Shower Thoughts: Space Is Weird
The universe is a mind-boggling place. Actually, I'm not even sure I can call it a place. NASA says the universe is everything, but what they really mean is that it contains everything— all of space, energy, time, and matter, like you and me. But there's more to it than meets the eye, literally. All ordinary matter, like the particles that form us and everything else we can see, only comprise about 5% of the universe. So far, that's all the stuff that makes up our stars, planets, and galaxies. And we've only been able to see about half of all of that with our telescopes. The rest is entirely invisible.
It's as if the universe doesn't like being put under our microscope—or telescope, to be more precise. Around 27% of our universe is dark matter, which emits no light or energy and can't be detected by conventional sensors and detectors. We don't even know what it's really made of, and to be completely honest, we're not even sure it exists. We could only assume. To be fair, we have strong reason to believe dark matter exists. As early as the 1920s, astronomers hypothesized that the universe must contain more matter than we can see because the universe's gravitational forces appear stronger than the visible matter can account for. It's a simple matter of math—okay, probably not simple math, but you get the idea.
As if this wasn't confusing enough, the remaining 68% of the universe is made up of dark energy. Just like dark matter, dark energy is purely theoretical. It popped on our radars in 1998 when the Hubble Space Telescope discovered that, in the past, the universe expanded at a slower rate than it does today. If the universe is now growing at an accelerating rate, then there must be a force countering gravity and causing this acceleration. Wait, did I just describe repulsive gravity?
As you can see—or can't—actually, there's a lot of speculation when it comes to developing a blueprint for understanding the universe and everything in it. Even if we focus solely on the visible 5%, there's still a lot to unpack. The universe is a very confusing place, but subjects like math and physics make it easy for us to understand and appreciate the beauty in its chaos. Learning these difficult subjects might sound daunting, but there's a fun and easy way to learn them: brilliant.org. The best way to learn math, science, and computer science topics, Brilliant makes learning fun with interactive courses and features that allow you to challenge yourself or compete with others.
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Back to our story. Next time you find yourself gazing at a sky full of stars, take a moment and try to count how many you can see. Let me help you: on a clear night, there's about 6,000. But if we wanted to calculate the number of stars in the entire universe, first we'd have to count the galaxies. To do that, astronomers take very detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and count the galaxies in those pictures. They then multiply that number by the images needed to photograph the entire sky.
Are you ready for the answer? There are approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the universe—two trillion clusters of dust swirling in a mostly invisible universe, harboring countless stars, planets, and even civilizations. Our Milky Way galaxy alone is home to 100 billion stars. Using this number as a standard, we can predict that there are roughly 200 billion trillion stars in the universe—a staggering number, I know. It's about 10 times the number of cups of water in Earth's oceans. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, every star has at least one planet orbiting it, meaning there are at least 100 billion exoplanets in our galaxy alone.
Today, NASA has discovered more than 5,000 of them. The big question that has been haunting us ever since we developed the mental capacity to ponder our existence in this vast universe is still unanswered: are we alone in the universe? Well, according to Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, considering the young age of our solar system compared to the much older age of the universe, interstellar travel should be easy to achieve. Given enough time, Earth should have been visited by intelligent aliens by now, if they did exist. This interpretation became known as the Fermi Paradox, and it provides no consolation to our lonely existence.
But what if life isn't as unique as we think it is? What if the universe is teeming with countless species, far more intelligent than we are—species that know of our existence and even visit us, only to deem us unfit or too primitive for interaction? Think about an ant colony that you happen to come across during your walk in the park. Would you try to communicate with them? It would be pointless, wouldn't it? If you're having a bad day, you might even go out of your way to step on them. Maybe our entire existence is equivalent to an ant colony placed in this region of the universe by some sort of higher intelligence—an isolated experiment with no particular purpose.
All right, I'll admit that's a bit dark. Let's bring some light back into the equation. Light is the fastest thing in the universe, and in a vacuum, it can travel at speeds close to 300,000 km/second. To put that in perspective, light can circulate the Earth 7 and 1/2 times in just 1 second. Even at these insane speeds, it would take light 92 billion years to travel across the observable universe. Yes, that's where the measurement "light-year" comes from.
Light is strange. It's an electromagnetic wave of massless particles called photons that travel outward in straight lines. But how can it travel around the Earth if it moves in straight lines? Maybe Earth is flat after all. I won't get into that right now, but I made an entire video about it. You should check it out—spoiler, though: it isn't. While light does travel in straight lines, it can also be bent by gravity. Contrary to what we were taught in school, gravity isn't a force; it doesn't pull anything downward. Instead, it just curves the fabric of the universe.
If you're confused, don't feel bad; gravity has confounded the best of us. Winston Churchill famously said that gravity is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But we've put our best scientists on it, and while Newton gave us a good understanding of gravity, it was Einstein who cracked the code. To do so, Einstein first had to reimagine three-dimensional space by adding time to the equation. The outcome is a four-dimensional construct called spacetime. A mass, like the Sun, warps this fabric by creating a valley, and then planets, like Earth, circle around the valley like a ball around a roulette wheel. This is what we call the force of gravity.
Einstein had quite the imagination. Before he was recognized as a genius, he worked as a patent clerk and had a lot of time to think about, well, time. In his Special Relativity Theory, Einstein proved that time is relative to the observer. This means that when an object is moving really fast, it experiences time more slowly. For example, in 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly spent nearly a year on board the International Space Station, which meant that he was moving much faster than his twin brother, Mark, who was on the Earth's surface. Based on Einstein's Special Relativity Theory, Mark aged 5 milliseconds more than his brother did in space during this time.
This is called time dilation, and while 5 milliseconds doesn't seem like much, at speeds approaching that of light, time dilation can have much more dramatic effects. If a 15-year-old leaves Earth traveling at 99.5% the speed of light for 5 years, upon returning to Earth, they will find that they've aged only 5 years, while everyone else has aged 50. I know, but time dilation isn't exclusive to speed; gravity can also slow time. The bigger the mass of an object, the bigger the warping of spacetime, and the slower time moves. It's believed that time freezes entirely at the edge of black holes—at the event horizon.
Who knows? Maybe time even moves backwards inside black holes. Speaking of black holes, in the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered that black holes aren't as rare as we thought they were. Almost every galaxy we know of, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center. We still don't know what they're doing there, but they must have played a significant part since they're at the heart of every galaxy. Maybe galaxies gave birth to black holes, or black holes to galaxies. You know, your typical chicken and egg situation, but on a cosmic scale.
Observations from the Hubble tell us that galaxies were born around 1 billion years after the Big Bang, and we know that the Big Bang was created out of a singularity—an infinitely small, hot, and dense point, which is the exact definition of black holes. Could our universe have been born out of a black hole? It very well could have.
Have you ever wondered what was there before the Big Bang? Was there a time before time itself? As creatures of time, it's hard to imagine a time without time. Okay, this time I'm done talking about time. I'll leave this topic for another video. Here's one to make you gasp for breath: every atom of oxygen in your lungs, carbon in your muscles, calcium in your bones, and iron in your blood was created inside a star before Earth was born. Apart from hydrogen, every other ingredient in our body is made from elements forged by stars.
Stars are basically giant element furnaces. Their intense heat can cause atoms to collide, creating new elements like iron and carbon. Now, aren't you glad there are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe? If you're feeling overwhelmed by the true immensity of it all, you can take a step back and focus your energy inward. There are around seven octillion atoms in a 70 kg (or 150 lb) body—that's 7 billion billion billion, and these atoms are made up of even smaller fundamental particles, like electrons.
The study of matter and energy at the smallest fundamental level is called quantum physics, and believe it or not, we still don't know much about it. An electron, for example, can exist in two places at one time; it's called superposition. If we're made of electrons and other quantum particles, why can't we be in two places at once? Is there something I'm missing here?
As I said, quantum physics is a mind-boggling field, but unlike dark matter and dark energy, at least we can observe quantum particles, right? Well, we can, but it's a bit more complicated than you might think. One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory is that the sheer act of observation can alter the observed reality. One of the most famous experiments in physics, the double-slit experiment, demonstrated that particles like electrons could have wave-like properties and suggested that simply observing the electron can dramatically affect its behavior.
Like most of the universe, it seems that electrons don't like being observed. They've been proven to be rather intimate with each other; maybe that's why, once interacting, subatomic particles can form unbreakable bonds, even if they're billions of light-years apart. It's called quantum entanglement and is still one of the many mysteries of quantum physics. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance," which sounds like an incredible name for a band, I'll admit.
Maybe diving into the world of subatomic particles wasn't such a good idea, but it was necessary. Finding a link between the very small and the large will be the key to understanding everything the universe offers. Despite everything we know, we haven't even begun to scratch the surface.
At the end of the day, our existence in this cold and silent universe is as confusing as it is mesmerizing. But there's a certain kind of wisdom in not knowing. Maybe if we did, we'd have no reason to push the boundaries of our knowledge anymore, or worse, we'd have no reason to look up at the stars and just wonder.
On a clear night, your piece of the sky can be lit by as many as 6,000 stars. So whenever you can, look above and enjoy the cosmic view. You never know what you might discover.