RE: You think you are special to all this? Ok......
February 23, 2016 at 12:09 pm
(This post was last modified: February 23, 2016 at 12:12 pm by Alex K.)
(February 23, 2016 at 9:40 am)abaris Wrote:(February 23, 2016 at 8:35 am)Excited Penguin Wrote: I thought it was something like ~90 billion ly across.
It's not important, since all of these calculations are based on what we know - as of yet. Give it another few decades and it might turn out to be even larger. Give it another few decades and what is now only considered a possibility, might turn into a theory. The multiverse.
It's huge, that's all that counts. And we're not even a dot making up it's entirety. Just the same way, as humanity is just a bad and shortlived joke compared to earth's history and preexisting life forms.
To be clear though, the 90 billion lightyears is not the estimate for the size of the entire universe, but a measurement for the observable universe - that's not very likely to change dramatically. Most cosmologists would probably guess that the universe as a whole if finite at all, is much much much larger. If inflation happened as people suspect it did, numbers suggest it was an increase by a factor of like 10^30 in size, and in that scenario it seems very unlikely that it would just have accidentally stopped at or anywhere near the size of our observable universe as we see it now.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition