Mouse Neurons and The Universe
 

Do you see a pattern, or is it just coincidence?

Well, it's worth noting that the pic on the right is a little speculative. Physicists are still working on the whole dark matter issue, and it's a computer simulation.

ANyway, in a way, it's both a pattern and a coincidence. There are lots of patterns that you see all over nature that are the products of basic math and so on. Here, it's interesting that they look alike because we're dealing with such massively different scales and very different forces. But I can think of a lot of things that look similar. For example, road maps look like this, with nodes at the big cities and webs of roads. Ants are the same way - a big field with a lot of ant mounds would look similar from above, with nodes at the ant mounds and connecting fibers for the ant paths.

It's really a beautiful thing - any kind of self-similarity in nature or the man-made world is cool. It fills me with a sense of awe and humility.

http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=atlanta,+ga&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=9&ll=3 3.671783,-84.256897&spn=1.615996,3.47168&iwloc=addr

Also, you can make some extremely similar looking pictures using some 2d cellular automata rules.

great thread. I love patterns!

The thing that freaks me out about the universe is that you could have a massive massive black hole somewhere surrounded by absolutely nothing. No way of knowing it is there. It sort of binds us to our galaxy. Leaving the milky way for another galaxy, there will be black holes that we might not have any indication of their existence, because there is no nearby matter for us to view getting sucked in.

hell our Galaxy is over 150 thousand light years across. That is about
880,457,040,000,000,000 MILES!!!!

that's over 880 quadrilllion miles! (light travels at 186 thousand miles per second, multiplied by 60 seconds, multiplied by 60 minutes, multiplied by 24 hours in a day, multiplied by 365.25 days a year, multiplied by 150 thousand years)

That's just top cross our galaxy! The nearest star to us is under 2 light years away. That is 195,657,120,000 MILES!!!!

One hundred ninety five billion miles away!!

shit that is far!!!!!

Proxima Centauri is the closest, and it's 4.22 light years away.

Ah, isn't life wonderful? Everything is like those webs really, at least if you want them to be.

You are correct! That is twice as far as my estimate!

It's no big deal. 2 light years at 186,282.397 miles per second isn't that much further. :D

Everything's the same in this Universe, from a certain point of view.
What's the difference between a rat dying and a star collapsing?
It's in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
We're bits of nothing into that vaste emptyness we call the Universe.
Patterns repeat because in fact there are as many as infinite universes nested one into the other. Think about the atoms, for instance. They have their own galaxies and empty space and colliding forces. Like fractals or the number aleph.
When we address the infinity, all of us (human, not human, atom, whatever) are equal before the Great Thing, or the Great Void, as you prefer.
Just in my humble opinion, of course.
*Edit: "What's true below, it's true above" - William Blake.

Nasa is inventing an improbability drive to make that trip really short.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omv7IG7p1dI

Hohoho.

According to Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, travelling at the speed of light is possible.

Sadly, the known Universe is so vast, it would take a lifetime to travel far even at light speed.
Hyperspace? ;)

There are some scientists that think Einstein is wrong, and faster than light speed is achievable by manned spacecraft.

Yeah, there's a theory I read some place I can't remember. They said the real problem was acceleration. Lightspeed has to be attained by acceleration, but accelerating beyond lightspeed would bring us back in time.
They said if we mounted acceleration over acceleration, like accelerating platforms, we could attain beyond-lightspeed.
Now I don't remember if I read it in Carl Sagan's Cosmos or a science fiction book. That's a real trouble, mmm?

Teleportation is another option. The thing that makes many scientists worry about teleporting (if it's ever achieved), is the fact that if you dematerialize here and appear somewhere else, it could damage your DNA and cell structure. Not only that. Will it really be you, or a carbon copy, that materializes on the other side.