Airbrush

Yes, what we see is the red shift indicating how fast it WAS moving away from us at the moment the light LEFT the distant galaxy a Billion years ago. NOW we believe it is moving away much faster than the red shift told us.

I've never heard of any expert in astronomy suggest that a black hole singularity could further collapse.

A way to reverse global warming by reducing CO2 in the atmosphere is to irrigate the deserts. I don't know how to do this, but it will take a huge magnitude of fresh water and maybe that can be made in many desalination plants all over the world. Then you need a lot of explosives to dig out huge irrigation ditches extending into all the great deserts of the world. Then plant LOTS of trees.

An ET civilization that is perhaps 1,000,000 years more advanced than we are, would probably be interested in ANY other intelligence, since intelligence is probably very scarce. They will have technology that is so far advanced that we cannot even start to imagine HOW they know things. Like explaining what Kepler does to a Neanderthal. But what ETs detect will probably be limited by how far LIGHT itself from Voyager has traveled.

So it is safe to say that all objects in the asteroid belt orbit the sun the same direction as all the planets. An asteroid in retrograde orbit would not last long. It would get smashed to bits and the bits would accrete to bigger asteroids going the prevailing direction.

Besides the finite age of the universe and it is not steady state, I think the main reason the sky is not bright from an infinte number of stars is simply because of the vast distances to stars and galaxies and the feebleness of the light which cannot be seen with the naked eye. If you fix the most powerful telescope on a "black" area of space, you will find faint galaxies are there. 75% of stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs and NONE of them are visible to the naked eye.

Maybe ETs have advanced methods for scanning space for any objects with unnatural shapes.

If you study the Kelper findings carefully you will find that a very tiny percentage of the planets discovered so far are Earth-like. Kepler wants to see 3 transits before confirming a planet. Kepler was launched 3-07-09 and has been watching for about 4 years already, and considering that 75% of stars in Kepler's visual field are Red Dwarfs, we would expect to see at least 3 transits for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone ALREADY. And yet, Earth-like planets are STILL a very tiny minority of planets discovered. Kepler is not going to find many more, no matter how long the mission continues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_mission Moontanman: ".....IMHO artificial colonies are a more likely option for intelligence to colonize the galaxy, avoidance of gravity wells is a good reason and everything needed to live is freely available in space. Building colonies out of available materials and spinning them to produce artificial gravity negates the need for planets and such colonies could be made big enough to imitate planets on a small scale. They might resemble a valley rolled up into a torus similar to an endless suspension bridge..." This is a good point. If an ETI is very advanced it would not be seeking habitable planets. It could manufacture space colonies, as you say, anywhere, just using materials from asteroids, which are easily available. That would be more practical, considering how far it is for them to travel to an Earth-like planet. However, if they did stumble upon us, I think we would be very interesting to them, since intelligence is so rare in the universe. In that case, they would not want to colonize our planet, but rather just secretly study us. This would explain why ETs visiting Earth would use stealth. Maybe they are just careful enough to remove evidence of their surveillance of us, so we cannot prove they are here. We may take vague photos of UFOs, but they know more about us than we know about ourselves. They would know EXACTLY the threshold of information that would give them away to us. They simply keep their activity below that threshold and will never be proven to exist. For them to evade us is about as easy as it is for us to evade an ant colony.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis seems reasonable to me. Consider that Kepler has discovered many planets, but the vast majority of them are not good for life to evolve over a long time. Earth-like planets are probably so rare that the nearest is hundreds or thousands of light years away. The idea of intelligent ETs seems very interesting, we would like to know about them, and yet we should hope we NEVER meet one. Encounters between civilizations is not good for the less advanced civilization. Them arriving here would probably be our doom. Advanced life is probably predatory and predators have no mercy.

Is there anything about Voyager that an intelligent ET could detect, that would make it stand out against other objects in space? Is there something about it that if ETs had the technology that they could scan space and notice something unusual about Voyager?

The difference between the Big Bang, before the bang, and a supergiant black hole is the Big Bang was in extreme inflationary motion from the beginning. Also, I think gravity behaved differently at such high density. If string theory is correct, and the Big Bang originated from a collision of higher dimensions, the Big Bang could have originated from a region of ANY size.

"....More recent theories include the clustering of dark matter halos in the bottom-up process. Essentially early on in the universe galaxies were composed mostly of gas and dark matter, and thus, there were fewer stars. As a galaxy gained mass (by accreting smaller galaxies) the dark matter stays mostly on the outer parts of the galaxy. This is because the dark matter can only interact gravitationally, and thus will not dissipate. The gas, however, can quickly contract, and as it does so it rotates faster, until the final result is a very thin, very rapidly rotating disk...." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution It seems that spiral galaxies formed very early in the universe. Then collisions between spiral galaxies created the larger eliptical galaxies. I think supermassive black holes fomed long before any stars formed, shortly after the big bang when enough matter was close enough together that such large black holes could form and combine with other large black holes.

Just rent a room. Do you have your own car?

Thanks Spyman, that illustration of Kepler's visual field exactly answers my original question. Its' view extends for many more thousands of light years beyond its' effective range of 3,000 ly but the more distant stars must be too distant for Kepler to take readings.

Thanks for all the help above. I searched "plane of solar system plane of milky way" and here is what I found: QUESTION: "Are the orientations of our solar system and others in our galactic disc "in-line" with the disc or are they oriented in all different directions? What determines their orientation? ANSWER: "They're oriented in all different directions. The size of a solar system is so much smaller than the size of the Galaxy, that the Galaxy's structure has no impact on the orientation of a solar system. What determines their orientations is the direction of the angular momentum that the system had when it formed, and that's pretty much random. Our own solar system is tipped by about 63 degrees with respect to the plane of the galaxy. " http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=633 That explains it. Our solar system is not at all aligned with the Milky Way. So Kelper's field of vision is pointed in the northward direction relative to Earth, but that is looking at an angle 63 degrees into the Milky Way. If the average thickness of the Milky Way is 1,000 ly, then our region must be a few hundred ly thick.

Thanks for the answer StringJunky. 1,000 ly is the AVERAGE thickness of our galaxy. Our region must be even less thick. Now I am confused. This does not make sense. How can Kepler be watching stars 3,000 ly away, when our galaxy is not even close to being that thick in our spiral arm? Is it possible that the plane of our solar system is not parallel with the plane of the Milky Way? "...The stellar disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 ly (30 kpc) in diameter, and is, on average, about 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick...." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Size_and_composition

The Milky Way is 100,000 ly across. The central bulge is thicker than our region of the galaxy. How thick is our galaxy in our region of our spiral arm? I had been looking for info about the Kepler mission search for Earth-sized planets. I finally heard in a Science Channel program that Kepler's field of view includes stars that range in distance from us between 300 and 3,000 ly. Does that mean our spiral arm is roughly 6,000 ly thick? If we were located exactly on the plane of the galaxy, it makes sense that Kepler's field of vision should include all the stars furthest from us while gazing "upward", and not the nearby stars. Kepler is following the Earth around the Sun and looking "upward", in the direction of north if aligned with our solar systems "north", looking at the same patch of stars continuously, that extend to the "upper" edge of our spiral arm.

Zero does exist. It is a quantity.

If the entire universe was really smaller than a proton when it began, and it has been expanding at a finite rate since the Big Bang, even if inflation happened many times since the Bang (faster than light speed expansion is not an infinite rate), the universe would have to now be FINITE in size. The only way this cannot be true is if only the OBSERVABLE portion of the universe was smaller than a proton at the moment of the Big Bang. That would suggest that the entire universe began infinite in size for it to now be infinite in size. "...The size of the Universe is unknown; it may be infinite. The region visible from Earth (the observable universe) is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years,[33] based on where the expansion of space has taken the most distant objects observed...." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe This means the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background) is about 46 Billion LY away, which is about 50% further in distance from us than the most distant observable galaxies and quasars, which are about 30 Billion LY away from us at this moment.

Mining asteroids is HOW we will become a space-faring species. They are a handy supply of ice which can be converted into water, air, and fuel, and they have many useful metals and such.

"...at what distance could a person safely remain before feeling the gravitational effects from such an object?" Let's use the Earth for an example. If Earth was crushed into a black hole, it would be about the size of a marble. You could orbit this black hole safely, but you would need to be over 4,000 miles from it. With an asteroid-mass, primordial black hole, you would also need to keep a good distance away to orbit it safely. We don't know if any primordial, mini-sized black holes still exist, but I think they could be any size, depending upon how much mass they have, which could vary a great deal.

The scientific method includes observation and intuition. An educated guess, or hypothesis, is somewhat intuitive. The next step is to test the hypothesis.

It seems to me that supermassive black holes could only have formed soon after the Big Bang. That is the only time so much mass is in such close proximity. After a while, matter is too spread out for them to form.

"To make trouble for me someone (I have a pretty good idea of who it was) had reported to the police that my car had been stolen..." Going forward you should be careful to not make aquaintences upset with you. What did you do to this person to make them call the cops? I don't believe they did that for nothing.

Very interesting! "The described detection strategy, along with its South Pole position, could allow the detector to provide the first robust experimental evidence of extra dimensions predicted in string theory. Many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, including string theory, propose a sterile neutrino; in string theory this is made from a closed string. These could leak into extra dimensions before returning, making them appear to travel faster than the speed of light. An experiment to test this may be possible in the near future.[16] Furthermore, if high energy neutrinos create microscopic black holes (as predicted by some aspects of string theory) it would create a shower of particles; resulting in an increase of "down" neutrinos while reducing "up" neutrinos.[17] There is no group within the IceCube collaboration working on tachyons, travel through extra dimensions, or observations of microscopic black holes." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube