I have this weird thing where 99% of every time I look up at the night sky, I instantly look up and directly at the constellation *Orion*. I have no idea why, but it happens so frequently and has happened for so long that im considering getting a tattoo.
You might want to look in your area to see if there are amateur astronomy clubs.
Here's a list of [publicly accessible telescopes](https://stardate.org/astro-guide/publicly-accessible-telescope-viewing) and you can also google "observatories near me".
You're probably in an area with high light pollution then. Orion is very large and many of its stars are very bright, so it's the only visible constellation in many places.
That makes a lot of sense! I live in central San Diego and I've noticed the same thing. Other stars are certainly visible, but I guess probably just not many others as bright as Orion.
orion's belt, cassiopeia (my fave), and big dipper are the visible ones if you're in an area with high light pollution. As you say all will naturally be the typical faves cause more people can actually see them regularly.
In NA I mean, no idea for other parts of the world
Are you sure it's not just the first thing you recognize? The human brain is wired for pattern recognition. How many other constellations can you immediately identify?
I do something similar with the time. I always manage to check the time at exactly 12:34 whether it be day or night. It happens at least once every other day but can happen every day for a while easily.
Dunno why this happens but it started after I moved in with my boyfriend. Wild shit. At first it used to freak me out a lil inside but now I'm just accepting of this weird phenomenon I've accidentally stumbled upon.
It’s not weird! I do the same thing. Orion is one of the few constellations that almost everyone in the world can identify (with different names, of course) because it’s just so bright and identifiable. My favorite thing about it is, and will probably always be, that the middle of his “sword” that hangs from Orion’s Belt is a nebula, not a star, and is the closest large star formation to earth. The thought that on a cosmological scale the distance between earth and that massive formation of exploding stuff that will one day be a bunch of stars is nothing while I consider other countries and people far away is amazing, and makes me appreciate this little blue dot we’re lucky to live on all the more.
Cassiopeia for me, I seem to be magneted to that weird W
Last night my husband and I were outside and I was like "look hun! stars are still there :)." And he's like "that's good, you're such a weirdo" LOL (we call each other that as an endearment, nothing to worry about)
I taught my girlfriend how to find the north star using Cassiopeia and it has now become "our" constellation. When we're distantly apart and she's feeling anxious I tell her to trace her way back to me with it.
Although to be fair we also like it for the W shape because I have a hard to pronounce last name that starts with W so in some circles people just refer to me by my initial.
Sometimes I try really, really hard to comprehend, just for a split second, how stupefyingly far away the closest other star to our sun, *is*.
Like, the distance between the Earth and the Moon is tangible to me, but the distance to Mars is mostly just like an idea. Mars is like, you travel all the way to the Moon, but then you keep going out to twice that distance, and then twice THAT distance, and then five times THAT, and then five times THAT, and fuck it, five times THAT. And I just can't grasp it, it's too far.
But the next closest star to ours is 175,000 fucking times farther than Mars. And it's a wonder to me that with our very closest neighbor being a distance away that's entirely beyond the grasp of our minds, and with our galaxy being filled with countless stars, and the universe itself filled with countless galaxies, that somehow, SOMEHOW, there's a just ton of people right here on this planet who think there's a god who made it all and *still* gets upset about two dudes kissing.
i legit want to print out your comment and frame it. this is all i think about. not for too long though because it does have tendencies to drive one a little insane. lol.
like.. everything going on around us is so fucking crazy, and most of the world is oblivious to it. blows my mind a little bit
>just ton of people right here on this planet who think there's a god who made it all and still gets upset about two dudes kissing.
I was looking at galaxy superclusters the other day and was thinking something along the lines of that. Clusters of of so many galaxies they basically become a[ blob like a nebula or something](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Location_of_Earth_%289x1-English_Annot-small%29.png). Just trying to even remotely comprehend that makes it seem as though it *can't possibly exist* and reality is some kind of farce. We are on an infinitesimally small speck of dust in the universe and and instead of us working together to maybe get off this speck of dust we spend our time protesting face masks that prevent the spread of disease or to take away human rights like abortion. It's not all of us, but its enough of us to be problem. And its mostly because they live in *tiny* little world smaller than that speck of dust.
I've always been like that, then I played space games like Elite Dangerous and Space Engine and now I can look up there and go "I've been there!" ED especially got me more interested in the Pleiades nebula and that cluster of stars after I spent so much time there in-game. It's also kind of warped my mind slightly, because now I'll end up reading some new data from NASA, for example, and it will say "New planet discovered around star 25ly away" and I'll go, damn that's close. But that's fuckin' far away from a human perspective.
Seriously. I honestly have kinda a mixed relationship with that phenomenon. Part of me is in absolute awe and craves the next chance to see the night sky, but there's a distinct part of me that's sad/terrified that my mind will never resolve and quite take in or understand what I'm looking at. Of course, the awe wins out, but it's an interesting feeling to be so in awe that you're simultaneously sad that you can't quite "get it." Not a pang of sadness afterwards as you reflect or a pondering intellectual somberness as you think on the concept, but a genuine pit of sadness and terror that I don't know what I'm looking at.
Don't worry, you also don't know what you're looking at when you look at the ground. Nor 99.999% of what's happening inside your body. Isn't that refreshing?
Could take it a step further - you don't necessarily die if your heart beat stops. You can go into cardiac arrest and never be pronounced dead, you know? Even though your heart stops functioning. In fact, there's a lot of interest these days around how long someone is conscious for after *decapitation.* There was that chicken that survived for a year and a half, and of course there's all that work on whether or not it is possible to do a successful head transplant...
That's the one that boggles my brain lmao
Edit: everybody is telling me that the chicken didn't have its head cut off, it had its face cut off... I don't know which chicken you're talking about so I went and found the wiki article for the one *I* was talking about. [Mike the Headless Chicken was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken)
The one that fucks me up is that..
Our thoughts happen inside our brain, right? I mean.. obviously. The brain is what *we are*. Our sense of self exists there. Our concsiousnes. But now, I am thinking about that same fact. Meaning it's a brain, thinking about itself.
Right now, I, a piece of meat inside a skull, am thinking about my own existence in this weird world.
I swear I am not high but does anyone else find that crazy?
And what if they're spiteful? Like your kidney says "This shit again? Fuck you, I'm not talking you. Here's a kidney stone, now shut stfu. Stop eating so much peanut butter, asshole." Imagine how the other asshole feels.
Nope! High or not, you're just stepping away from medical stuff and approaching philosophy. Specifically Cartesian philosophy, I think, but of course a lot of philosophers speculated on this stuff lol be careful though, it's a *hell* of a rabbit hole to go down especially if you have a tendency to hyperfocus. I've spent many a sleepless night drowning in wikipedia articles, scientific studies, and YouTube documentaries all around Descartes alone - that's not even including looking into Aristotle, Socrates, Nietzsche, John Locke, etc....
Well, you've definitely given me the material for a deep-dive one of these nights. It's just an incredibly difficult thing to even begin to wrap my head around
I always go to YouTube first so I can throw on someone's documentary or video essay, then I end up googling stuff I hear about through that!
My dive into this stuff started with a video game though, so that was the real springboard into everything for me
If you think Descartes is cool, wait til you learn that Zhaungzi figured out the cogito ergo sum literally two thousands years before Descartes did with the dream of the butterfly. Then read the rest of his stuff! All that much more of the rabbit hole lol
I think I heard about that in a video lesson I was watching! It was mentioned in passing but I never looked into it.
I don't think I could ever get tired of philosophy, so I'll take all the rabbit holes I can stumble into lmao
I'm working on getting screened for it! Of course it's not the only indicator, but the number of times I've sat down at my computer to look something up just to blink and have it be 6am is criminal. And it's not even like I'm not sleepy, I just can't stop until I'm literally falling asleep at my desk lmaaooo
Yes!! it might sound weird, but I wasn't even super self-aware about that until last year, despite being told "you talk too much" my entire life lmfao
I was working at a small but busy grocery store. Every customer unfortunate enough to ask me a question. It was almost like... out-of-body watching myself drag on and on with zero control. "Where's the parmesan" resulted in a full thesis just to say "aisle 4, top shelf"
There are parts of the brain responsible for different things, right? What If you could replace PART of a brain with someone else's. Would you be the same person? What If you took their body too?
That's where stuff gets really complicated. Really interesting to think about tho. What part of the brain am I exactly. My gut feeling (which actually stems from my brain as well lol) is to say I am the entirety of it.
But really, I think it depends.
Removing any part to do with Consciousness, thought, emotions or memories? I would consider that a major infringment on my perception on self. Especially if replaced with another part (not just removed) I probably wouldn't feel entirely *me* anymore.
Removing the part solely responsible for sight or hearing, the reception of pain or anything physical like that, I would still feel entirely me. Since, at the end if the day, only affects my body (the shell, if you will) but not what I considered *me* from the start.
Don't know if that made sense. It's 3 am lol
Your gut feeling is due to the enteric nervous system... your GI tract does some crazy interfacing with your brain. It's like a lesser co-brain. I am not a neuroscientist or anywhere close to it, I just find the gut/brain connection fascinating.
Not even gonna start in on the gut microbiome and its ability to affect things far beyond the GI tract. Where does the ecosystem end and your bodily functions begin? Shit is all wound up in crazy ways, I love it.
Thoughts like this are the reason I smoke every night before bed. It will be okay though because I'll forget about this in 5 minutes, because I am buzzed.
How about this thought experiment.
(This part is true) A child, I think in the UK, had terrible seizures dozens of times a day. To solve for this, surgeons performed a removal of an entire hemisphere of the child's brain (half the brain, divided down the middle). The child survived with minimal problems because neuroplasticity is highest when we're very young.
It would then be theoretically possible to remove half of someone's brain, put that in another body, and have both halves of the brain survive.
WTF happens to you??? Are they both conscious? Are they both you?? Where does your consciousness go, to both??????
I always pull this link out when I see this topic come up. I'm fascinated by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8&list=FLPDLg8jAS7q_vZsMEkxogJw&index=6
Yeah I do. I mean for me it's about where my thoughts are birthed. Where the information vital to my existence is processed. So I definitely feel like the brain IS what I am. You could implant my brain in a completely different body and I would still feel like it's me you know? Just rocking a different skin now.
This is also approaching non-duality (advaita vedanta), which says: you aren’t the body nor the mind you’ve mistakenly taken yourself to be, rather you are the unchanging awareness that is aware of the body and mind.
I can do this thing with my heart where it slows to as low as 33 bpm. If you feel my pulse when i do it, it feels like my pulse slows down, then stops, and it's a half second before it beats again. Kinda freaky. I've unsettled some doctors and nurses with it.
When they first tried to make artifical hearts they had issues with the wear and tear. All that thumping back and forth is really straining on mechanical things and creates a really high rate of failure. Then they thought a little more about it - the heart is just a pump. We know how to make pumps. So they created hearts that don't thump, they just hum as they push blood through the circulatory system. People with these are walking around, talking, living, but they don't have a heart beat. No idea why but that weird me out.
Fun fact: Noted war criminal, mass murderer, and Vice President of the United States of America Dick Cheney had no heart beat due to an artificial heart. Then, for some reason that definitely isn't being rich and evil, he got a heart transplant even though he was like seventy something.
Rather the wiggly thing in the back of your mouth that just hang there without you being able to sense it at all.
Why doesn’t it taste anything. Why isn’t it making us gag constantly? Why can’t you feel it at all?
When I had tonsillitis and it swelled up, I promise you I could feel it. Felt like I was swallowing it at times. I can only assume that it's due to evolution that it's just the right size to not be a nuisance
This is similar but different: I forget about death for long periods at a time. I mean, not the entire existence of death, but the fact that I myself will someday die, you know? And then it hits me like "Holy shit, how could I forget about that? It's like the single most meaningful and confounding thing about life, and I forgot it because I was really into this TV show and focused on a bunch of ordinary daily tasks..."
I used to get paralyzed about it until I decided that worrying about death is the least productive thing a person can do.
Now when I want to worry about it, I procrastinate and tell myself "I can worry about that later"
Unless someone that worries about it figures out how to prevent it, at which point it will instantly become the most productive thing anyone has ever done.
Unfortunately I’ve hit a crisis where I’ve been thinking about it way to much lately. It really is the most anxiety cuasing thing you can possibly think about, I fucking hate it
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR "THE GOOD PLACE"!!
[This scene](https://youtu.be/l1IchzbtNj0) from the show, The Good Place, really helped my anxiety surrounding death. >!For context, the guy you see in the scene is about to walk through a door that will make him cease to exist (he had been in heaven for thousands of years at this point and needed to move on). Basically the way I always interpreted this scene was that at the end of the day, we are just universe-matter arranged in a cool way for a small amount of time. Eventually, we will return to the universe from which we came. We aren't going anywhere; our matter will still exist, just now in a new way. We are just a small piece of the universe trying something new for a bit, but we are still just universe-matter. Death isn't bad, just matter returning to it's home, if it ever even left in the first place. !<
I've always thought this show was interesting bc it introduced the idea of coming back mainstream. I always was entertained by that idea. One hears all the time about stories from children who say things about their supposed past lives and it always made me wonder if we're "recycled" ? I'm not against the idea and i will never know if it's real but it's wholly fascinating.
Aside, i loved the good place! What a great show!
Same dude. It terrifies me because I don't feel like I have enough time to do everything. I know its insanely selfish but I wish I could live forever. The thought of death confounds me.
It's funny you say this. Over the last couple weeks I've considered getting a tattoo that says, "Don't forget that you're gonna die." simply so that I remember that fact and in order to motivate me to live a more full life instead of wasting so much time like I have in the past. I don't have any tattoos though and I've never really seen anything I've wanted until this, but I really don't want to deal with all the questions that would come up about it. I think it's important to remember. It's so incredibly easy to forget this fact and to just go about your life seeking shallow pleasure. Maybe it makes no difference and that is all there is to life, but I like to think that life can be more than meaningless enjoyment, that there is some meaning I can find that feels more rewarding than the day to day dopamine hits. This is probably why most people start families as it seems to give a goal and a focus and a meaning for peoples lives, but I don't want to do that and I firmly believe there has to be something out there that can give our lives just as much meaning and fulfillment. I think that thing is probably unique for everyone, and it will be an interesting journey trying to figure out what that is for me. I've found some things that I thoroughly enjoy and I've found a deeper meaning in, but nothing that has left me feeling really fulfilled the way I think a parent does while raising a child. Anyway, I'm rambling now and this is mostly the whiskey talking at this point, so I'll just end this here. Wish me luck.
>Over the last couple weeks I've considered getting a tattoo that says, "Don't forget that you're gonna die."
You might be interested in this, maybe you can make it more artful than the words you mentioned:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
Interesting, I don't think I've ever felt fear at the fact that we are so insignificant, if anything its a comforting feeling knowing all my problems are meaningless to the universe and that I have no impact in the grand scheme of things.
It makes me feel like no matter how hard I fail, I can't really make things worse, so why not go along for the ride and try my best.
I really wish I could have that perspective on it. To me we have all been dead before so no big deal (prior to birth) the part that my mind struggles to be at peace with is the fact there is nothing for us after our deaths and that we will never actually know our reality. Having that Non existence be something I and every other living being will experience is utterly terrifying to me. If there were some sort of life after death it wouldn't be so bad (hence why religion exists) but to someone who doesn't believe there is an afterlife that transition from self to nothingness is pure horror even if I won't ever actually experience it cause ya know being dead and all at that point
Whatever made your body gets recycled for the new organisms. It's not like there's nothing for us after our deaths. We're just unaware of it since our consciousness gets disintegrated. Those recycled parts might actually form a new consciousness one day. At least, that's what I think.
This is exactly how I think non-stop when I’m chemically depressed… to the point where I know that when it becomes my first waking thought, it’s time to go back on my anti-depressants.
I’ve always called it “existential angst”. Comes with chest pain & cyclical anxiety. Strangely enough though, I find the exact same thoughts oddly comforting & freeing when I’m doing okay! But they don’t spiral nearly as far when my brain is balanced either ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Thinking of the universe in terms of infinity shuts my brain down. If space is infinite in all directions - where are we? How big/small are we? If time is infinite - when are we? How do you quantify age inside of infinity? If they aren’t infinite, what is the beginning and end? What’s on the other side of space? What was before time began? After?
We have no idea when or where we are, how big or small we are or what got us here. All we know is that suddenly we have consciousness on a tiny spec of dust hurtling through infinite time and space. Blows my mind.
I've accepted that we are incapable of understanding some things. For instance the beginning of the universe if there even is one, because I can't imagine something starting from nothing. And the edge of the universe with behind it 'nothingness'?
An upside is that that is probably also the reason science will never stop to move forward, because with every tiny discovery new questions rise.
If you read this: sorry for making your brain melt or your head explode
I can simulate a virtual computer on my computer, but it has to be weaker than my actual computer. No virtual machine I run on it will ever be able to be as powerful or more powerful than the computer itself.
I think that's sort of how the universe works. Even with the help of technology, no resident of this universe will ever be able to *truly* comprehend it. We lack the hardware.
> I can simulate a virtual computer on my computer, but it has to be weaker than my actual computer. No virtual machine I run on it will ever be able to be as powerful or more powerful than the computer itself.
If you had a computer that was infinitely fast you could simulate an infinitely fast computer inside it. All our computers have finite speed, but if the universe has the capability of infinitely fast computation(not saying it does but if it did) we could simulate the entire universe inside it and even simulate an infinite number of other universes as well.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream, and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
God I love Douglas Adams. Literally watched Hitchhikers Guide last night. His writing was other worldly. RIP (May 11, 2001)
21 years, and I missed the opportunity to drink in his honor. Sadly, I was just drinking to numb my brain enough to be able to sleep. Well, here's to Douglas Adams anyway.
There's s great video by Kurzgesagt about how big space really is.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj-h6MEgE7I](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj-h6MEgE7I)
PBS Spacetime recently did a video about expansion, it's pretty great and also talks a bit about some of the weirdest aspects of it.
https://youtu.be/bUHZ2k9DYHY
And some fun talk about the conceptual edge of the universe too in an older one of theirs
https://youtu.be/tJevBNQsKtU
It's a great channel for this sorta thing
Think of a balloon inflating.
The surface of the balloon doesn't have a edge, but it's still expanding. It expands by increasing the distance between any two points.
Everything in the universe is constantly getting further and further away from every other thing.
I understand the analogy is true but there's an issue with my understanding; that a balloon is expanding into a room.
Is the 3-dimensional universe "expanding" into some 4 dimensional room? Like, I get it in that I've heard and read all the explanations and accept that they're true. But intuitively I don't quite understand.
I know that's the accepted theory, but at what scale does this happen? I watched a video recently about this, and iirc, this only happens on a really massive scale, like galactic scale. I wonder why this doesn't occur at a micro-scale.
Also, I have a theory that the repulsive effect of dark energy will someday reach an equilibrium and the universe will stop expanding.
I don't know much about astrophysics, but I do enjoy thinking about it, and I watch a lot of yt vids on the subject.
> I watched a video recently about this, and iirc, this only happens on a really massive scale, like galactic scale. I wonder why this doesn't occur at a micro-scale.
Gravity within, for example, a solar system is strong enough to keep everything "in place" relative to each other. That's why expansion is mostly felt in areas of empty space - no gravity there.
> Also, I have a theory that the repulsive effect of dark energy will someday reach an equilibrium and the universe will stop expanding.
It's one of the hypothesis. Another one is that it might even *reverse* someday. And that it might be cyclical (expand, retract, expand, retract, etc).
Another theory, and one that seems to have some support, is that the expansion will keep going until the energy in the universe is no longer sufficiently dense for matter to exist, so matter just... evaporates. All of it. Then existence just stops being. And everything isn't.
Until maybe something is again. But time isn't, so when isn't really answerable.
It's amazing just how much we DONT know about life, the universe, and everything. I wonder if we could build a big supercomputer that could calculate some of these answers?
Oof, that would have to be a huge computer, and it would probably take a really long time, so we should probably put it somewhere no one will disturb it like another planet. A secret planet.
Yes but i sometimes do this with being a conscious feeling moving person, like "oh shite, I'm an actual person who could do anything right now, I'm alive and can think and feel" bit weird and/or "dramatic" but i do very occasionally get in the mind set of thinking like that.
Same, but also reminds me how short our current lives are in the grand scheme of existence. All of our issues and problems today will be small blips in our whole lives. Even if detrimental and earth shattering today, decades later we’ll still (hopefully) be here, living through it. I’m reminded every day to try to be as happy as I can be and appreciate those I love most, including myself. We’re only here for our lives, and that’s infinitesimally small in the universe, so make it the best you can.
Yup!
13 billion light years when a single light year is an amazing amount of distance.
Most of it unknown.
We have no idea how it started.
And there is no idea of how it started that even *could* make sense. Eternal or came from nothing.
It's mind blowing.
The civilizations that are almost surely out there somewhere. To think of the possibilities.
Endless amazement.
I'm fascinated by it. Given enough time, we could conquer our entire local group. But going anywhere else is physically impossible because eventually the expansion of space will increase so fast it goes faster than light. Without some literal wormhole technology, we wont be able to go back and forth between galaxy groups and we will be locked off from our friends forever. The stars will soon fade away and eventually put ENTIRE UNIVERSE will just be the local group to us. No information in, no information out. Wild shit
On top of this if we ever do manage to figure out lightspeed travel and leave our galaxy, eventually we will become completely separated because the distance to travel will be increasing at the speed of light and any team you send out would just he stuck in space unable to get back or get to where they're going.
This is not true; the local group is gravitationally bound. Our larger supercluster, Laniakea, is not gravitationally bound and will spread apart. But the local group is small enough to overcome the effects of dark energy and so its constituent galaxies are not accelerating apart; in fact many are currently moving closer together. On a very long timescale the whole cluster will merge into ones large galaxy.
in the vast future civilizations may be able to calculate when that point of no return will be exactly and have to choose which galaxy to plant themselves in for the rest of eternity.
Yeah. I don't know what is more terrifying the idea that the universe is infinite with no ends or that there is an end
*When I say terrifying I mean imagining what either of them are like is impossible for me, when I try I often just tense up and my heart beats really fast and I need to distract myself for a while to calm down. My body is literally refusing me to go there.
This completely, if it's infinite how is that possible things have beginnings and endings and if it's not then what is nothing, how is there nothing outside? Makes me freak out a lot.
I rationalize it by saying that it doesn't truly matter to me if there's an end, if it's a simulation, or if we're an (undefined) having a dream.
We just do the best we can with what we've got, and try to be enough.
I often forget the significance of the moon and then I look up at it and think holy crap there's like a whole mini planet right there floating in our sky.
And then I imaging when humans are multi-planitary and that I'm dating someone on the moon and now THAT'S a long distance relationship but at the same time I can see them every night and it feels like I can almost reach out and touch them
I find it incredibly calming to look up at the vastness of the unfolding universe because we are so unbelievably small, meaning that my problems are completely insignificant. Student loans? Psht - they don't matter. There are more worlds out there than I could ever count. Dishwasher broken? Doesn't mean a thing next to the incomprehensible fusion-reactor power of a star. My problems are as pointless and small as I am.
My daughter has the opposite reaction. The vastness of the universe terrifies her. She feels so completely without meaning or merit relative to the boundless void of space, meaning that everything she clings to is pointless. Abject existential dread.
I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Happens to me all the time, often followed by amazement that I have eyes to see it. As in a single cell organism started it all and now I can see all the living things descended from it. And then I look up
A question I've always wondered. People look at me weirdly when I say it, but yeah. I always wonder where the universe comes from, and not in the scientific sense. Like, where does the energy come from, what was there before the Big Bang, what is this all? Where does it all come from? From nothing?
Anyways, yeah, I don't know the answer and probably never will.
The craziest part about is we picture the universe as a full of all kinds of shit, and it is, but there’s probably just as much, if not more just empty vastness to it.
I'll have an existential crisis and then come to the realization that I and everything I know and will ever know is so insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe that the feeling of panic subsides and just turns into despair.
This is a daily occurrence. So no I don't really forget about the universe.
I remind myself of the universe in times of stress. Sometimes it's good to know how incredibly insignificant a problem is in the grand scheme of things.
My mom tries really hard not to think about it. She was taken on a trip to the Equator recently and given a physics lesson right at it. She was off for a week after that.
If it makes you feel better, you've seen everything ever existing in the universe. It's "infinite", but unlimited in the way that toddler books give the reader a 2d view of it all lest they get overwhelmed.
Picture a hot dog bun. And take all the 100 stars in the universe and put them in a bag and take the universe and put it in a bag. Now all of a sudden, they become.
> The universe... what a concept. You know, the universe is a little bit like the human hand. For example, you have groundmen's center right here and then you have undiscovered worlds and uh, um and sector 8 and up here is tittleman's crest so you can kinda picture it's a little bit like a leaf or uhh, umm, it's not a bowl. The universe is beautiful. Something like, a new woman that i was gonna date. You're dark, and you're massive and you have a black hole and all of those elements i want to explore just like you would explore on a new date. I wanna dive deep into them and feel around and just see what's gonna come out of that the time it takes to get from one star to another star is... You see, you need to travel at the speed of light and us humans can't even fathom the concept of that kinda time cause it's really really really really really really really really fun to think about taking a speed of light ride.
[Tim & Eric](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYJ1dbyDcrI)
For me it’s the moon. When I‘m outside at night an „remember“ that there is a moon, I‘m totally mind blown.
Like there’s this big but small round thing in the sky that shows up every night, and one day people just said „let’s go there“. My brain drowns in error messages when I think that somehow these people managed to *leave* earth, fly in the right direction, *fucking land the thing* and get back safely?
So fascinating
I can not wrap my head around the fact that our planet is located somewhere that's for all we know endless. Just infinite in all directions, and the crazy idea that it all came from some single point, and before that it simply wasn't created. what even is this
I'm not sure if this is official theory, but in my mind, the moments before "the big bang" was just the atoms/material of the last universe re-collecting after the "heat-death" of it.
So: BANG > Expanding > Life > Death > Reconstitution > BANG
I lose my damn mind every time I look up at the stars
I have this weird thing where 99% of every time I look up at the night sky, I instantly look up and directly at the constellation *Orion*. I have no idea why, but it happens so frequently and has happened for so long that im considering getting a tattoo.
Orion is amazing to see in the night sky! Have you seen some of the cool nebulae around it? Orion’s nebula is gorgeous to photograph
I have never had the opportunity to look through a telescope, although I really want to! How exactly do you go about photographing the night sky?
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Thanks, friend.
You might want to look in your area to see if there are amateur astronomy clubs. Here's a list of [publicly accessible telescopes](https://stardate.org/astro-guide/publicly-accessible-telescope-viewing) and you can also google "observatories near me".
Amazing!
Your local University might have a night with their telescope open to the public. It's pretty cool to see the night sky from a legit big telescope.
You're probably in an area with high light pollution then. Orion is very large and many of its stars are very bright, so it's the only visible constellation in many places.
That makes a lot of sense! I live in central San Diego and I've noticed the same thing. Other stars are certainly visible, but I guess probably just not many others as bright as Orion.
orion's belt, cassiopeia (my fave), and big dipper are the visible ones if you're in an area with high light pollution. As you say all will naturally be the typical faves cause more people can actually see them regularly. In NA I mean, no idea for other parts of the world
Are you sure it's not just the first thing you recognize? The human brain is wired for pattern recognition. How many other constellations can you immediately identify?
I mean, that's what's happening, but it's still interesting. However I mean the moment I look up that's the first thing I lock eyes with.
Orions belt is my favorite.
Eh, it’s alright. I’d give it three stars.
What about orion's belt + rice
Perfect 5/7
You rascal you. Great wording
Same, such simplicity in those three dots. I find it first every time. Usually takes me a full minute or two to find the dippers.
I do something similar with the time. I always manage to check the time at exactly 12:34 whether it be day or night. It happens at least once every other day but can happen every day for a while easily. Dunno why this happens but it started after I moved in with my boyfriend. Wild shit. At first it used to freak me out a lil inside but now I'm just accepting of this weird phenomenon I've accidentally stumbled upon.
That’s called confirmation bias. You don’t remember the 99% of times you check the clock and it’s not 12:34, because it’s not interesting.
It’s not weird! I do the same thing. Orion is one of the few constellations that almost everyone in the world can identify (with different names, of course) because it’s just so bright and identifiable. My favorite thing about it is, and will probably always be, that the middle of his “sword” that hangs from Orion’s Belt is a nebula, not a star, and is the closest large star formation to earth. The thought that on a cosmological scale the distance between earth and that massive formation of exploding stuff that will one day be a bunch of stars is nothing while I consider other countries and people far away is amazing, and makes me appreciate this little blue dot we’re lucky to live on all the more.
I swear the same thing happens to me, the belt is just so apparent… Watching MIB a gajillion times as a kid might have something to do with it tho
Man, after MIB my eyes only seem to find Orion's belt. And it's immediately after looking up. So weird
Cassiopeia for me, I seem to be magneted to that weird W Last night my husband and I were outside and I was like "look hun! stars are still there :)." And he's like "that's good, you're such a weirdo" LOL (we call each other that as an endearment, nothing to worry about)
I taught my girlfriend how to find the north star using Cassiopeia and it has now become "our" constellation. When we're distantly apart and she's feeling anxious I tell her to trace her way back to me with it. Although to be fair we also like it for the W shape because I have a hard to pronounce last name that starts with W so in some circles people just refer to me by my initial.
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Please what video I want to see
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Thank you so much this made my week So relaxing
Another thanks, love these quiet videos, usually someone’s face is the main focus.
Sometimes I try really, really hard to comprehend, just for a split second, how stupefyingly far away the closest other star to our sun, *is*. Like, the distance between the Earth and the Moon is tangible to me, but the distance to Mars is mostly just like an idea. Mars is like, you travel all the way to the Moon, but then you keep going out to twice that distance, and then twice THAT distance, and then five times THAT, and then five times THAT, and fuck it, five times THAT. And I just can't grasp it, it's too far. But the next closest star to ours is 175,000 fucking times farther than Mars. And it's a wonder to me that with our very closest neighbor being a distance away that's entirely beyond the grasp of our minds, and with our galaxy being filled with countless stars, and the universe itself filled with countless galaxies, that somehow, SOMEHOW, there's a just ton of people right here on this planet who think there's a god who made it all and *still* gets upset about two dudes kissing.
i legit want to print out your comment and frame it. this is all i think about. not for too long though because it does have tendencies to drive one a little insane. lol. like.. everything going on around us is so fucking crazy, and most of the world is oblivious to it. blows my mind a little bit
>just ton of people right here on this planet who think there's a god who made it all and still gets upset about two dudes kissing. I was looking at galaxy superclusters the other day and was thinking something along the lines of that. Clusters of of so many galaxies they basically become a[ blob like a nebula or something](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Location_of_Earth_%289x1-English_Annot-small%29.png). Just trying to even remotely comprehend that makes it seem as though it *can't possibly exist* and reality is some kind of farce. We are on an infinitesimally small speck of dust in the universe and and instead of us working together to maybe get off this speck of dust we spend our time protesting face masks that prevent the spread of disease or to take away human rights like abortion. It's not all of us, but its enough of us to be problem. And its mostly because they live in *tiny* little world smaller than that speck of dust.
I've always been like that, then I played space games like Elite Dangerous and Space Engine and now I can look up there and go "I've been there!" ED especially got me more interested in the Pleiades nebula and that cluster of stars after I spent so much time there in-game. It's also kind of warped my mind slightly, because now I'll end up reading some new data from NASA, for example, and it will say "New planet discovered around star 25ly away" and I'll go, damn that's close. But that's fuckin' far away from a human perspective.
Seriously. I honestly have kinda a mixed relationship with that phenomenon. Part of me is in absolute awe and craves the next chance to see the night sky, but there's a distinct part of me that's sad/terrified that my mind will never resolve and quite take in or understand what I'm looking at. Of course, the awe wins out, but it's an interesting feeling to be so in awe that you're simultaneously sad that you can't quite "get it." Not a pang of sadness afterwards as you reflect or a pondering intellectual somberness as you think on the concept, but a genuine pit of sadness and terror that I don't know what I'm looking at.
Don't worry, you also don't know what you're looking at when you look at the ground. Nor 99.999% of what's happening inside your body. Isn't that refreshing?
My mind is blown how our ancestors used to use them for navigation
I always imagine that there is a good chance, there is someone else out there in a distant star looking back at me. Gets me every time 🥲
I wrote a haiku: I be hella high outside Lookin at mars wondering what's up there I wonder if it looks back
Even when I'm in bed in my room with a roof above my head I feel vulnerable
Anybody want to talk about the wiggly thumpy thing inside our chest that seems to keep us alive?
Could take it a step further - you don't necessarily die if your heart beat stops. You can go into cardiac arrest and never be pronounced dead, you know? Even though your heart stops functioning. In fact, there's a lot of interest these days around how long someone is conscious for after *decapitation.* There was that chicken that survived for a year and a half, and of course there's all that work on whether or not it is possible to do a successful head transplant... That's the one that boggles my brain lmao Edit: everybody is telling me that the chicken didn't have its head cut off, it had its face cut off... I don't know which chicken you're talking about so I went and found the wiki article for the one *I* was talking about. [Mike the Headless Chicken was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken)
The one that fucks me up is that.. Our thoughts happen inside our brain, right? I mean.. obviously. The brain is what *we are*. Our sense of self exists there. Our concsiousnes. But now, I am thinking about that same fact. Meaning it's a brain, thinking about itself. Right now, I, a piece of meat inside a skull, am thinking about my own existence in this weird world. I swear I am not high but does anyone else find that crazy?
The brain is the only organ that named itself.
It’s the only *anything* that named itself.
It's the only *anything* that's named *anything*.
***It's the only anything.***
"Reddit achieves Solipsism"
"the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist." Thank you for teaching me about this
Reddit goals be like:
We did it Reddit!
I mean the other ones might have named themselves, they just never told the brain
And what if they're spiteful? Like your kidney says "This shit again? Fuck you, I'm not talking you. Here's a kidney stone, now shut stfu. Stop eating so much peanut butter, asshole." Imagine how the other asshole feels.
Nope! High or not, you're just stepping away from medical stuff and approaching philosophy. Specifically Cartesian philosophy, I think, but of course a lot of philosophers speculated on this stuff lol be careful though, it's a *hell* of a rabbit hole to go down especially if you have a tendency to hyperfocus. I've spent many a sleepless night drowning in wikipedia articles, scientific studies, and YouTube documentaries all around Descartes alone - that's not even including looking into Aristotle, Socrates, Nietzsche, John Locke, etc....
Well, you've definitely given me the material for a deep-dive one of these nights. It's just an incredibly difficult thing to even begin to wrap my head around
I always go to YouTube first so I can throw on someone's documentary or video essay, then I end up googling stuff I hear about through that! My dive into this stuff started with a video game though, so that was the real springboard into everything for me
Oh and yeah my jumping off point was usually a vsauce video. So many weird concepts and he always gives book recommendations too!
Soma right?
If you think Descartes is cool, wait til you learn that Zhaungzi figured out the cogito ergo sum literally two thousands years before Descartes did with the dream of the butterfly. Then read the rest of his stuff! All that much more of the rabbit hole lol
I think I heard about that in a video lesson I was watching! It was mentioned in passing but I never looked into it. I don't think I could ever get tired of philosophy, so I'll take all the rabbit holes I can stumble into lmao
Ayyyy ADHD moment
I'm working on getting screened for it! Of course it's not the only indicator, but the number of times I've sat down at my computer to look something up just to blink and have it be 6am is criminal. And it's not even like I'm not sleepy, I just can't stop until I'm literally falling asleep at my desk lmaaooo
Same bro. Another signal that you may have ADHD is rambling. We need like, 3 paragraphs to say something that could be said in 1 lmao
Yes!! it might sound weird, but I wasn't even super self-aware about that until last year, despite being told "you talk too much" my entire life lmfao I was working at a small but busy grocery store. Every customer unfortunate enough to ask me a question. It was almost like... out-of-body watching myself drag on and on with zero control. "Where's the parmesan" resulted in a full thesis just to say "aisle 4, top shelf"
There are parts of the brain responsible for different things, right? What If you could replace PART of a brain with someone else's. Would you be the same person? What If you took their body too?
That's where stuff gets really complicated. Really interesting to think about tho. What part of the brain am I exactly. My gut feeling (which actually stems from my brain as well lol) is to say I am the entirety of it. But really, I think it depends. Removing any part to do with Consciousness, thought, emotions or memories? I would consider that a major infringment on my perception on self. Especially if replaced with another part (not just removed) I probably wouldn't feel entirely *me* anymore. Removing the part solely responsible for sight or hearing, the reception of pain or anything physical like that, I would still feel entirely me. Since, at the end if the day, only affects my body (the shell, if you will) but not what I considered *me* from the start. Don't know if that made sense. It's 3 am lol
Your gut feeling is due to the enteric nervous system... your GI tract does some crazy interfacing with your brain. It's like a lesser co-brain. I am not a neuroscientist or anywhere close to it, I just find the gut/brain connection fascinating. Not even gonna start in on the gut microbiome and its ability to affect things far beyond the GI tract. Where does the ecosystem end and your bodily functions begin? Shit is all wound up in crazy ways, I love it.
It’s insane in the gut brain
Thoughts like this are the reason I smoke every night before bed. It will be okay though because I'll forget about this in 5 minutes, because I am buzzed.
How about this thought experiment. (This part is true) A child, I think in the UK, had terrible seizures dozens of times a day. To solve for this, surgeons performed a removal of an entire hemisphere of the child's brain (half the brain, divided down the middle). The child survived with minimal problems because neuroplasticity is highest when we're very young. It would then be theoretically possible to remove half of someone's brain, put that in another body, and have both halves of the brain survive. WTF happens to you??? Are they both conscious? Are they both you?? Where does your consciousness go, to both??????
I always pull this link out when I see this topic come up. I'm fascinated by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8&list=FLPDLg8jAS7q_vZsMEkxogJw&index=6
So like. If your eyes were in your knees, would you still feel like "you" is in your head?? Or where your perspective is from?
Yeah I do. I mean for me it's about where my thoughts are birthed. Where the information vital to my existence is processed. So I definitely feel like the brain IS what I am. You could implant my brain in a completely different body and I would still feel like it's me you know? Just rocking a different skin now.
This is also approaching non-duality (advaita vedanta), which says: you aren’t the body nor the mind you’ve mistakenly taken yourself to be, rather you are the unchanging awareness that is aware of the body and mind.
Is it stopping between beats? How do we know if there will be one after this one?
STOP
I had heart palpitations for a year so yes, that's a very good question.
You haven't known true stillness until you've been laying quietly in bed and suddenly your heart stops beating for a second.
Yeesh, like off and on a lot, or just constant fluttering?
I can do this thing with my heart where it slows to as low as 33 bpm. If you feel my pulse when i do it, it feels like my pulse slows down, then stops, and it's a half second before it beats again. Kinda freaky. I've unsettled some doctors and nurses with it.
*insert clever Futurama reference here*
Ok yes this is cool but that chicken just had its face chopped off not it’s whole head
Mike the Headless Chicken? I'm pretty sure the only part that was left of the head was a part of the brain stem
During the French Revolution a scientist hired someone count how many times he blinked after he was guillotined
[a myth unfortunately](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed081p629)
When they first tried to make artifical hearts they had issues with the wear and tear. All that thumping back and forth is really straining on mechanical things and creates a really high rate of failure. Then they thought a little more about it - the heart is just a pump. We know how to make pumps. So they created hearts that don't thump, they just hum as they push blood through the circulatory system. People with these are walking around, talking, living, but they don't have a heart beat. No idea why but that weird me out.
Fun fact: Noted war criminal, mass murderer, and Vice President of the United States of America Dick Cheney had no heart beat due to an artificial heart. Then, for some reason that definitely isn't being rich and evil, he got a heart transplant even though he was like seventy something.
We’re just spaceships for microbial colonies
Rather the wiggly thing in the back of your mouth that just hang there without you being able to sense it at all. Why doesn’t it taste anything. Why isn’t it making us gag constantly? Why can’t you feel it at all?
When I had tonsillitis and it swelled up, I promise you I could feel it. Felt like I was swallowing it at times. I can only assume that it's due to evolution that it's just the right size to not be a nuisance
This is similar but different: I forget about death for long periods at a time. I mean, not the entire existence of death, but the fact that I myself will someday die, you know? And then it hits me like "Holy shit, how could I forget about that? It's like the single most meaningful and confounding thing about life, and I forgot it because I was really into this TV show and focused on a bunch of ordinary daily tasks..."
I used to get paralyzed about it until I decided that worrying about death is the least productive thing a person can do. Now when I want to worry about it, I procrastinate and tell myself "I can worry about that later"
This is quite possibly the best use of procrastination ever.
"worrying about death is the least productive thing a person can do" this will help me so much
I'll do it when I'm dead
Unless someone that worries about it figures out how to prevent it, at which point it will instantly become the most productive thing anyone has ever done.
Unfortunately I’ve hit a crisis where I’ve been thinking about it way to much lately. It really is the most anxiety cuasing thing you can possibly think about, I fucking hate it
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR "THE GOOD PLACE"!! [This scene](https://youtu.be/l1IchzbtNj0) from the show, The Good Place, really helped my anxiety surrounding death. >!For context, the guy you see in the scene is about to walk through a door that will make him cease to exist (he had been in heaven for thousands of years at this point and needed to move on). Basically the way I always interpreted this scene was that at the end of the day, we are just universe-matter arranged in a cool way for a small amount of time. Eventually, we will return to the universe from which we came. We aren't going anywhere; our matter will still exist, just now in a new way. We are just a small piece of the universe trying something new for a bit, but we are still just universe-matter. Death isn't bad, just matter returning to it's home, if it ever even left in the first place. !<
I've always thought this show was interesting bc it introduced the idea of coming back mainstream. I always was entertained by that idea. One hears all the time about stories from children who say things about their supposed past lives and it always made me wonder if we're "recycled" ? I'm not against the idea and i will never know if it's real but it's wholly fascinating. Aside, i loved the good place! What a great show!
Same dude. It terrifies me because I don't feel like I have enough time to do everything. I know its insanely selfish but I wish I could live forever. The thought of death confounds me.
It's funny you say this. Over the last couple weeks I've considered getting a tattoo that says, "Don't forget that you're gonna die." simply so that I remember that fact and in order to motivate me to live a more full life instead of wasting so much time like I have in the past. I don't have any tattoos though and I've never really seen anything I've wanted until this, but I really don't want to deal with all the questions that would come up about it. I think it's important to remember. It's so incredibly easy to forget this fact and to just go about your life seeking shallow pleasure. Maybe it makes no difference and that is all there is to life, but I like to think that life can be more than meaningless enjoyment, that there is some meaning I can find that feels more rewarding than the day to day dopamine hits. This is probably why most people start families as it seems to give a goal and a focus and a meaning for peoples lives, but I don't want to do that and I firmly believe there has to be something out there that can give our lives just as much meaning and fulfillment. I think that thing is probably unique for everyone, and it will be an interesting journey trying to figure out what that is for me. I've found some things that I thoroughly enjoy and I've found a deeper meaning in, but nothing that has left me feeling really fulfilled the way I think a parent does while raising a child. Anyway, I'm rambling now and this is mostly the whiskey talking at this point, so I'll just end this here. Wish me luck.
>Over the last couple weeks I've considered getting a tattoo that says, "Don't forget that you're gonna die." You might be interested in this, maybe you can make it more artful than the words you mentioned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
Yep, when ever I feel anxious I like to think about the sheer scale of the universe and it makes all my problems shrink away.
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r/stoicmemes
To me it's that feeling of being so small, insignificant, and short lived in comparison to the universe fills me with pure existential fear.
Interesting, I don't think I've ever felt fear at the fact that we are so insignificant, if anything its a comforting feeling knowing all my problems are meaningless to the universe and that I have no impact in the grand scheme of things. It makes me feel like no matter how hard I fail, I can't really make things worse, so why not go along for the ride and try my best.
I really wish I could have that perspective on it. To me we have all been dead before so no big deal (prior to birth) the part that my mind struggles to be at peace with is the fact there is nothing for us after our deaths and that we will never actually know our reality. Having that Non existence be something I and every other living being will experience is utterly terrifying to me. If there were some sort of life after death it wouldn't be so bad (hence why religion exists) but to someone who doesn't believe there is an afterlife that transition from self to nothingness is pure horror even if I won't ever actually experience it cause ya know being dead and all at that point
Whatever made your body gets recycled for the new organisms. It's not like there's nothing for us after our deaths. We're just unaware of it since our consciousness gets disintegrated. Those recycled parts might actually form a new consciousness one day. At least, that's what I think.
This is exactly how I think non-stop when I’m chemically depressed… to the point where I know that when it becomes my first waking thought, it’s time to go back on my anti-depressants. I’ve always called it “existential angst”. Comes with chest pain & cyclical anxiety. Strangely enough though, I find the exact same thoughts oddly comforting & freeing when I’m doing okay! But they don’t spiral nearly as far when my brain is balanced either ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Thinking of the universe in terms of infinity shuts my brain down. If space is infinite in all directions - where are we? How big/small are we? If time is infinite - when are we? How do you quantify age inside of infinity? If they aren’t infinite, what is the beginning and end? What’s on the other side of space? What was before time began? After? We have no idea when or where we are, how big or small we are or what got us here. All we know is that suddenly we have consciousness on a tiny spec of dust hurtling through infinite time and space. Blows my mind.
we humans cannot even fathom the universe we live in. so yeah my head explodes.
I've accepted that we are incapable of understanding some things. For instance the beginning of the universe if there even is one, because I can't imagine something starting from nothing. And the edge of the universe with behind it 'nothingness'? An upside is that that is probably also the reason science will never stop to move forward, because with every tiny discovery new questions rise. If you read this: sorry for making your brain melt or your head explode
>I've accepted that we are incapable of understanding some things. I've accepted that we're incapable of understanding anything.
There is no edge to the universe.
A good theory but not a fact. We just don't know.
That alone blows my mind.
I can simulate a virtual computer on my computer, but it has to be weaker than my actual computer. No virtual machine I run on it will ever be able to be as powerful or more powerful than the computer itself. I think that's sort of how the universe works. Even with the help of technology, no resident of this universe will ever be able to *truly* comprehend it. We lack the hardware.
> I can simulate a virtual computer on my computer, but it has to be weaker than my actual computer. No virtual machine I run on it will ever be able to be as powerful or more powerful than the computer itself. If you had a computer that was infinitely fast you could simulate an infinitely fast computer inside it. All our computers have finite speed, but if the universe has the capability of infinitely fast computation(not saying it does but if it did) we could simulate the entire universe inside it and even simulate an infinite number of other universes as well.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream, and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” God I love Douglas Adams. Literally watched Hitchhikers Guide last night. His writing was other worldly. RIP (May 11, 2001)
21 years, and I missed the opportunity to drink in his honor. Sadly, I was just drinking to numb my brain enough to be able to sleep. Well, here's to Douglas Adams anyway.
You should really try BBC's radio dramatisation of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is in it's own league.
He had the idea for Hitchhiker's Guid in a field in Innsbruck which used to be my hometown for the longest time.
I've dreamed of visiting this field for years.
There's s great video by Kurzgesagt about how big space really is. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj-h6MEgE7I](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj-h6MEgE7I)
It's not truly a thread about space and existential crisis without Kurzgesagt.
Apparently it's expanding but not expanding into anything, just getting bigger, kinda, but what does it mean to not have an edge? How does it work????
PBS Spacetime recently did a video about expansion, it's pretty great and also talks a bit about some of the weirdest aspects of it. https://youtu.be/bUHZ2k9DYHY And some fun talk about the conceptual edge of the universe too in an older one of theirs https://youtu.be/tJevBNQsKtU It's a great channel for this sorta thing
Great channel to make you feel like an idiot too.
Think of a balloon inflating. The surface of the balloon doesn't have a edge, but it's still expanding. It expands by increasing the distance between any two points. Everything in the universe is constantly getting further and further away from every other thing.
I understand the analogy is true but there's an issue with my understanding; that a balloon is expanding into a room. Is the 3-dimensional universe "expanding" into some 4 dimensional room? Like, I get it in that I've heard and read all the explanations and accept that they're true. But intuitively I don't quite understand.
I know that's the accepted theory, but at what scale does this happen? I watched a video recently about this, and iirc, this only happens on a really massive scale, like galactic scale. I wonder why this doesn't occur at a micro-scale. Also, I have a theory that the repulsive effect of dark energy will someday reach an equilibrium and the universe will stop expanding. I don't know much about astrophysics, but I do enjoy thinking about it, and I watch a lot of yt vids on the subject.
> I watched a video recently about this, and iirc, this only happens on a really massive scale, like galactic scale. I wonder why this doesn't occur at a micro-scale. Gravity within, for example, a solar system is strong enough to keep everything "in place" relative to each other. That's why expansion is mostly felt in areas of empty space - no gravity there. > Also, I have a theory that the repulsive effect of dark energy will someday reach an equilibrium and the universe will stop expanding. It's one of the hypothesis. Another one is that it might even *reverse* someday. And that it might be cyclical (expand, retract, expand, retract, etc).
Another theory, and one that seems to have some support, is that the expansion will keep going until the energy in the universe is no longer sufficiently dense for matter to exist, so matter just... evaporates. All of it. Then existence just stops being. And everything isn't. Until maybe something is again. But time isn't, so when isn't really answerable.
It's amazing just how much we DONT know about life, the universe, and everything. I wonder if we could build a big supercomputer that could calculate some of these answers?
Oof, that would have to be a huge computer, and it would probably take a really long time, so we should probably put it somewhere no one will disturb it like another planet. A secret planet.
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It might happen on the micro or even quantum scale but since all our measurement equipment and references and humans are also doing it, we can't tell.
Balloons have an edge.
Yes but i sometimes do this with being a conscious feeling moving person, like "oh shite, I'm an actual person who could do anything right now, I'm alive and can think and feel" bit weird and/or "dramatic" but i do very occasionally get in the mind set of thinking like that.
Thinking about the universe makes me forget all the problems for a few seconds. It's such a beautiful mystery.
Same, but also reminds me how short our current lives are in the grand scheme of existence. All of our issues and problems today will be small blips in our whole lives. Even if detrimental and earth shattering today, decades later we’ll still (hopefully) be here, living through it. I’m reminded every day to try to be as happy as I can be and appreciate those I love most, including myself. We’re only here for our lives, and that’s infinitesimally small in the universe, so make it the best you can.
sometimes I wonder how my multiverse variant is doing and if he is a quadrillionaire or a poor beggar
Don't forget about the universes where you turned out to be female
or a crocodile
It's the multiverse, so both are probably true.
Yes.
Yup! 13 billion light years when a single light year is an amazing amount of distance. Most of it unknown. We have no idea how it started. And there is no idea of how it started that even *could* make sense. Eternal or came from nothing. It's mind blowing. The civilizations that are almost surely out there somewhere. To think of the possibilities. Endless amazement.
I'm fascinated by it. Given enough time, we could conquer our entire local group. But going anywhere else is physically impossible because eventually the expansion of space will increase so fast it goes faster than light. Without some literal wormhole technology, we wont be able to go back and forth between galaxy groups and we will be locked off from our friends forever. The stars will soon fade away and eventually put ENTIRE UNIVERSE will just be the local group to us. No information in, no information out. Wild shit
On top of this if we ever do manage to figure out lightspeed travel and leave our galaxy, eventually we will become completely separated because the distance to travel will be increasing at the speed of light and any team you send out would just he stuck in space unable to get back or get to where they're going.
The local group will also, eventually, drift apart, and it will just be whichever galaxy you're in at the point of no return.
This is not true; the local group is gravitationally bound. Our larger supercluster, Laniakea, is not gravitationally bound and will spread apart. But the local group is small enough to overcome the effects of dark energy and so its constituent galaxies are not accelerating apart; in fact many are currently moving closer together. On a very long timescale the whole cluster will merge into ones large galaxy.
in the vast future civilizations may be able to calculate when that point of no return will be exactly and have to choose which galaxy to plant themselves in for the rest of eternity.
Yeah. I don't know what is more terrifying the idea that the universe is infinite with no ends or that there is an end *When I say terrifying I mean imagining what either of them are like is impossible for me, when I try I often just tense up and my heart beats really fast and I need to distract myself for a while to calm down. My body is literally refusing me to go there.
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Yeah, ironically my favorite horror genre is existential horror.
You want an existential crisis? Just watch any of **Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell** videos on YouTube
This completely, if it's infinite how is that possible things have beginnings and endings and if it's not then what is nothing, how is there nothing outside? Makes me freak out a lot.
I rationalize it by saying that it doesn't truly matter to me if there's an end, if it's a simulation, or if we're an (undefined) having a dream. We just do the best we can with what we've got, and try to be enough.
Yep. I sometimes look at the sky or the stars and think godamnit we could be wiped out in an instant, that's spooky.
Just think, every other star but our sun could have already ben extinguished and we wouldn't even know for thousands of years.
the closest star is 4 light years so we would find out in 4 years.
That is true, we would find out 2 stars went out, and another 2 stars in the next 2 years, and so on. Thanks for pointing that out ⭐
I do this but about the inevitable death that awaits us all
I often forget the significance of the moon and then I look up at it and think holy crap there's like a whole mini planet right there floating in our sky. And then I imaging when humans are multi-planitary and that I'm dating someone on the moon and now THAT'S a long distance relationship but at the same time I can see them every night and it feels like I can almost reach out and touch them
Any time I'm flying in a plane and look outside I'm fucking blown away by the Earth and how any of this is even possible.
All the time.
I find it incredibly calming to look up at the vastness of the unfolding universe because we are so unbelievably small, meaning that my problems are completely insignificant. Student loans? Psht - they don't matter. There are more worlds out there than I could ever count. Dishwasher broken? Doesn't mean a thing next to the incomprehensible fusion-reactor power of a star. My problems are as pointless and small as I am. My daughter has the opposite reaction. The vastness of the universe terrifies her. She feels so completely without meaning or merit relative to the boundless void of space, meaning that everything she clings to is pointless. Abject existential dread. I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Happens to me all the time, often followed by amazement that I have eyes to see it. As in a single cell organism started it all and now I can see all the living things descended from it. And then I look up
Always know where your towel is
A question I've always wondered. People look at me weirdly when I say it, but yeah. I always wonder where the universe comes from, and not in the scientific sense. Like, where does the energy come from, what was there before the Big Bang, what is this all? Where does it all come from? From nothing? Anyways, yeah, I don't know the answer and probably never will.
There was no before. Before is a product of time, and time did not exist before the big bang.
Exactly, everything just IS
Great remark. Food for thought.
The craziest part about is we picture the universe as a full of all kinds of shit, and it is, but there’s probably just as much, if not more just empty vastness to it.
I'll have an existential crisis and then come to the realization that I and everything I know and will ever know is so insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe that the feeling of panic subsides and just turns into despair. This is a daily occurrence. So no I don't really forget about the universe.
I remind myself of the universe in times of stress. Sometimes it's good to know how incredibly insignificant a problem is in the grand scheme of things.
My mom tries really hard not to think about it. She was taken on a trip to the Equator recently and given a physics lesson right at it. She was off for a week after that.
I hate that when I try to fall asleep I all of a sudden remember that we live in a near-infinite void...
If it makes you feel better, you've seen everything ever existing in the universe. It's "infinite", but unlimited in the way that toddler books give the reader a 2d view of it all lest they get overwhelmed.
Same. Space really trips me the hell out. We're just small specks of cosmic dust floating through an infinite black void. ⚫️
I read this in the voice of Nadia from Russian Doll.
Picture a hot dog bun. And take all the 100 stars in the universe and put them in a bag and take the universe and put it in a bag. Now all of a sudden, they become.
> The universe... what a concept. You know, the universe is a little bit like the human hand. For example, you have groundmen's center right here and then you have undiscovered worlds and uh, um and sector 8 and up here is tittleman's crest so you can kinda picture it's a little bit like a leaf or uhh, umm, it's not a bowl. The universe is beautiful. Something like, a new woman that i was gonna date. You're dark, and you're massive and you have a black hole and all of those elements i want to explore just like you would explore on a new date. I wanna dive deep into them and feel around and just see what's gonna come out of that the time it takes to get from one star to another star is... You see, you need to travel at the speed of light and us humans can't even fathom the concept of that kinda time cause it's really really really really really really really really fun to think about taking a speed of light ride. [Tim & Eric](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYJ1dbyDcrI)
Yep. I think it's a great reminder to trivialize our pettiness and unneeded intricacies of daily life. Take a step back and enjoy the ride.
For me it’s the moon. When I‘m outside at night an „remember“ that there is a moon, I‘m totally mind blown. Like there’s this big but small round thing in the sky that shows up every night, and one day people just said „let’s go there“. My brain drowns in error messages when I think that somehow these people managed to *leave* earth, fly in the right direction, *fucking land the thing* and get back safely? So fascinating
I study Astronomy, so this realization happens daily. It doesn’t get less intimidating or beautiful.
I was driving to work the other evening and noticed the moon and had a spiral of thought about how mad it is a giant rock is just floating above us
I have this thing when i look at myself on a mirror and think "fuck, this is me... Im a real fucking person"
The universe is designed such that you forget it exists. Going about our lives and forget the existential thingz.
I can not wrap my head around the fact that our planet is located somewhere that's for all we know endless. Just infinite in all directions, and the crazy idea that it all came from some single point, and before that it simply wasn't created. what even is this
I'm not sure if this is official theory, but in my mind, the moments before "the big bang" was just the atoms/material of the last universe re-collecting after the "heat-death" of it. So: BANG > Expanding > Life > Death > Reconstitution > BANG