The Universe is really weird but it may not matter (to us)

Universe
Image credit | xalanx

The problem with humans is that we have one point of observation and perspective. This is really important as we try and figure the vastness of the Universe. This will also never change. Even if we ever manage to build an AI that can overcome that (billions of points of view, linked together?) it will probably take so long that it will be too late for humans.

As scientists club together (we are talking over 11,000 from 153 different countries) to warn us that climate change, or rather catastrophe, is upon us, we still have no idea about the universe in which we exist.

Previous theories are melting away, because what we do have, or are beginning to have, are tools that can observe things that are happening billions of light years away. Or, more accurately, did happen.

The latest observation potentially throws everything we ever knew about the Universe into turmoil – again.

A report in Vice highlights the latest observation of vast structures holding our Universe together:

“The observed coherence must have some relationship with large-scale structures, because it is impossible that the galaxies separated by six megaparsecs [roughly 20 million light years] directly interact with each other,” Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute astronomer Hyeop Lee told the site.

While we have figured out gravity (in a tiny, teeny way) and the fact that heavenly bodies end up in orbit around other heavenly bodies, this observation is at such a scale as to unhinge all previous observations. That such vast bodies behave in this way must reset any thinking about just how big our Universe (or Universes, obviously) is, or are.

Meanwhile, back on our tiny chip of green and for the moment life giving world, it does seem that we are in trouble. Some will say that if you look at a copy of the London Times from June 1922, there are panicked articles about global warming and climate change that could have been written in 2019. But are we now near some sort of tipping point as things happen at an ever increasing rate?

A secret suspicion is that Mother Earth will ultimately look after herself. Another suspicion is that she also has a sense of humour. Which probably means that, rather than fry, we will actually end up in an Ice Age, which will freeze in all the nasty stuff we have been throwing at her, until such a time as the earth has refreshed itself and digested the nasty stuff.

What will be allowed to emerge from the ice, though, is anybody’s guess.

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