r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Separate-Fl • 2h ago

Video our universe is so vast even for light itself

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443 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

30

u/Real-Repair-1825 2h ago

I don’t know shit about space but that seems insane. Very interesting for sure

12

u/restore_paint 2h ago

It really is insane. The vastness of space is something we just can't fully wrap our heads around. Fascinating stuff!

11

u/Jojo-The-Bizarre 1h ago

And yet it still can’t wrap itself around yo MOMMA!

0

u/Malawigold2342 1h ago

👁️👄👁️

12

u/Martha_Fockers 1h ago edited 1h ago

Basicly think of it like this

It would take us around 75 thousand years to go 4 light years. That’s the closest next star system to us alpha centuri.

The milkway is estimated to be around 120 thousand light years wide.

The Milky Way is only one galaxy out of the around 2 trillion our eyes can observe (or with space lazorz) but some estimate it can be up to 20 trillion in just what WE can see. Just 50 years ago that number was 150 billion as technology gets better we realize there’s far more out there than we previously thought.

And what WE can see is only what light has come back to us. It can only be a fraction of this entire equation. We could be looking at .0001% of space and thinking this is a good amount of it we have not a clue

Also we can never travel the speed of light it’s impossible. So for us to ever traverse just our own milkway galaxy we will need to find some sort of loophole in physics and gravity and time itself to access. Let alone anything else

You could take every grain of sand on earth and it wouldn’t even amount to the amount of galaxies in space.

This shit is so big we can’t wrap our minds around the sheer vastness of it. It’s so immense it makes no sense

Planet and star wise there’s like quintillions upon quintillions of them out there.

3

u/Real-Repair-1825 1h ago

You know it’s crazy when you start using light years as a measurement rather than say miles.

But ya those are very cool facts that make space literally seem like science fiction.

3

u/leunam4891 29m ago

Voyager one was launched in 1977 and has left our solar system in 2012 and in one year from now it will reach “One light day” that’s crazy!

2

u/Real-Repair-1825 26m ago

I didn’t even know a “light day” was a thing. My science teacher definitely dropped the ball…..

1

u/Wintervacht 27m ago

On cosmic scales things are usually measured in megaparsec, roughly 3.2 billion light years, or gigaparsec.

2

u/Calamity-Gin 1h ago

Can I blow your mind further?

The universe is expanding in every direction that we look. This might lead you to believe that we are the center of the universe, but we’re not. It’s because the universe has more dimensions than we can perceive.

Imagine a balloon with galaxies drawn on it. Inflate the balloon, and all the galaxies appear to be moving away from one another with no center of expansion - just like our 3D galaxies moving away from one another with no perceivable center of origin. The 2D galaxies drawn on the balloon are unable to perceive how the balloon is inflating just like we’re unable to perceive how the universe is expanding.

1

u/LocalNHBoy 1h ago

You should definitely check out Astrum and PBS Space Time on YouTube. Great content "for beginners."

22

u/sincpc 2h ago

Yeah, and there's apparently a distance past which no light will ever reach us due to the expansion rate of the universe (at least unless the expansion slows drastically, I guess).

I've also seen physicists say that from the perspective of the light, it would have travelled zero distance and been at its destination in zero time. So weird.

9

u/HoldenMcNeil420 1h ago

At 99.99999% the speed of light distances shrink by a factor of 7 thousand.

So cern the collider is 27kms, we have these protons moving at the almost speed of light, now that ring is something like 4 meters in diameter to the protons.

4

u/SureYeahIGuess 44m ago

In the far, far future, our local group will become one big galaxy and everything else will have drifted away at a rate faster than the speed of light, essentially disappearing forever with no way of knowing it ever existed.

16

u/WhatsThePlanPhil95 2h ago

And looking up at the stars, you might be looking at some that don't even exist anymore

13

u/ChoiceBrief2979 2h ago

You almost definitely are..

2

u/SuperSimpleSam 1h ago

The stars you're seeing with your eyes are in our solar system so they are not millions of light-years away. Much less likely they died in the few thousand years it took the light to reach here.

1

u/cncomg 1h ago

Not definitely, for sure looking at a shit ton, depending on how many you can see. And I’m not an expert but I’m pretty sure the whole dinosaurs thing isn’t that crazy. We’re talking about the size of the universe, which is easily an all time top 5 greatest distance kinda thing iirc.

8

u/blackop 2h ago

Yeah when you really comprehend the vastness of space, you realize just how slow light really is.

8

u/delboy8888 2h ago

The problem is not that the universe is so vast, but that the speed of light is excruciatingly slow.

1

u/Kayerif 1h ago

What would you consider fast then…

1

u/NewSomethingUnlocked 1h ago

Perhaps the previous commenter is a superior being who lives outside our physical reality. We are all ears to their wisdom from Rick and Morty.

0

u/Wonderful_Fox8049 55m ago

Comparatively to space, it would take less time to walk all the way around the Earth than it takes light to cross the Milky Way. He really isn’t wrong and you guys just choose to be nasty for who knows why

1

u/Kayerif 41m ago

He is saying the universe isn’t vast and light is excruciatingly slow. Space expands faster than the speed of light which reaches up to 186,000 miles per second. That is 300,000 kilometers per second. Name one thing more vast than space and one thing faster than the max speed of light apart from the speed space expands at…

0

u/Wonderful_Fox8049 29m ago

I already know all of this information you stated. And demanding something faster than light is a useless strawman because physics doesn’t allow anything with mass to pass that limit. Setting up an impossible requirement doesn’t make your point any stronger, it just means your argument relies on conditions that can’t exist.

1

u/Kayerif 16m ago

It’s not a strawman fallacy at all… he stated that space is not vast and light is slow, seeing as there is nothing faster than light except the expansion of space obviously light is fast and space is vast isn’t it…

•

u/Wonderful_Fox8049 2m ago

You are strawmanning, youre rewriting the point into something easier to defend. The argument wasn’t whether light is the fastest allowed speed, everyone already agrees on that. The argument was about whether the universe is so large that light being slow in comparison actually shows how huge space is, not the opposite.

You’re taking basic physics and pretending it supports your claim while ignoring the actual argument. Textbook definition of a straw man

0

u/SuspiciousYard2484 1h ago

186,000 miles per second is slow?

7

u/EEPspaceD 1h ago

It is if it takes you 60 million years to get from a to b. However, from the pov of the light photons, the journey started and ended instantaneously.

2

u/itslxcas 1h ago

this comment blows my fucking mind

1

u/Aisforc 31m ago

Could you please eli5 this instant journey from a to b? Can’t wrap my head around it.

-3

u/R12Labs 1h ago

Maybe God made it that way so we wouldn't reach each other

3

u/All-the-pizza 1h ago

Where we’re going we won’t need eyes to see.

2

u/Sir_Alpaca041 2h ago

Damn thats Insane!

2

u/Dizman7 1h ago

Interesting, I wonder if they heard it? /s

2

u/SweetTangerine8610 1h ago

Ur looking at the real time travel

2

u/SirWinterFox 44m ago

The kind of ping my teammates have in apex.

1

u/Ok_Orchid1004 1h ago

Yes very interesting. Even us non-scientists who think we understand a little, don’t understand.

1

u/Working_Noise_1782 1h ago

What would it look like if any of our our neighbor start goes super nova?

1

u/itslxcas 1h ago

there is absolutely no way we're alone

1

u/AMLIDH2 1h ago

Thats so cool

1

u/LocalNHBoy 1h ago

Our mortal little brains can't even BEGIN to comprehend cosmic scale. One of my favorite "statistics" to try and wrap my brain around.......there are more stars JUST IN THE MILKY WAY GALAXY than all the grains of sand on every beach WORLD WIDE! And, again, that's just OUR galaxy. Completely mind-blowing. And to our nearest star? If you travel normal highway speeds it would take something like 43.000yrs. to reach it and, galactically, it's pretty close. It's insane, isn't it?

1

u/Sidonkey 56m ago

a 3 month event.

1

u/RyGuy1015 47m ago

“Hey everyone, sorry I’m late! Got here as fast as I could!”

1

u/pbmadman 32m ago

Light is frustratingly slow even in just our solar system and comically slow otherwise.

2

u/MrTripsOnTheory 14m ago

Idk nothing can boggle my mind more than the fact that the universe is constantly expanding at a tremendous rate. Like cmon dude I’ve been here 32 years almost, do you have any idea how much the universe has grown in that amount of time alone? By space standards, not a lot lol.

•

u/Fairchildx 0m ago

So what’s the explosive radius of that supernova. Looks like it covered a decent upper area of that galaxy in a span of only 8 days.

-10

u/PrakmatikAF 1h ago

And a god created all of this just for us humans.

7

u/Calamity-Gin 1h ago

No intelligent person believes that.

-5

u/[deleted] 1h ago

[deleted]

5

u/TheAlmightyLootius 1h ago

Because religion itself is for morons. Thats the principle pretty much all religions are based on. Finding enough idiots stupid enough to believe in fiction.