80-100 billion galaxies. It’s also estimated that there is roughly one habitable planet per star in the universe. This mind-numbingly large estimate also ignores two things:
1. “Habitable” comes from our frame of reference on what life needs to exist: water, carbon, specific temperature range. Life in other parts of the universe might find other environments habitable, raising the estimate.
2. The observable universe may be all there is, or it may be 1 billionth of 1 percent of the universe, which might be just one of billions of universes. Or this universe could be infinite in size, and be one of an infinite number of universes. We simply don’t know.
In light of all that, it seems laughable to assume we’re the only life in the universe.
Good video to give you an idea of the scope:
http://www.5min.com/Video/Overview-Of-The-Universe-1383218
I’m way, way late in responding to this post, but there are some exciting developments in physics, most notably string theory, that may lead to travel possibilities far beyond what we’re currently capable of.