Feeling small?
Posted by Nicholas Gruen on Thursday, December 20, 2007
There are 100,000 times as many stars in the universe as sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived.
This is the tenth of ten big facts about the universe. See how many you know here.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:47 AM and filed under Science.
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Sounds like another gem from the Department of Made Up Statistics.
Not saying it ain’t iinteresting, nor that it may not be of the right order of magnitude, but come on, they take two unknown (and unknowable) numbers and assume that they exist in some ratio? It’s a bit much to call it a ‘fact’.
Aah, Christmas. A great time for humbug.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 9:36 am | PermalinkIt’s a fair cop.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 9:46 am | PermalinkWhat STT said. Isn’t the universe infinite anyway? If so then there would be an infinite amount of stars, so a ratio isn’t possible.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 3:51 pm | PermalinkSTT: it’d be a good order of magnitude reckoning guess I’d reckon. Physicists do that a lot. As I recall Robert Merkel talked about it.
It could be something like:
Estimated number of known galaxies * Average number of stars per galaxy.
A cursory search on Google gives 125 billion galaxies and a figure for our galaxy of 100 billion stars, which I will take as my baseline.
That gives somewhere in the order of 12,500 billion billion stars. The order of magnitude is 1021, if I’ve added the zeros up right.
Now we try to estimate the number of words and sounds uttered. That would be given by Total Time Elapsed of All Human Lives To Date * Average Speed of Speech.
Turning again to Google, some fellow named Keyfitz reckons that 2.402 billion years of life have been lived since 1 million BC and the average speed of speech is 15 sounds per second.
That gives 1.1369904 x 1018 possible sounds uttered since the dawn of the species, assuming that everyone spoke constantly from birth. So the order of magnitude is 1018.
The difference in this case is 3 orders of magnitude — about 1000 times. Even if you fiddle with the parameters by reducing the numbers of stars and galaxies ten times each, you still wind up with a big difference.
I would say that the scientists who compiled that estimate had better access than Google, so I would say their calculations were plausible. QED.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 4:06 pm | PermalinkYobbo: the latest cosmology suggests that the universe is finite.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 4:08 pm | PermalinkIt might predate the latest cosmology a little Jacques. I rtead somewhere (forget where) of a nineteenth century physicist who advanced one or two proofs that the universe couldn’t be infinite. The one I remember is that if the universe were infinite, the night sky would be uniformly white, instead of (sometimes very) dark blue with a scattering of stars. This is because there would be no direction in which one could look without there being at least one or more stars shining out somewhere in that direction - in fact an infinite number of stars.
I’ve probably botched the explanation, but when I first read it, my reaction was one of those “Oh yeah, of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” reactions.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 6:29 pm | PermalinkGummo refers to Olber’s paradox from 1823, which would mean that the universe is either finite, or expanding, or both.
I too have objections to the “Top Ten Favorite Facts“.
#4 is still only conjecture, and #8 might be true if #4 is true.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 7:32 pm | PermalinkA bit further, in a few years time, what we now measure as the effect of hypothetical dark matter and dark energy may well be regarded as the disproof of #4.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 7:36 pm | PermalinkA scientist - possibly an astrophysicist or astronomer from Condobolin or Parkes has tried to construct a model in western NSW to try to convey the scale of space to us.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 9:55 pm | PermalinkThis description of his model was on ABC NSW yesterday.
Say the Sun is at Condobolin , maybe Earth is at Dubbo , Pluto is interstate etc.
The interesting point was that if you compared the speed of a car travelling at 100 km/hr as travelling at 3x the speed of light , you would have to travel 2.7x the distance to the Moon to get to the nearest star.
I’d guess that means you could travel at 33 km/hr ( the impossibility of travelling at speed of light etc etc ) but the scale is still staggering.
I can’t recall all the details more precisely sorry but if you search around on the ABC it might be there.
Yobbo, as I understand it the idea that the universe is infinite is just sooooooo September 10th - like totally 1895sville.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 10:02 pm | PermalinkNicholas Gruen [10]:
Given that the universe is immense …. why would the terms “finite’ and “infinite” be suitable or even relevant? Is an entirely different concept called for in talking about the universe?
Just a bit of wondering …. from a non-cosmologist.
Posted on 20-Dec-07 at 11:32 pm | Permalinkerr - no.
I reckon I’ve got a good grasp of the conceptual difference between infinite and really really really big.
Posted on 21-Dec-07 at 1:28 am | PermalinkThe problem with Olber’s paradox is that it doesn’t account for the speed of light. Even if the universe is infinitely large, the speed of light is finite. It would take an infinite amount of time for the light of the infinite stars to reach us in an infinite universe, so the night sky does not settle the matter either way. QED.
I can’t recall who came up with that counter-proof.
Posted on 21-Dec-07 at 11:37 am | PermalinkNicholas Gruen [12]:
Posted on 22-Dec-07 at 6:33 am | PermalinkNo, I mean, is there a completely different concept that otherwise describes the universe than [what seems to me] the linear one of big, very very very big and infinitely humungously big? If there isn’t, I’ll just have to go back to science fiction with its hyperspace, warp-drive, BEMs, etc. and leave philosophy tp the philosophers.
Which just goes to show that the universe cannot be infinite and eternal. Since eternity has neither beginning nor end, any given moment within infinity will have been preceded by a period of infinite duration so the light will have got here. No QED about it, I’m afraid.
Posted on 22-Dec-07 at 7:31 am | PermalinkI love these discussions. I reckon the only way to experience the infinite is to be able step outside the time-space continuum. This, while conceptually almost graspable, is however, experientially impossible. The minute you ‘think’ you’ve got it, you obviously haven’t by virtue of the fact that you are there and are taking up space, ie your body takes up space and concomitant to having a body comes the inevitiblity of entropy, ie. time. The ability to conceptualise the idea of no space and no time and the possibility of an infinite also takes up space but a different kind of space to the space taken up by a prone to the exactitudes of time, in a decaying body. (Thought also takes time, whereas feelings are lightning quick.)
The only way we are ever going to realise an infinite is once we have been rendered body-less–’dead’ and through some process of ‘non’-thought. Once we have become less dense, we may be able to feel our way into the infinite. Something which we tend to do by being gripped by the possibility, the liklihood that it is a reality that ‘exists’.
In time honoured boy scouts way, best be prepared. The infinite is large and we are dead a long time, for some–eternally.
Posted on 22-Dec-07 at 9:40 pm | PermalinkGummo Trotsky [15] and caroline [16];
Posted on 25-Dec-07 at 10:05 am | PermalinkAah. That’s the spirit. That’s the sort of thing I was looking for.