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I love thinking about the sheer scale of it all. This is a billion stars of the ~200-400 billion stars in our galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy (the closest to us) h

I love thinking about the sheer scale of it all. This is a billion stars of the ~200-400 billion stars in our galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy (the closest to us) has ~1 trillion stars. There's an estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone, and who knows how many in the Andromeda galaxy. There could be another satellite somewhere in this galaxy charting space just like this and we'd just be a bright dot to them among billions of other bright dots.

mkempe 8y ago
Last time I looked into this the current estimate is that there are on average 10 planets per star, so we have 1-4 trillion planets in our galaxy, and there are 10 trillion planets in Andromeda. The Universe is teeming with galaxies, which are teeming with planets. Given what we know now it is likely that they are teeming with life (organisms in a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action) as well.
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
  The majority of those planets are unsuited to anything we can imagine being alive, or only suitable for very simple unicellular life. Most of those plants are gas giants, or blazing hot gas giants. Some are rocky, but many of those are in orbits like Mercury, which would alternately bake and freeze them. Of course, part of the reason for this might be our detection methods, but as of now, we’re not finding. I hope like Earth, Venus, or Mars, while we find a lot of Jupiter’s. Maybe we’ll disocver that something like bacteria is ubiquitous, but that doesn’t imply much for our prospects of finding intelligent life. For all that we know life is common, but multicellular life is incredibly rare, or maybe it isn’t rare, but intelligent life is.
  - dugluak 8y ago
    Wondering if giants like UY Scuti have planets and how big.
    - mkempe 8y ago
      Red supergiants are necessarily no more than about 25 million years old; they keep ejecting a lot of material, forming nebulae; and then they end as supernovae. So, unlikely to have sufficient time and relative calm to form and maintain planets.
  - binalpatel 8y ago
    There's this great article I came across a few weeks ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-ex... About how we may expect life to be more prevalent than it is because our own existence is so miraculous. Though the other side is - if the universe is so large, with so many planets, then there may be a chance that there's life out there that's just as incredibly lucky as us.
  - mkempe 8y ago
    Are you arguing? I only mentioned life, not degrees of complexity of life. Ponder this: how early did life appear on Earth? what later cataclysmic events did it survive through the next several billions of years? how many living organisms are there on Earth at the moment? Finally, how you imagine life can exist or can appear is not equivalent to the facts of life on Earth, let alone in the entire Universe.
  - Brockenstein 8y ago
    I've always liked to entertain the idea that highly advanced intelligent life is an evolutionary dead-end. After all if human beings drive themselves to extinction in the next 10,000 or 50,000 years what did our intelligence get us? It didn't enable us to survive better than other species. And what if a lot of intelligent species run into this problem? Where the level of knowledge and power they amass far outstrips what they've evolved to responsibly handle. And the result is intelligent species often manage to destroy themselves before they become wise enough to avoid that.
    - magduf 8y ago
      It's interesting how insightful, thoughtful comments like this get modded down to hell on HN because they offend someone's religious beliefs. You're right, all evidence so far does point to us driving ourselves to extinction eventually, and the way things are going, it's likely to be a lot less than 10k years. And the idea of other intelligent species running into this problem isn't a new idea, it's long been a theory among searchers of extraterrestrial life, called the "great filter theory".
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Yet these themes frequently crop up among those who are making a point of the inferiority of religious thought. I have a certain distaste for how much people apparently love to think in terms of labels rather than substance. I often think downvoting is overdone, though.
        magduf 8y ago
        >The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Really? I haven't seen that at all. If you're talking about Christianity and the whole "end times" stuff, that's a little different: that isn't humanity "driving itself to extinction", that's some deity deciding that humans are bad and proactively eliminating them. I don't see that as the same thing at all. In fact, why I said this seemed to be offending peoples' religious ideals is that I think the idea of humans making themselves extinct directly counters this religious idea that a deity is the one in charge of humans' fate. To them, if humans are all eliminated, it can't possibly be because humans did it to themselves (as this is what they'd call a "humanistic" or "secular" idea), but could only happen because their deity made it so. And conversely, as long as humans are "good" enough (meaning they worship the deity enough, nothing about them wrecking their environment or obliterating themselves with nuclear weapons) then the deity will protect them from their own mistakes.
  - kwoff 8y ago
    Just about "alternately bake and freeze" (no opinion on the rest): Mercury does spin (slowly, every 60 earth days; previously was thought to be tidally locked), but on the other hand it's not tilted with respect to the "ecliptic plane" (the plane in which the planets orbit around the sun). It turns out it has water ice at the poles: https://www.space.com/18687-water-ice-messenger-discovery.html https://www.space.com/18687-water-ice-messenger-discovery.ht...
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    There are billions of galaxies though, so even if we are the only planet out of billions in our galaxy with complex life, there could still be billions of civilizations out there! For that matter, the typical planet with life could be too large and have too thick an atmosphere for space travel or astronomy and thus never have any idea the rest of the universe exists. That wouldn't necessarily mean life was limited to single cells.
NelsonMinar 8y ago
I love thinking of all this cosmic reality boiled down to a single ~100GB CSV file.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dsnuh 8y ago
  Or a 1TB XML file...
danbruc 8y ago
One either hates those comparisons or loves them, I personally like them because a hundred billion is way to abstract for me. If you fill your 50 m² apartment to a height of 1 m with table salt, then you are looking at 400 billion grains of salt. [1] [1] I once counted the grains in 1 cm³, there were pretty much exactly 8000 of them ignoring the very fine powder from crushed grains. 1 m³ of table salt gives you pretty much one grain of salt for every human on earth.
- mrybczyn 8y ago
  Excellent visualization, however you have to use the units of measurement appropriate for a space faring people who have visited the moon. So your 500 sq ft apartment is filled to a height of 3 feet with salt. That is 400 billion grains of salt.
  - danbruc 8y ago
    I actually thought about including imperial units - which seems not to be quite the correct technical term as I just found out - but did not want to encourage their further use and therefore decided against including them.
  - TallGuyShort 8y ago
    More relevantly, those are the units of measurement of a space faring people who later crashed because they couldn't keep their units straight.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I really had no idea that people that asked for others to use imperial units existed…
    - 8bitsrule 8y ago
      ... and yet in the US, most still do that outside of tech environments. Try ordering cement by the cubic meter.
    - 8y ago
Nition 8y ago
Have you seen Hubble's high-res Andromeda image? It's amazing for sense of scale [1]. Zoom in - every bit of "noise" is a star. It's also downloadable in full res [2]. Maybe use the torrent option to save their poor servers. [1] https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable [2] https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a
- Medox 8y ago
  The same picture but in a video with a very fitting song imo: https://vimeo.com/124610461 https://vimeo.com/124610461
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  There could be a google maps for this, like there is https://www.google.com/moon/ https://www.google.com/moon/
mrarjen 8y ago
It's fairly unimaginable almost to a human, even our own tiny solar system in comparison is gigantic... This video is a really good example of how to sort of wrap your head around just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE

mkempe 8y ago

Last time I looked into this the current estimate is that there are on average 10 planets per star, so we have 1-4 trillion planets in our galaxy, and there are 10 trillion planets in Andromeda. The Universe is teeming with galaxies, which are teeming with planets. Given what we know now it is likely that they are teeming with life (organisms in a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action) as well.

DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
The majority of those planets are unsuited to anything we can imagine being alive, or only suitable for very simple unicellular life. Most of those plants are gas giants, or blazing hot gas giants. Some are rocky, but many of those are in orbits like Mercury, which would alternately bake and freeze them. Of course, part of the reason for this might be our detection methods, but as of now, we’re not finding. I hope like Earth, Venus, or Mars, while we find a lot of Jupiter’s. Maybe we’ll disocver that something like bacteria is ubiquitous, but that doesn’t imply much for our prospects of finding intelligent life. For all that we know life is common, but multicellular life is incredibly rare, or maybe it isn’t rare, but intelligent life is.
- dugluak 8y ago
  Wondering if giants like UY Scuti have planets and how big.
  - mkempe 8y ago
    Red supergiants are necessarily no more than about 25 million years old; they keep ejecting a lot of material, forming nebulae; and then they end as supernovae. So, unlikely to have sufficient time and relative calm to form and maintain planets.
- binalpatel 8y ago
  There's this great article I came across a few weeks ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-ex... About how we may expect life to be more prevalent than it is because our own existence is so miraculous. Though the other side is - if the universe is so large, with so many planets, then there may be a chance that there's life out there that's just as incredibly lucky as us.
- mkempe 8y ago
  Are you arguing? I only mentioned life, not degrees of complexity of life. Ponder this: how early did life appear on Earth? what later cataclysmic events did it survive through the next several billions of years? how many living organisms are there on Earth at the moment? Finally, how you imagine life can exist or can appear is not equivalent to the facts of life on Earth, let alone in the entire Universe.
- Brockenstein 8y ago
  I've always liked to entertain the idea that highly advanced intelligent life is an evolutionary dead-end. After all if human beings drive themselves to extinction in the next 10,000 or 50,000 years what did our intelligence get us? It didn't enable us to survive better than other species. And what if a lot of intelligent species run into this problem? Where the level of knowledge and power they amass far outstrips what they've evolved to responsibly handle. And the result is intelligent species often manage to destroy themselves before they become wise enough to avoid that.
  - magduf 8y ago
    It's interesting how insightful, thoughtful comments like this get modded down to hell on HN because they offend someone's religious beliefs. You're right, all evidence so far does point to us driving ourselves to extinction eventually, and the way things are going, it's likely to be a lot less than 10k years. And the idea of other intelligent species running into this problem isn't a new idea, it's long been a theory among searchers of extraterrestrial life, called the "great filter theory".
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Yet these themes frequently crop up among those who are making a point of the inferiority of religious thought. I have a certain distaste for how much people apparently love to think in terms of labels rather than substance. I often think downvoting is overdone, though.
      - magduf 8y ago
        >The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Really? I haven't seen that at all. If you're talking about Christianity and the whole "end times" stuff, that's a little different: that isn't humanity "driving itself to extinction", that's some deity deciding that humans are bad and proactively eliminating them. I don't see that as the same thing at all. In fact, why I said this seemed to be offending peoples' religious ideals is that I think the idea of humans making themselves extinct directly counters this religious idea that a deity is the one in charge of humans' fate. To them, if humans are all eliminated, it can't possibly be because humans did it to themselves (as this is what they'd call a "humanistic" or "secular" idea), but could only happen because their deity made it so. And conversely, as long as humans are "good" enough (meaning they worship the deity enough, nothing about them wrecking their environment or obliterating themselves with nuclear weapons) then the deity will protect them from their own mistakes.
- kwoff 8y ago
  Just about "alternately bake and freeze" (no opinion on the rest): Mercury does spin (slowly, every 60 earth days; previously was thought to be tidally locked), but on the other hand it's not tilted with respect to the "ecliptic plane" (the plane in which the planets orbit around the sun). It turns out it has water ice at the poles: https://www.space.com/18687-water-ice-messenger-discovery.html https://www.space.com/18687-water-ice-messenger-discovery.ht...
- perl4ever 8y ago
  There are billions of galaxies though, so even if we are the only planet out of billions in our galaxy with complex life, there could still be billions of civilizations out there! For that matter, the typical planet with life could be too large and have too thick an atmosphere for space travel or astronomy and thus never have any idea the rest of the universe exists. That wouldn't necessarily mean life was limited to single cells.

NelsonMinar 8y ago

I love thinking of all this cosmic reality boiled down to a single ~100GB CSV file.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dsnuh 8y ago
Or a 1TB XML file...

danbruc 8y ago

One either hates those comparisons or loves them, I personally like them because a hundred billion is way to abstract for me. If you fill your 50 m² apartment to a height of 1 m with table salt, then you are looking at 400 billion grains of salt. [1] [1] I once counted the grains in 1 cm³, there were pretty much exactly 8000 of them ignoring the very fine powder from crushed grains. 1 m³ of table salt gives you pretty much one grain of salt for every human on earth.

mrybczyn 8y ago
Excellent visualization, however you have to use the units of measurement appropriate for a space faring people who have visited the moon. So your 500 sq ft apartment is filled to a height of 3 feet with salt. That is 400 billion grains of salt.
- danbruc 8y ago
  I actually thought about including imperial units - which seems not to be quite the correct technical term as I just found out - but did not want to encourage their further use and therefore decided against including them.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  More relevantly, those are the units of measurement of a space faring people who later crashed because they couldn't keep their units straight.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I really had no idea that people that asked for others to use imperial units existed…
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    ... and yet in the US, most still do that outside of tech environments. Try ordering cement by the cubic meter.
  - 8y ago

Nition 8y ago

Have you seen Hubble's high-res Andromeda image? It's amazing for sense of scale [1]. Zoom in - every bit of "noise" is a star. It's also downloadable in full res [2]. Maybe use the torrent option to save their poor servers. [1] https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable [2] https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a

Medox 8y ago
The same picture but in a video with a very fitting song imo: https://vimeo.com/124610461 https://vimeo.com/124610461
Gravityloss 8y ago
There could be a google maps for this, like there is https://www.google.com/moon/ https://www.google.com/moon/

mrarjen 8y ago

It's fairly unimaginable almost to a human, even our own tiny solar system in comparison is gigantic... This video is a really good example of how to sort of wrap your head around just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE