S
summers
Visionary
- Nov 4, 2020
- 2,495
Another thread I posted was a catalyst for this thought: On a large or long enough scale, nothing matters. Here are a few examples:
Size:
Time (even crazier):
Size:
- What happens on the other side of the planet probably won't affect you.
- When the moon finally crashes back into the earth, basically destroying it, the rest of the solar system will be fine.
- If the sun were to disappear, and all objects in the solar system got flung into space, they would probably never interact with any other celestial object.
- If our galaxy disappeared, the rest of the universe would go on like nothing happened.
- Even if our local group of galaxies disappeared (this is HUNDREDS of TRILLIONS of stars), the rest of the universe wouldn't even notice.
Time (even crazier):
- Over millennia, only a very few people are remembered. Think about history books - how many people from 2000+ years ago are mentioned?
- Over hundreds of thousands of years people probably won't even be around, and their contributions, short of the voyager probes and objects still orbiting the planet, will be completely lost.
- Over billions of years, the earth will be gone, no one (human or alien) will ever know it existed.
- Over trillions of years, everything that is currently known about the universe will be gone (even if there were beings left capable of understanding this) (this is due to the theory of expansion basically blacking out the cosmic radiation background)
- (This is the craziest) According to certain theories, over a long enough time, the universe will be the same as if the big bang never happened (this is very simplified). In essence, nothing and everything wind up being exactly the same, given enough time.