this is a problem i’ve been having for a long, long time. well, a short time, when compared to the vastness of Time itself, but let’s just say it’s been a decade or more in the pot.
and maybe i’m just being obstinate…
see, i don’t like the numbers that most physicists generally associate with such things as the size and age of the universe. i refuse to believe them, in fact. to say that the Earth is roughly a few billion years old is one thing, but that the universe is only 12-14 billion years old? that makes the span of the Earth’s existence match a full 25% of the lifetime of the universe itself (so far). i’d like to think that the universe is far older than that. when i was a kid, i’d read an estimate of 18-20 billion years, and i have little problem with that, but lately all i’ve been reading are estimates ranging from 12-14, and never more than that. i have no real argument, it just seems to me that the universe must be vastly older than we think.
which brings us to length. we seem to have little problem in assuming that the universe stretches out a fairly equal distance on all sides from the Earth. this is because that’s all we can see or measure with our finest equipment, and it’s all we can fathom mathematically, due to the age and rate of expansion that we have been thus far able to observe (or extrapolate). so does that make the Earth the center of the universe or something? ha! doubtful. of course, the Earth would be the center of the observable universe, but why isn’t anyone ever publically making assumptions that we’re way off-angle, that we’re maybe closer to something like a third of the distance from the edge to the center.
once again, i have zero facts to support my case. all i have is what i think, and what i think just makes more sense to me than the extrapolations of paid sophists.
i think that the universe is probably a hell of a lot bigger and older than what anyone has come up with so far. it’s probably so god damn big that it repeats itself, or appears to, every few gazillion lightyears, and it’s probably so fucking old that what we call the “Big Bang” has happened several thousand times already, and the last event was maybe even as long ago as a trillion or more years, or at least a few dozen billion.
that’s what i think. and i’m very probably way off base. i’m likely even wronger than the mainstream physicists!
but here’s something: they’re always talking about how everything seems to be expanding, and in a seemingly ridiculous twist, that it seems to be expanding away from the Earth… as if we were truly located at the Center of Everything! but what most people don’t seem to realize is that when the whole thing is expanding and getting less dense, any point you observe things from would appear to be the center. that’s because any point you observe the expansion from is itself getting farther away from its surroundings; everything is moving away from everything else. there need not be a center (for any practical purpose), because it’s only getting less and less dense. physicists know this, but the general public don’t seem to understand it very well. so this much has been a sort of Public Service Announcement, for those of you who may not have realized.
so my point is that we’re not at the center, and that any calculations made based on the assumption that we’re anywhere near to the center cannot be remotely correct. and we can’t tell where the center is, because all we can see is light from a distance away from us, in lightyears, that happens to be equal to the age of the universe, in years. and there’s no conceivable way to measure things otherwise. but the first wave of expansion was undoubtably matter travelling at literally impossible, faster-than-light speeds (which in turn means infinite mass; Q.E.D. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity), which means the universe may be millions of times larger than it is old; and if it’s that much larger than we suspected, then our calculations for its age may also be affected, and it might well be that much older as well.
ok, my little unsophisticated, uneducated, and thoroughly unqualified geekrant is done. go about your business in a disorderly fashion.
