Cowboy Cosmology

[Wayne]

 

[injest]

Sort of funny - the news coverage is focusing on this being "bad" news because perchlorate in the soil means the soil is less likely to currently contain living organisms.

There is to be a press briefing at 2pm today. We'll see if they mention the oxygen thing.     

but even if all we find is fossils...that is still HUGE, Wayne....it would be proof we are not alone. not the end of God's creation but just a part.

[Wayne]

Yeah.    My guess is panspermia. I suspect life survives in rocks in space that rain down now and again and seed planets at random. Bacteria, a few sea monkeys. Hey, they survive being sent through the US mail.   

Our current sun and solar system are maybe the 3rd or 4th generation in this region. The same rock, metals, and gases have re-exploded and re-coalesced several times into stars and planets. Maybe life evolved on planets circling suns that have long since gone nova. Doesn't explain how it came to be in the first place, but it does suggest that there may have been a longer history to life than the 4.5 billion years since the Earth came into being.

The universe is not that much older - 14 billion years but there could have been 2 or 3 generations of sun and planets here before the current configuration.

A bit like Jurassic Park 2: Something has survived.   

[Wayne]

Oooh, that reminds me! I worked out my cosmology last weekend.

[Wayne]

I have been wondering what happened before the Big Bang, and I'm guessing that it occurred where two former universes collided.

Each of them had been produced by its own Big Bang, at great distances apart. Each of them expanded from their own Big Bang into vast empty space. But then their outer, more or less spherical edges approached each other and eventually "touched". Of course, a universe is itself mostly empty space between galaxies, which are themselves mostly empty space between stars, so there wasn't a lot of real contact at first.

But a point of intersection became a growing disc of intersection between the two. No big deal for a very very long time.

As matter and energy continued to spread from each of the two big bangs, the intersecting area became denser than the rest of the space occupied by the two universes. With its own gravity, it began to pull in matter and energy from the two universes.

A long time passed.

The disk-shaped intersection probably acquired some spin as a result of the net spin of the two universes, unless they just happened to perfectly cancel each other out.

The growing mass began to pull more and more of the two universes in, and began to collapse on itself from its own gravity.

It became so dense that there was no more space between the galaxies, then no more space between the stars, then no more space between the atoms.

Then electrons began to collapse from the "shells" they normally occupy right down into the atomic nuclei, and matter changed to "plasma" under the great pressure.

That collapse continued until the total amount of matter and energy in the exceedingly dense ball crossed some threshold. And then it exploded, and that was our Big Bang.

And that original spinning disk is reflected in the "hotter" yellow and red spots in the map of the outer shell of the universe above.

At least that's what I think right now.   

[injest]

I think you think more about stuff than me....and it is interesting to read what you DO think.

It hurts my head to think too much about the 'universe' and what might be outside it. Cause how could something be outside the universe if the universe is everything?

[injest]

hmmmmm!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7543776.stm

why dont' I ever discover something?

[Wayne]

Well, our universe is limited by what can be seen by telescopes. And what can be seen by a scope is limited by the speed of light.

The current understanding is the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, and I've read that galaxies have been identified that are 12 to 13 billion light-years away. That means the light we are seeing left those galaxies 12 to 13 billion years ago, so we are seeing them as they were in the first billion years or so after the BB.

Beyond that, there is a sphere of haze. There were no galaxies yet to send out any light. Presumably that haze prevents us from seeing any farther. So our universe more or less coincides with "everything produced by our Big Bang."

One could imagine though, that a clear enough spot could exist in the sphere of haze that you could see through it, and beyond to the product of another Big Bang. Probably just a dot, but a whole nother universe, as it existed many billions of years ago.

[Wayne]

where two former universes collided.

Another possibility would be that two universes expanding and intersecting would not provide enough material to reach the critical mass necessary for a Big Bang. After all, they both resulted from their own Big Bangs, which must have occurred when they reached critical mass, and more than half of the material of those universes is heading either away from the intersection or out at a perpendicular or close to perpendicular angle.

So in that case maybe a third universe comes in as a trigger.

Probably don't need a fourth universe.   

[Wayne]

why don't I ever discover something?

    Well then here's what you should discover! See if you can discover another universe.

The strategy would be to look through the least hazy part of the shell of our universe. That would be the dark blue parts near the center and the right side of the big oval on the previous page.

Probly won't look like much more than a dot. One way you could tell if it's another universe, instead of a star or a galaxy in our universe, would be if it had a blue shift (meaning it's coming toward us) instead of a red shift (meaning it's going away from us). Everything in our universe has a red shift, because the whole universe is spreading apart.

Actually it probably wouldn't have a blue shift, it would just have no shift.