Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Quatro
Now you want to talk about space and what may or not be out there ... 
What if what we see is not really still there if it took thousands of years just for the light to get here?
If we send a space ship to see, manned or unmanned, how long would it take to see something that may have exploded thousands of years ago and on top of that how long would it take to get a message back to earth that what we thought was there is no longer there.
We misewell wonder what will be discovered in our life time left here on earth, because whoopie we are never going to find out anyway.
We're all going to die |
Looking out into space inevitably means looking back in time. Telescopes are time machines. The further away the galaxy is that we look at, the younger a universe we see there.
This will change when interstellar objects reach relative velocities beyond the speed of light, which is inevitable due to the expansion of the universe. Becasue then thse objects become literally invisible and will never be known of again.
We live in a special age of this still young universe. We live in tjis very short time window when the universe - in form of life forms like us - actally can get aware of itself and can look at and know about itself. This will get lost again, it seems according to contemporary cosmological models. The whole time-and-light-and-visibility thing seems to be just a brief contemporary episode in the universe lifycycle anyway.
I prefer not to think too closely about this anymore, there is quite some Lovecraftian horror in it.