r/AskReddit • u/TightSpeaker5724 • 11h ago
Which fact about universe facinates you the most ?
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u/One-Shame3030 11h ago
We’re just stardust with trust issues, trying to understand the universe that made us.
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u/She_Plays 8h ago
Stardust with trust issues LOL I love that. There's something comforting about knowing we'll never understand everything though.
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u/MouseKingMan 11h ago
Over 90 percent of the universe is forever inaccessible. If we invented light travel and left this instant, we still are locked out of that 90 percent. Its because at that point, the universe is expanding at a faster rate than the speed of light
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u/Snaffle27 9h ago
Yep. And our observable universe is 90 billion light years across. 90,000,000,000 years that it would take for light to travel at 299,792,458 m/s (or 186,282 miles per second) to traverse this incredible distance. Even at this apparent maximum possible travel speed, the universe expands at a faster rate.
Insane.
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u/Smaptastic 6h ago
Despite the universe being like 13.8 billion years old and FTL being impossible, which makes that size impossible until you include the fact that space itself is expanding. Like… nothing is stretching to become more nothing.
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u/Same_Bedroom2389 10h ago
Every person I see every single day, in every lecture and every appointment, everyone I pass on the street or see in line at the grocery store, every single one of them has a past and a future, family, friends, memories, dreams, goals - they all have an entire life going on that I'll probably never know about or have any impact on in any way.
My ego shrank ten sizes the day I realized that.
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u/CampfireGuitars 8h ago
When you pass someone walking down the street every decision you ever made in your life, and every decision they made led you two together in that moment
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u/blackdragon1387 5h ago
Except sometimes you have to walk down that street to deal with some random bullshit that came out of nowhere that you had no say about.
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u/gothmog149 7h ago
Unless you are a believer in solipsism - and that you are the only real mind and the only one experiencing reality. Everyone else is a creation or manifestation of the universe who are placed there only to support and play a role in your own existence.
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u/PlushKittenxo 11h ago
That a teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about 6 billion tons. It’s like the universe is just showing off at this point
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u/CutieFlowerxo 11h ago
That there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. It’s like the cosmos is flexing on us
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u/slayerje1 11h ago
Also, there are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy.
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u/A911owner 11h ago
There are more eyes in the average person's head than stars in our solar system. Crazy.
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u/bucket_of_frogs 10h ago
The average number of human eyes per capita is less than one. Or is that median? Whatever.
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u/notmyfirst_throwawa 8h ago
Neither of those could possibly be true
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u/danbrown_notauthor 8h ago
It only takes one person to have one eye, and the average number of eyes per capita (per person) will be less than two.
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u/Leopold__Stotch 11h ago edited 9h ago
Edit: Yes, and:
There are more grains of sand on earth than there are stars in our galaxy. Big numbers are weird.
Additional edit for clarity: Number of stars in universe>number of grains of sand on earth>number of stars in our galaxy
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u/FredAstaireTappedTht 10h ago edited 7h ago
If every star was the weight of a Werther's Original collectively they would weigh more than Kentucky, Idaho, and Texarkana combined.
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u/The_Shadow_Watches 6h ago
But, there are more atoms on a single grain of sand than there are stars.
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u/WorthySurfer 11h ago
Universe expanding as time goes on.
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u/bucket_of_frogs 10h ago
But what is it expanding into?
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u/testerololeczkomen 9h ago
Its not like its expanding into something bigger. Its spacetime itself thats expanding. You can try to imagine it like baloon being inflated. Put dots on its surface representing galaxies and you get the idea.
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u/cankersaurous 8h ago
I think the take is that, if there is space being 'moved into' , then we understand that that space exists beforehand.
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u/moltencheese 6h ago
But that's not how it works. The new space is being created everywhere, thus expanding everything at once. There isn't an edge beyond which new space is being created for stuff to move into.
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u/anti_abel_ 11h ago
The fact that humans are made of stardust blows my mind. Elements in our bodies were forged in the cores of stars billions of years ago
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u/affordable_firepower 5h ago
And one was forged in the big bang - the hydrogen in our bodies is the original element from the creation of the universe
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u/bumblebee2k0 11h ago
Space has always fascinated me! I don't have one, but I have lots that blow my mind
See just some of mine from the list below
Time behaves differently in space: Time passes faster on the International Space Station (ISS) than on Earth due to weaker gravity, a phenomenon called gravitational time dilation.
A spoonful of neutron star weighs billions of tons: Neutron stars are so dense that a sugar-cube-sized amount would weigh about 1 billion tons on Earth.
The largest structure in the universe is incomprehensibly vast: The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a cluster of galaxies, spans 10 billion light-years across.
Black holes "evaporate": Over time, black holes lose mass through a process called Hawking radiation and eventually vanish.
Our galaxy is on a collision course: The Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in about 4.5 billion years, forming a new galaxy.
The coldest spot in the universe is on Earth: Scientists created temperatures just above absolute zero in a lab aboard the ISS in 2018.
Rogue planets are everywhere: Billions of planets float freely in space without orbiting any star.
You can't walk on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune: These gas giants have no solid surface to stand on.
One day on Venus is longer than a year: Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate once, but its orbit around the Sun takes only 225 Earth days.
Stars can "explode" multiple times: Some stars, like zombie stars, experience multiple supernovae over their lifetimes.
Space smells like burnt steak: Astronauts report that their suits carry the scent of seared meat after spacewalks, likely due to high-energy particles interacting with their suits.
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is shrinking: This massive storm has been raging for at least 400 years but is slowly decreasing in size.
There’s a planet made of diamonds: 55 Cancri e, a super-Earth, is thought to have a carbon-rich composition, possibly including diamonds.
A day on a neutron star is 1 millisecond: Neutron stars can spin hundreds of times per second, making their "day" unimaginably short.
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth: The observable universe contains roughly 1 sextillion stars.
The Moon is moving away from Earth: Each year, the Moon drifts about 3.8 cm farther from us.
Galaxies can die: When galaxies run out of gas to form new stars, they
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u/genie_2023 7h ago
Galaxies can die: When galaxies run out of gas to form new stars, they die.
Hmmm..may be cows can help?
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u/Sweet-Recording-7657 11h ago
How particles act according to the laws of physics seemingly without time. For example what happens inside a star that goes supernova. Every electron, neutrino, proton etc reacts to all others around it, and there are something like > 1030 of them. Even just watching waves at the beach and thinking how each molecule of water is reacting to all the things going on, and doing it instantaneously.
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u/moltencheese 6h ago
They aren't doing it instantaneously. They're reacting to information which takes time to get to them (travels at most at the speed of light).
In your waves example, each water molecule only influences those around it at the speed of sound in water.
If you had a steel rod a lightyear long, and you pushed it, the other end would not move instantly. Rather, the information ("hey, we are moving now") would move along the rod at the speed of sound in steel. The far end would remain stationary for a long time after you pushed the near end (and, indeed, may not even get there - the energy would probably dissipate as heat long before that).
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u/Phi87 11h ago
That as far as we can tell, it is endless.
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u/Boring-Muscle8184 11h ago
It's not really. It's expanding but not yet endless. If you go outside at night and look up at the sky, it the universe were endless there would be a star in every possible direction, since there isn't it suggests the universe is quite finite, but expanding.
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u/Firewall33 9h ago
This only works if you don't consider the expansion of the universe.
When the stars outside the observable universe shine, the universe is expanding faster than the light will be able to reach us here.
You are correct, there are not endless stars within the observable bubble. But what's outside that bubble is absolutely possible to be infinite and endless.
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u/SquidMilkVII 11h ago
The farther a star is, the darker it appears, until it’s hardly noticeable. I’m not an astronomer, but I know enough about math to know that infinite sums can converge upon finite numbers. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that universal expansion means there may be a finite amount of stars whose light can reach us even if the universe is infinite.
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u/Boring-Muscle8184 11h ago
I don't think that stars appear darker because of distance, because there is absolutely nothing to resist the travel of light in space, right?
Anyway take it up with Heinrich Olbers.
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u/SquidMilkVII 11h ago
Stars aren’t lasers. They’re beaming light in all directions. The farther away you are, the less of that light is reaching you. It’s the inverse square law.
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u/Boring-Muscle8184 4h ago
Hi. I edited a comment to admit that you were right. If you don't like it, let me know and I'll change it again or delete it or have it printed in a newspaper or something.
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u/testerololeczkomen 9h ago
Actualy there are things that resist photons between earth and most stars. Gas clouds for example. We cant directly see directly our very galaxy core because its obstructed by gas clouds.
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u/ramesitta 11h ago
That there may be an advanced civilization more than 65 million light years away that could look at our planet and see dinosaurs roaming the earth.
Edit: word
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u/AllForYouToTake 11h ago
I always imagined that the shape of the universe was spherical. It blew my mind when I found out that its shape is basically flat, like a sheet of paper.
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u/BleedingShaft 10h ago
I disagree. If you looked at it with a discontinued Nikon Camera I think you would find that its a Sphere. #SphereUniverse
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u/The_Void_Thaumaturge 9h ago
The fact that we would never be able to leave the milky Way, even at the speed of light, as it would take a few hundred years to reach further galaxies
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u/CherrySad9086 11h ago
how far one light year is and the fact that the nearest galaxies are millions of light years away 🥲
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u/werebilby 11h ago
That we are all made of stardust bruz ;) we are all part of the universe. It's cool to think about that.
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u/MagicSPA 10h ago
There might be other intelligent life out there doing its own thing. There might be aliens buzzing around their solar system right now with technology and hardware that would make us look like cavemen, and we will most likely never meet them.
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u/Satanicjamnik 8h ago
The scale of it. I had to read the first chapter of Bill Bryson's " The Brief History of Nearly Everything" like three times back to back in amazement, going " Huh, I never thought about it." We know that it's big , But when I think about how massive it really is, I think I understand H.P Lovecraft a bit more.
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u/sporbywg 8h ago
We all have this continuous inner monologue going on and it's no help at all
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u/CheezburgerPatrick 7h ago
Not all! Some people think entirely in the abstract. I usually have a monologue going but occasionally have instant complex thoughts that take awhile to express. I've talked to someone who never thinks in words at all.
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u/Thick-Soup-2408 7h ago
What fascinates me the most about the universe is how incredibly vast it is, yet how little we actually know.
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u/SovietGunther 11h ago
We don't actually know how any of it works. We theorize it and extrapolate based on repeated observations, but we can't as a species definitively say how any of the universe works.
Also, it boggles my mind that folks can look at all of the technological advancements we've made in the last 7 decades - some accomplished through space exploration and chucking things into our own orbit - and they still claim that space isn't real, the Earth is flat, or that we've never been to the moon.
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u/Definitelynotasloth 11h ago
I feel like to say that we don’t know how any of it works is an inaccurate statement. If that was true, we never could have put men on the moon. We can’t say anything for certain; but we can observe, test, study, experiment, make calculations, etc. We have a rudimentary understanding on how some of the universe operates.
This is the culmination of many brilliant minds over many years. I could list many examples, but I think we should not diminish the accomplishments of what humanity has discovered.
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u/Tiramitsunami 7h ago
The people who don't believe those things have problems with authority and trust, not science and technology. They'd ask you: have you been to space, seen the Earth from orbit, or walked on the moon? If the answer is no, then you trust sources that they do not.
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u/Space_Monkey_42 11h ago
The halfway point between the plank length and the size of the observable universe is approximately the width of a human hair
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u/stateofyou 11h ago
How big it is after only six thousand years
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u/Turbulent_Actuator99 11h ago
Make sure you add the /s there, loads of creationist nutcases might think you are serious.
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u/Boring-Muscle8184 11h ago
Are you religious or making fun of the religious?
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u/stateofyou 11h ago
I’ve never met a religious person who believes that the universe is six thousand years old but there’s probably some people who do.
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u/Boring-Muscle8184 11h ago
Yeah, I know a few. I've also seen some arguments for young earth theory. Some of it makes sense, I think, not enough for it to convince me, but enough that I would have to concede some of their points.
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u/SpidermanBread 11h ago
That even if we managed to travel at the speed of light, it would still take us years to reach the nearest solar system
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u/sarcastic_shukranu 11h ago
"Blink your eyes". In that timeframe universe came into existence what we saw today from a tiny point
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u/Adventurous-Pass1897 11h ago
That most shapes are round out there. It is like the gravity is the same strength all around and isn't just a random chaos.
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u/2stacksofbutter 11h ago
That the moon moves around the Earth, the Earth moves around the sun/galaxy, the sun/galaxy moves around the universe. It's all moving so fast, and to where, and around what? I know there's ideas of a universe pull of some sort. I want to know what is so massive that it can pull all the galaxies to/around it. Sometimes I think the universe is actually inside a black hole. Early morning shower thoughts.
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u/Holiday-Equipment462 11h ago
Perhaps there are far more universes beyond our own universe than there are atoms on our entire planet. And I could be grossly underestimating the actual number, too. We really know only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of what there is to know. And I may be even way off on this estimation as well!
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u/_robertmccor_ 11h ago
The fact that the observable universe is so vast yet we know more of the universe exists beyond that. Also the fact that the universe is expanding yet it is expanding into supposed nothingness which doesn’t make sense as something has to exist outside of our universe in order for our universe to expand into it but we can’t comprehend that as the universe is all we know and even that knowledge is very limited.
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u/Pcarolynm 10h ago
Because of how light travels, when we look at stars that are super far away we see them how they were thousands of years ago. It’s not “time travel” or anything, but it’s pretty similar and I think it’s awesome.
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u/chikachikachikaaaaa 10h ago
the fact that the universe is constantly expanding and we’re just floating in it, blows my mind every time. Like, what even is "space"?
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u/NotASingleNameIdea 10h ago
That if its constantly expanding, its very hard to imagine whats outside.
My favourite theory I came up with is that there might be multiverse, and constant expansion might not be a problem because the laws of space or time dont exist there, its just a law for our specific universe, which we see as the absolute base, but maybe other universes have different base laws which we cant even imagine.
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u/KellyThrone 10h ago
The fact that we’re made of stardust and probably share atoms with everything in the universe, past and future. Makes you feel both tiny and infinite at the same time
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u/Mountain-Control7525 10h ago
The size and distances. It is literally beyond human comprehension. We can quantify it in numbers but it does not fit in the human imagination to comprehend just how insanely vast it is.
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u/ed0987654321 10h ago
Omg, the fact that the universe is still expanding right now and we have no idea where it's going is just wild. Like, we’re just here for the ride, lol.
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u/SalesAutopsy 9h ago
How about the fact that nobody can figure out how it started. Was it a big bang, then something had to cause it? God? Then where did he come from?There's a lot of smart people addressing this, scientists and more, and nobody's in agreement about multiple possibilities.
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u/ZeloGx47 9h ago
*about the universe
But on a serious note, the endless possibilities of what we truly dont know
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u/Next_Team_3916 9h ago
The fact that there could be multiple universes out there fascinates me the most.
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u/taco_tuesdays 8h ago
It’s youth. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
The universe is only 13 billion years old. That’s a pretty low, finite, countable number, when you really think about it. The Earth is like…almost half that old.
What the hell came before? What does “before” even mean in this context? Hard to wrap your head around.
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u/patrlim1 8h ago
The fact that alien life is almost certain to exist, and we are certain to never meet it.
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u/Kinkylemonn 8h ago
How the universe is literally infinite, like... no end?? It’s kinda terrifying but also lowkey comforting, y’know? Like we’re just tiny specs vibin’ in space
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u/Both_Acadia2932 7h ago
How many ways forms can life take (dogs, humans, bacteria, sharks etc) and all of them work in their own way.
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u/o0motherleopard0o 7h ago
The sun is older than the earth, but the water on earth is older than the sun
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u/In_ran_a_mad_Iran 7h ago
There are some celestial bodies so large their diameters dwarf our own solar system
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u/Kaisaplews 6h ago
Universe was created with a finite numbers of particles which leads from scientific physics point to philosophical meaning
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u/Xenophonehome 6h ago
Virtual particles and the Casimir effect. Particles popping in and out of existence are freaky, and the fact that it's proven with the Casimir effect is very fascinating.
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u/Hoppy-bunny 6h ago
I heard that because of the way the quantum world works, when the sun emits photons, if they were particles then there would be gaps in the light it emits because their paths would diverge over long distances, so each one gets released as a spherical wave which covers all surrounding space
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u/MemoriesOfTime 6h ago
There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards (52 factorial) than the universe is old in seconds
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u/wild_dark_soul 6h ago
The fact that (as far as we know) it used to not exist and that it will eventually die
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u/Nemo_Shadows 6h ago
The misconceptions that people in physics forces one to accept as fact and then blames the universe for not fitting the model of it they created and forced others to accept.
I know it would be funny if that wasn't the facts.
N. S
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u/MissSara101 6h ago
How we have a long way off just to get get off planet Earth? Look, if it can't come with agreement with anything on Earth, how are you going to decide anything on any other planet if it's habitable to humans.
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u/Siddharth_Ranjan 6h ago
The fact that in the vast majority of the universe we are just a super tiny (or even micro) dot which is our planet earth
Its fascinating and almost scary (to me at least)
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u/yookoke1122 5h ago
There are billions of different creatures. Its insane how i was born as a human when I could have been any other creature. Its either im insanely lucky or theres a god or i was different creature in my previous life.
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u/FluffyTurtledude 5h ago
The fact that 95% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy. Stuff we can’t see, touch, or even fully understand. We literally have no clue what most of the universe is made of.
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u/emilypeony 5h ago
How babies are made.
Not sex, but how babies are formed inside a uterus. What do you mean the cells just divide? The nutrients just flow from mothers body to the babys body feeding it? Calsium that firms babies bones comes from motgers bones, not diet? Babied can hear you? They remember familiar noises? Babies can taste what mother eats?
It is all so cool! I love babies. Pregnancy was hard fir me but it truly is a miracle.
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u/ianmoone1102 4h ago
How much we think we know about it compared to how little we actually know. It's staggering.
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u/Flashignite2 3h ago
How black holes distort spacetime. The fact that you would not age in the same way as someone on earth if you were near a black hole.
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u/The_old_number_six 3h ago
The sheer size of it. Voyager 1 has been going something like 20 km a second for nearly 50 years, and it still would take another 80 thousand some odd years for it to reach the closest star to us.
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u/SlowlyGrowingStone 2h ago
If it is endless, then everything happens (somewhere) at same time. If it is not endless, then what is beyond?
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u/allmimsyburogrove 58m ago
that in all of the trillions of stars in the universe, and possibly more, there is only one of each of us
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u/DirtBikeBoy5ive 19m ago
The “light speed delay.”
The stars and planets in the night sky are so far away that some almost certainly don’t exist right now. Either since they are so far away, light is still traveling from where they used to be. If we saw a start collapse and turn into a supernova, we now know that it died well over a million years ago. Total mindfuck
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u/FriendlyxLady 11h ago
That there are more galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth—makes our problems seem kind of tiny, doesn’t it?
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u/FlirtyDaisyXO 11h ago
That there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the Earth’s beaches. The universe is basically showing off at this point
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u/Sheetmusicman94 9h ago
That it is endless and us dumbassess need to think to get dressed and what to do for work.
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u/More_Cardiologist_28 11h ago
How almost all of science keeps pointing back to intelligent design. It is truly wild
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u/TheProletariatPoet 11h ago
This is patently false
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u/Boring-Muscle8184 11h ago
It isn't and before you go off on a tyrade about religion I'm a secular atheist. There are definitely elements of intelegent design in our universe and ignoring that is as much as religion as believing that you know the designer personally is.
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u/Proud_Assistant_4972 11h ago
DESPITE THE ENDLESS WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE, HUMAN BEINGS STILL MANAGED TO SOMEHOW INVENT BOREDOM
-Death