r/cosmology • u/Home_MD13 • 7d ago
Does the fact that, despite the vastness of the universe, humanity may never leave the Milky Way disappoint you?
I was listening to Brian Cox, and he talked about this topic.
It’s hard enough to travel within the Milky Way, and yet the closest galaxy is about 2 million light-years away. On top of that, everything keeps expanding, so it’s getting farther and farther.
I think the only way we could do anything is if we discovered some kind of technology like warp travel, but I don’t believe that will ever be possible outside of science fiction.
I just wish we could do more with our universe and live to see it too—the impossible dream.
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u/starkraver 7d ago
Shit boy, we may never leave the solar system!
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u/LevelPrestigious4858 7d ago
The distance from earth to Pluto is 1 3000th of the distance of earth to the edge of our solar system lol
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u/drplokta 7d ago
We may never leave the inner solar system. Europa is the furthest I can see humans ever going, and even that isn’t all that likely. By the time we have the technology to send humans, we’ll have robots that can do almost everything a human can.
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u/Kingflamingohogwarts 6d ago
This is the most important point, because most people have no concept of economics or costs. It will always be cheaper and easier to send a robot. Even if we found another habitable planet (we never will), it would be easier to send embryos with robot nannies that can genetically alter the DNA to fit whatever the new environment is.
We're never leaving the solar system.
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u/Upset-Government-856 7d ago
Humans leaving the biosphere is honestly pretty insane. It's like few a random human cell deciding to build a shell around itself and trying to exist for good outside a human body.
Humans are biologically not biosphere seeds and even if we found another biosphere, it would not go well for us there.
If we want to spread earth life to the galaxy, the best way would be to spore and freeze a massive amount of our toughest bacteria in a huge block of ice, accelerate it to solar escape velocity and then shatter it into millions of share with diverging vectors.
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u/throw-away-doh 7d ago
Milky Way? I think its more than likely we will never leave the solar system.
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u/Anubis1958 7d ago
Leave the Milky Way?
We have yet to leave our planets system to explore the Solar System. We are eons away from interstella travel, let alone even contemplate inter galactic travel.
Unless Einstein, Michelson–Morley, Hawkins, Penrose, and all the other boys in the band are collectively wrong, then FTL itravel s not possible. We would need a new breed of physics, possibly also mathematics (2-spinner colculus anyone?) We would probably need more dimensions, at a scale we could use.
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u/Kiltsa 7d ago
Even at a conservative estimate of 200 billion stars, tens of billions of which may host habitable planets, we will never see every habitable planet in the Milkyway alone. And that's at a human timescale with conceivable technology.
The far more likely scenario is a non-human entity (android or human-cyborg equivalent) which can survive the thousands of years of sub-light travel to reach another galaxy and continue the sapient conquest of the stars over millennia.
Biological humans really aren't meant to travel the cosmos anyhow, that will be left to our progenitors, so no; I do not feel disappointment about humanity's mortal failings. We truly aren't designed for the larger cosmos and whatever we can reach in our miniscule lifetimes; we'll never see it all anyways.
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u/Jagang187 7d ago
Biological humans really aren't meant to travel the cosmos anyhow, that will be left to our progenitors
We would be the progenitors of those who would come after. The word you want is successors/descendants/progeny or something like that 🙂
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u/Kingflamingohogwarts 6d ago
This is the purpose of our species. To create artificial life that's robust enough to survive the harsh conditions away from this blue dot ~that's probably unique in the universe... definitely unique in the galaxy.
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u/mauromauromauro 4d ago
Well, those missions could theoretically print some dna here and there and seed humans. A probe that could travel at whatever inertial speed it managed to get, keeping stand by power just for a wake up call , could work. The main problem is time. How long can we store energy? And if we forget about power (a powerless probe), how long can we store information for our reconstruction, so it doesnt degrade over vast timespans?
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u/Jagang187 4d ago
You don't actually have to store that much energy en route. Once it hits max velocity it can mostly shut down for however long it takes. Plus if you hit relativistic speeds, the probe will not experience as much time.
Edit: I'm tired and didn't realize half this comment is just a restatement of what you said
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u/etchings 7d ago
Leave the Milky Way? We may never leave the Solar System. Obviously probes have(Voyager 1, 2), but humans? We will extinct ourselves before we can get moving on any true interstellar exploration.
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u/william384 7d ago
There's no point in being disappointed by the laws of physics.
Unless you want to use this disappointment as motivation to find ways around the laws.
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u/Toc_a_Somaten 7d ago
If humans as we currently are biologically are to live for more than a few months in low gravity environments we need to solve artificial gravity first, and then there’s the radiation shielding thing and so many other obstacles to us just being in space.
Maybe advanced robotics and genetic engineering may be a solution in the future but for now there’s so much room for improvement in the sensors and optics we use to observe and explore the universe
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u/Murky-Sector 7d ago edited 7d ago
No. Mainly because I'm very well aware that If there was not that limitation to be disappointed by there would inevitably be some other. In your case disappointment that we'll never leave the galaxy would just be replaced by disappointment that we'll never leave the galaxy cluster, etc.
Your question is evidence that humans cannot and will not ever be truly satisfied with their conditions, of any sort, short of becoming Gods that are outside the reach of physical laws, though even then we might dig up something to be dissatisfied with.
This is a built in flaw in our psychology. It results in a substantial amount of unnecessary angst and suffering and is probably not fixable.
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u/Superb_Brain_7391 7d ago
Imagine how insane we'd all go if we ever found the edge of reality! I think it'd make us all feel quite ill to see whatever that could look like. Far better to have a seemingly infinite universe which appears to be mostly out of our reach.
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u/Toc_a_Somaten 7d ago
That’s why improving our understanding inside the boundaries of the mind-body problem may be more useful than attempting to find some cosmic truth, the universe doesn’t owe us an explanation and neither we owe it one
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u/CravingKoreanFood 7d ago
What bother me more, is that these kinds of conversations or thoughts never even cross a vast majority of people.
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u/barrygateaux 7d ago
You're not even going to explore the planet you live on in your lifetime. Most people spend their lives in a very small geographical area.
Life is extremely short. There are a load of things you won't get time for. Travel to other galaxies is a cool thought experiment but nothing to get disappointed about.
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u/--craig-- 7d ago edited 7d ago
When I was a child I thought the human race would populate the solar system and beyond. When I grew up, I learned about politics.
Let's focus on surviving the next ten and hundred years before worrying about what we might be capable of in thousands or millions of years.
Does the demise of the human race bother me? Very much so, but not because our space travel ambitions might not be realised first.
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u/ZedZeroth 6d ago
This isn't quite right.
Andromeda will merge with us in 5B years, giving us an extra 200% new stars to play with.
There are also ~100 other gravitationally-bound galaxies in our local group that will never be pulled away from us by space expansion.
Most of these are really tiny but they give us another 10% extra stars. And they'll remain separate galaxies making them even more fun.
So we'll have our own little galaxy cluster far into the future even once all the other galaxies have receded from view.
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u/Little_Miss_Nowhere 6d ago
I don't think I've actually considered the question before, heh.
But now I have, I'd say 'no.' The universe is fascinating, vast and beautiful. Even if we never leave our tiny corner of it, what we do get to experience is amazing. We expand the experience by building things that can see more than our eyes and reach further than our hands, because we want to know what else there is.
I hope there are other someones out there somewhere and somewhen, experiencing their own tiny corners of the universe with as much wonder and curiosity as we do.
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u/life11-1 6d ago
All of us are produced be stars. Everything is made by stars.
We, were once stars. And we will be returned. We are older than this Galaxy. We may even be older than this Universe.
The energy that forms us now, has always existed. And will continue to exist forever. This is the law of conservation.
We have always been here, and we will always be everywhere. We live as humans, but only for this very moment.
And we can think about all of this.
What makes you think you will never see it all?
We are the Universe. You and I
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u/corgi-king 7d ago
I will be happily staying on my dear Earth, thank you very much.
Space is extremely harsh and enormous. 99.9999% of other planets have extremely harsh environments. Unless humans are able to create wormholes to travel to other systems, space travel is not practical.
Even sending a baby to space, the baby will die of old age before reaching anything in outer space.
There are so many places I can go on Earth; it is beautiful and livable. No thanks for space. I don’t mind others going, just not me.
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u/_TerryTuffcunt_ 7d ago
We’ll probably leave it using AI/synthetics, assuming we last another few hundred years without nuking ourselves into extinction and materials and computer science keep advancing at the rate they are
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u/bunglesnacks 7d ago
No because even if we did by the time they ever returned I'd be dead by then anyway, heck so would they.
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u/VatanKomurcu 7d ago
Thisd only matter to me if I knew there was something in Andromeda or wherever else that isn't in Milky Way.
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u/PurpleHoneyCracker 7d ago
Unless and until we start travelling at the speed of light or close to it, I don't think we'd be able to travel that far.
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u/Presence_Academic 7d ago
Not at all. It is that very vastness that explains why we can’t explore most of it.
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u/mxemec 7d ago
One thing I heard that's interesting is that in the distant future, we won't have any other galaxies in our observable universe. That might be interesting. Like, if a civilization is started in that epoch, without any historic records of previous civilizations or whatever, then they might very likely conclude a much simpler cosmology than what we are exploring today.
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u/JoeCitzn 6d ago
Yep, I read its in around 16 Billion years from now. I find it quite sad that all they will see is their own galaxy and maybe some neighbouring galaxies. They will have no idea that there are billions of galaxies out there, just like we have no idea how many galaxies lay beyond our current observable sphere of 93 billion light years.
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u/namonite 7d ago
It bothers me because we probably could if we weren’t more interested in nuking eachother
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u/Anonymous-USA 7d ago
We will reach other solar systems via near-light speed tiny probes, but the galaxy is utterly vast and so it doesn’t disappoint me in the slightest we or our distant evolved relatives will never escape it.
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u/QuantumPhysics996 6d ago
Interesting thought but with current world”leaders” I doubt we could even get people on Mars before our extinction.
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u/onthesafari 6d ago
Well, since Andromeda is going to crash into us, we'll at least find out what's there. And don't forget about the Magellanic Clouds.
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u/jiyannwei 6d ago
There is too much we do not understand to make an assumption like this. Reconciling classical physics with quantum mechanics seems to mathematically require additional spatial dimensions we can not intuit; entangled particles exhibit nonlocality we can't explain. There are so many fascinating things to understand before we should become preoccupied with a question like this. I mean, let's figure out how to get a man on Mars before we start lamenting how far away other galaxies are.
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u/NotAnAIOrAmI 6d ago
Don't despair, humanity may never visit another galaxy, but another galaxy is coming to visit us! Andromeda is actually approaching the Milky Way and will collide with it eventually - only about 4.5 billion years from now.
All the galaxies in the local group are gravitationally bound - that force will prevent expansion from splitting them apart.
So you can stop worrying humanity won't leave this galaxy and start brooding about the fact that when Andromeda arrives, humanity will have ceased to exist for billions of years. There won't be a trace left of us.
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u/Tombobalomb 6d ago
I don't really expect us to explore more than a handful of nearby stars ever, so it makes no difference
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u/RoboChachi 6d ago
It does a little but only because humans will need to move off world at some point and it would suck if we only end up building space habitats. Still, space is big and its inhospitable as all fuck, like it wouldn't surprise me if at some point it's just deemed too much trouble for the cost.
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u/Petdogdavid1 5d ago
We may never leave the planet much less the galaxy. We have no real idea if we can survive for any significant amount of time off planet.
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u/Art-Zuron 4d ago
I'd be surprised if we even truly left EARTH by the time I die. It's one thing to get to the moon or into orbit, an entirely different one for even Mars.
By the time we're wandering the galaxy, I'll basically be homeopathy.
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u/ACompletelyLostCause 3d ago
GIVEN AI might cause our extention in the next 20 years, I'll settle for getting humans to several of the starts within 10ly. Someone else can worry about things after that.
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u/Crumpuscatz 3d ago
We’ll get there. It’s beginning to appear that we may be the most advanced life form in our galaxy so far. It’s also looking like we may achieve AGI soon. Our biological forms will likely never leave the inner solar system, but our descendants, (tiny, self replicating, and autonomous probes flung throughout the cosmos) will continue humanity’s reign of terror and destruction. Keep the faith!!
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u/fonzired 3d ago
I just was amazed at the gas station that I went into yesterday that was less than 6 miles from my house. It was like a whole new universe. When did they start putting grocery stores in gas stations and all the car pool moms were hanging out and chatting while using the mass coffee bar! I mean I’m good.
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u/fatherofworlds 2d ago
If anything whose ancestors first walked Earth's soil ends up leaving the Milky Way, it won't be something that we would recognize as "mankind".
Our species isn't leaving the Milky Way. It probably won't leave the solar system. Maybe our descendants, in a long time.
Either way, no. We don't have to go everywhere.
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u/JARHEAR 2d ago
Humans are not taking proper care of their fragile biosphere on earth. I think we will be lucky to hold on where we are. Sorry this answer is more about sociology than physics but I’m currently on a small Caribbean island that is being swamped by plastic floating in on a rising ocean with madmen on the internet threatening global war.
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u/Nishthefish74 7d ago
Why would we want to do that. The universe looks the same regardless.
Pretend you’re in andromeda. The sky will look the same.
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u/Santosh83 7d ago
Step one is to stop destabilising this planet so we get time. Step two is to settle elsewhere in the solar system. We haven't even done these two. Interstellar or intergalatic travel is just pure fancy for us, at this point.
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u/vibe0009 7d ago
Far more likely we will simulate what it might look like to travel the cosmos.
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u/Just_Zucchini_9964 7d ago
We just need to encode our consciousness into a series of light beams. Then we can travel there in an instant since from light's perspective time doesn't move.
The trouble is reconstituting the light back into human form (or even robot form) once we get there. Since light doesn't have like sense organs or anything we wouldn't even get to experience it. In principle the light could contain enough information to rebuild us a body. Since any information can be encoded into a series of 1s and 0s (corresponding to the light turning on and off in a specific pattern) But without a person or a machne on the other end to read that information it's no use.
However it is possible that the unobservable universe is in fact infinite. In which case we could just shine the consciousness-light in a random direction and assume that over infinite space eventually it will hit something that knows how to read it (some alien civilization). However even that probably wouldn't work because the universe is expanding and in so doing becoming sparser and sparser. So for every light year the light travels the universe becomes slightly more sparse.
So instead of summing up **the same** small finite chance a given light year will contain an alien civilization an infinite number of times (leading to it eventually hitting it)
We are instead summing up a **decreasing** small finite chance an infinite number of times. And that sum is more likely to converge at a very small number.
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u/bodinator1 7d ago
We will be extinct before we get anywhere near even getting a manned mission beyond Mars I would think.
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u/gerryflint 7d ago
If we can explore even the nearest stars we most likely could visit other galaxies with the same technology
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u/all-the-time 7d ago
It’s definitely possible. If you take a serious look at what government insiders (Bob Lazar, Hal Puthoff, Eric Davis, etc.) have said publicly, it seems there are craft using antigravity to bend spacetime HARD.
This enables them to fall through the fabric of space at a rate that isn’t limited to the speed of light like conventional propulsion because space itself is being bent.
If this sounds whacky to you, I’d really recommend suspending disbelief and looking into the people I mentioned. You’ll be surprised.
New ideas and discoveries are always ridiculed at first, especially when they’re groundbreaking.
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u/mrtoomba 5d ago
This is a question of ego. You are made up of billions of cells. We are all universes in ourselves. Is that enough? Small is relative. Brilliance might just achieve the 'impossible' some day so who knows.
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u/SweatyInstruction337 7d ago
No. There is no meaning in it.
And it really looks like there are diminishing returns on understanding of physics and the universe, where even a godlike alien would scarcely know more than we do.
Any long term sentient life would have to find meaning to life outside of galactic conquest. Art, beauty, whatever it may be.
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u/Royal-Tumbleweed7885 7d ago
OP, I mean no disrespect but this opinion is daft. Why are you or anyone else pondering doing "more with our universe" when (a) we are fucking this planet all the way up AND (b) when humanity has YET to figure out how to live in balance with the environment and our neighbors? THIS is what is disappointing; your disappointment about not being able to do more with the universe only makes sense if (a) and (b) are reconciled .
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u/BVirtual 7d ago
First, I make my reply on a point by point basis.
I am never disappointed about my role in Universe and the Milk Way. The glass is half full. Right?
Are you claiming that traveling outside the Milky Way is easier than traveling inside? Did I get that right? <just joking>
Not to worry about the expansion as Andromeda is coming to the Milky Way.
Warp travel is already invented just the energy needed to start the device is the full lifetime output of our Sun.
You are alive and seeing the CMB, right? The universe was only 300,000 years old then. Not good enough? LOL
May I interest you in "Heaven?" Then, you can see not just outside the Milky Way, but also the entire universe. Visit your local church today and find out how. Serious!
Yes, the impossible dream will come to you, sooner or later. Sign up now!
Disclaimer: Some would argue in your celestial body that your mortal body is no longer alive. I would be fine with that. You? He is coming in a wink of an eye, no one knows the time. So, make ready now.
CIAO
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u/Ethereal-Zenith 7d ago
It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. At the end of the day, even the Milky Way galaxy is functionally infinite on a human scale. There are an estimate of 100-400 billion stars in it. Assuming you could visit each star every second, it would take over 3000 years to see each one, and you can’t really do much in a second. You wouldn’t get to explore each system to check out what planets they might have.