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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to cosmic scales, it is literally unimaginable by the puny human mind. I don't know about others but I frankly can't really comprehend what does the mass of an entire mountain condensed into a single pebble mean.

And there are stars full of this stuff. And there are stars spinning so fast its magnetic waves would rip the iron out of my blood and destroy the physics that hold my atoms together just because I am standing a few billions miles away from it.

It is absolutely humbling and make it ridiculous to think that there were men ages ago who thought the universe was created solely for human and somehow we, the sacks of meat so fragile it bursts at every miniscule amount of agitation, were "made" as some special, supreme beings in the universe and all of creations. Hilarious and sad.

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> I frankly can't really comprehend what does the mass of an entire mountain condensed into a single pebble mean.

Maybe turn it around. On a cosmic level, that mountain is nothing but a fluff of cottonwool, the earth a hot air balloon.

Or turn around again. Zoom out far enough and maybe there's a view where the pulsar is comparably no more that a lit sparkler.

Note: This isn't an argument for god or whatever. Just thinking on scales where our "laughing in the rain" is a nightmare for ants.

That's us! We're not bathed in pulsar brilliance, we're picking up the sparse but energetic photons it emits from far far away. We cannot see the "highest energy pulsar" with our naked eyes.

>This isn't an argument for god or whatever...

It better not be. This is a proper orthodox forum.

> When it comes to cosmic scales, it is literally unimaginable by the puny human mind.

One of my favorite mind-benders is that on some level, we embody cosmic scales of our own. The "biggest length" is our observable universe is 10^26 m. The "smallest length" is the Plank length at 10^-35 m. That puts the "middle length" at about a millimeter, or (very roughly) human scale.

I find all this really incredible as well. But at the same time I also find it really 'mindblowing' that I am able to think about why and how all of this stuff was made, and while thinking about it, there will always come a point where you have to at least 'think' about an creator. Not that I think it was made especially for us, but it's still very strange. Somewhere I read when you think about the universe it is like "The Universe thinking about itself.".

I agree. I actually think that is a very common thought, at least from what I have seen with my colleagues who are mostly scientists in engineering and biotech. It could be because of our background but the kind of complexity and seemingly genius engineering solutions in some biological systems just boggle the mind and make us question how it happened. We often handwave them with evolution and sure we can come up with some ideas of how it actually evolved but at some point I personally felt some explanations we got became too contrived and overly convenient and nearly unfalsifiable...

To be honest though, I still don't think a creator is absolutely necessary. But I also think there is nothing wrong with the idea that there is one. I just personally don't think this creator, if exist, would belong to any of the major religion out there.

We are a tad beyond handwaving, but with all the information overload it's hard to recognize scientific breakthroughs anymore.

Anyway thermodynamics did it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271

Most people won't like this answer, because it's too impersonal. Thus the search for a more inspiring origin story continues. There is no drama in thermodynamics, no love, no revenge, although there are explosions.

That is a great paper! Yes, from my engineering school I know if we dig deep enough, it would all be thermodynamics. But I was not sure if anyone dig that deep yet. This paper seems to be deeper than what I thought was done. Strange how I didn't see it, seems very relevant especially with all the LLM rage these days.

> Somewhere I read when you think about the universe it is like "The Universe thinking about itself.".

This reminds me of this quote from Jill Tarter of SETI, particularly the last sentence:

“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”

source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)

(I copied this nearly verbatim from another comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37061363)

I suspect it's been used in many places - we need to summon that quote investigator! - but I did make a note of this when I read Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks:

"All you ever were was a little piece of the universe, thinking to itself."

Paraphrasing: There are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each galaxy contains approximately 100 billion of stars. It takes 100s of thousands years travelling at the speed of light to get from one end of the galaxy to the other. It takes 100s of millions to billions of years to get from one galaxy to another. And all those galaxies are moving away from each other at mind boggling speeds 73 kilometres per second.

It’s humbling. And we kill each other for silly reasons. We are so significant, yet so insignificant.

>It takes 100s of thousands years travelling at the speed of light to get from one end of the galaxy to the other.

The crazy thing is that at a constant 1g acceleration you could get to the Andromeda galaxy in your lifetime. Andromeda might be 4 million light years away, but relativistic effects mean that only about 30 years would pass for you.

Of course, constant 1g acceleration would require an unimaginable amount of energy (and something to thrust with).

At 1.5g-s you could make it in 20.

> what does the mass of an entire mountain condensed into a single pebble mean

I find it easier to comprehend in the subatomic context, picturing the space between particles like the space between stars and planets on the cosmic scale. Mash all the stars and planets together in, say, our solar system, and the entire solar system would only be about the size of the sun. Then repeat that for all the solar systems in the Milky Way, and the entire Milky Way would only be about the size of the black hole at the center. Relatively, of course!

Your ideas about the world are drawn from what you see. Maybe you see something they didn't see. Maybe they see something you didn't see.

I dunno man. Every generation thinks they have the answers and that their ancestors were fools.

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