Airbrush

To answer my own question, after watching the following Youtubes, I think Graham's number is vastly larger than googolplex, raised to a googolplex power, a googolplex number of times. That means Graham's number is vastly larger than a power tower of googolplexes, a googolplex high.

I posted this in Other Sciences, but this will probably get more attention in the Lounge. Anyone familiar with very large numbers and very small things? My questions was: suppose you could fill a volume the size of the observable universe (less than 100 billion light-years in diameter) with a tiny sand that is so tiny that each sand grain is one Planck Length in diameter. Could you fill that volume with Graham's number of Planck-sized sand? My guess is yes you could fill the observable universe with Planck-sized sand. You could probably fill a volume you cannot even comprehend how large with Graham's number of Planck-sized sand. This is what I found in Wikipedia: "... the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot be expressed even by physical universe-scale power towers ...." Graham's number - Wikipedia Next question. Is Graham's number larger than a googolplex, raised to a googolplex power, a googolplex number of times? (That means you keep raising the number to a googolplex power, and you do so a googolplex number of times.)

"Does cosmic expansion ever end?" From the way it looks in this region of the multiverse, it doesn't ever end. All matter and black holes will evaporate into low-energy photons before expansion ends.

Anyone familiar with very large numbers and very small things? My questions was: suppose you could fill a volume the size of the observable universe (less than 100 billion light-years in diameter) with a tiny sand that is so tiny that each sand grain is one Planck Length in diameter. Could you fill that volume with Graham's number of Planck-sized sand? My guess is yes you could fill the observable universe with Planck-sized sand. You could probably fill a volume you cannot even comprehend how large with Graham's number of Planck-sized sand. This is what I found in Wikipedia: "... the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot be expressed even by physical universe-scale power towers ...." Graham's number - Wikipedia Next question. Is Graham's number larger than a googolplex, raised to a googolplex power, a googolplex number of times?

I should have started with "Did anyone catch this interview? Do you have an opinion on this GOP technique to perpetuate doubt about the 2020 elections?" Or anyone is free to challenge me that this interview is bogus.

This interview illustrates the bogus argument Trumpers often use to argue the "election was stolen." They get into the details of court cases in PA, WI, and NV, and pretend they were never thrown out of court. Bill Maher = B Sean Spicer = S B “What do you think about the “election was rigged” and Trump really won?” S “I think there were some serious problems [with the 2020 election]. When you look at PA, WI, and NV, the idea we changed rules running up to an election, in terms of how it was counted. The PA Dem governor, in 2019, Act 77 was signed by Gov. Wolf, so that all ballots had to be in by 8:00pm.” (These 3 cases, along with over 50 others, are baseless claims already thrown out of court for no real evidence of voter fraud.) B “There was a pandemic, that’s why.” S “So change the law.” B “There was no time to do that.” S “There was plenty of time to pass legislation in all these other areas.” (This is irrelevant to the fact there was NO time to change election laws for the pandemic. There was “plenty of time in all these other areas” at a different time.) B “This is the rabbit hole you want to go down?” S “I do” B “Avoid the question?” S “No” B “Did Trump win or lose the election?” S “I don’t know.” (This is an absurd claim, since the strategy of Trump and company is to pretend to believe the election was rigged and insist Dems must prove the election was NOT stolen, which is absurd.) B “There you go, because the world does know.” (Everyone in a position of knowledge about the elections knows the election was not stolen.) S “No wait, first of all, tell me how many votes that got cast ILLEGALLY and not according to the system [unintelligible].” B “This was litigated in courts, even Republicans that were in charge of the vote came down on the side this election WAS FAIR. You said after the election when I asked you about fraud, you said you have seen no evidence.” S “I haven’t, but what I have seen is a state…There is a difference…” (Spicer is babbling nonsense) B “There is imaginary evidence?” S “No no no…there is a difference. PA supreme court did what WI courts did. They let people…WI does not have a provision in their law to vote early in person. It has an absentee ballot provision. People set up tables in parks in Madison WI, allowed people to come without ID. In PA they were allowed to vote without ID. No post mark on the ballot, in violation of Act 77, signed by a Dem governor in 2019, and the answer is “don’t worry about it because there was a pandemic.” What’s the next thing you can just blow away? A law is a law, until it is changed. You don’t get to pick what law you want to follow, depending upon what’s happening outside.” (Again, courts have already thrown out these cases) B “Again, this was looked at exhaustively. (Bill Barr and Pat Cipallone, devoted Trumpers, could find no evidence or substantiate any claim for the kind of voter fraud Trumpers claim.) S “It’s not. That’s not true though. What was looked at, for example, in WI, the court ruled 4 to 3.” (This was totally irrelevant material, inserted to make him sound knowledgeable.) B “Ok Sean, I get it. You know what?” S “You accuse me.” B “You said your piece. You are like that kid in school.” S “Who is right!” B “Who has to answer about a book report. So he reads one page, very carefully, that nobody else has read. We don’t know what you are talking about.” S “You do….It’s your show” B “What I do know is this was looked at by people of BOTH parties and they came down that Trump LOST this election, but you wson’t say it. Either your part of a big lie or your part of a conspiracy” S “It’s not a big lie. The WI audit committee just released a report. I have it here.” (This was already thrown out of WI court) B “You are afraid of Trump” After that Spicer goes back to repeating his earlier claims about the states of PA, WI, and NV, which were already rejected by the courts.

Coincidentally, I saw parts of "How the Universe Works" last night. The episode is "Birth of the Cosmos" season 10 episode 12. That must be new. They were talking about the first second of the big bang. Very early, maybe before inflation, as I understood it, the Higgs Field was not in existence yet, so the Higgs Boson didn't have its' mass yet, the very early universe was massless until the Higgs Field was established, which put the breaks on the expansion of the big bang, but it already expanded so far. I may have this wrong, but that is the impression I got from that episode. Anyone familiar with that?

Thanks Alex. Your name reminds me of the fact I saw every episode of X Files. I was 27 when I discovered reggae music on my radio dial after Bob Marley had died in 1981.

Keep in mind that the observable universe is limited by the speed of light, and is about 50% further than the most distant visible galaxy. The CMB is NOW about 46 billion light years away and the most distant galaxies visible are NOW about 30 billion light years away. "...because the Universe has been expanding all this time, this galaxy isn't just 13.24 billion light years away; it's actually more like 30.35 billion light years distant." How Far Away Is The Universe's Most Distant Galaxy? (forbes.com) "The Universe" and "How the Universe Works" are wonderful documentary series, although somewhat simplified for dramatic effect. How many episodes of each of these series have you seen? I think I've seen them all. Are there new episodes?

This confirms your assertion that gravity was a force before the inflationary period. It would seem to me that the big bang would have been enabled if it inflated before gravity became a force, thereby allowing the explansion unimpeded. It appears counterintuitive that gravity appeared before the inflationary expansion. So the big bang was expanding against the force of its' own gravity. "It is believed gravity split from the primordial 'superforce' almost simultaneously with the big bang. See Neil Tyson's discussion here http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/category/subjects/bigbang" Reference: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/big-bang-gravity-split.320140/

Did cosmic inflation happen before the force of gravity existed?

"Breakthrough Starshot is a research and engineering project by the Breakthrough Initiatives to develop a proof-of-concept fleet of light sail interstellar probes named Starchip,[1] to be capable of making the journey to the Alpha Centauri star system 4.37 light-years away. It was founded in 2016 by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and Mark Zuckerberg.[2][3] "A flyby mission has been proposed to Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of its host star, Proxima Centauri, in the Alpha Centauri system.[4] At a speed between 15% and 20% of the speed of light,[5][6][7][8] it would take between twenty and thirty years to complete the journey, and approximately four years for a return message from the starship to Earth. "The project was announced on 12 April 2016 in an event held in New York City by physicist and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, together with cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who was serving as board member of the initiatives. Other board members include Meta Platforms (then known as Facebook, Inc.) CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The project has an initial funding of US$100 million to initialize research. Milner places the final mission cost at $5–10 billion, and estimates the first craft could launch by around 2036...." Breakthrough Starshot - Wikipedia Solar sail - Wikipedia Even Stephen Hawking was interested. So you still think it is a fools' mission? What is possible if aliens had another million years to develop better interstellar probes? Here is an interesting interview with Brian Cox. When asked about the probability of intelligent life in the universe he answered that he is only concerned about our galaxy. I'm only interested in the probability of intelligent ETs within a few thousand light years. Beyond that is irrelevant It's way too far away to be of interest. Brian thinks intelligent aliens are so few and far between that there may be only one or two per galaxy.

"Using an array of laser thrusters, a probe weighing one gram would travel 4.4 light years, to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, in just two decades. That’s only twice as long as it took the New Horizons spacecraft to fly by Pluto." "Such probes would combine nanophotonics, a miniaturized radio thermal generator for 1 W of power, nanothrusters for attitude adjustment, thin-film supercapacitors for energy storage, and even a small camera. Equipped with a laser sail just under one meter (3 ft) in diameter, such a spacecraft could be propelled by a 70 GW laser array to about 26 percent the speed of light in about 10 minutes and reach Alpha Centauri in only 15 years." Reaching for the stars: How lasers could propel spacecraft to relativistic speeds (newatlas.com) If we can do this in the not very distant future, what kind of masses could an ETI send at what kind of speeds if their technology was thousands or millions of years beyond ours? They may have superior nanotechnology.

Suppose they were thousands or millions of years beyond our technology. Maybe they have surveyed this region of the galaxy for thousands of years and they already know precisely where the best habitable zones are in this local. They could send high-speed probes to all interesting, highly habitable solar systems, that report back to the home planet. If they witnessed life evolving on many different planets, they might be able to anticipate that Earth of 10,000BC was promising to evolve technological beings within a few thousand years. Then they return thousands of years later when things get interesting.

Brian Greene said "Nobody out there cares about us because we are so ill-developed, we are so young on the cosmic scene that there is nothing interesting to find here." That is misleading. It would be more correct for Greene to say "Nobody out there cares about us, because they don't know we are here." He makes it sound like we are not advanced enough for them to be interested. We are mere ants, boring. No, it is because they don't know we are here. They are beyond 100 LY from us, that is all.

Maybe they can determine idyllic habitable zones in the galaxy where any possible life would have a high probability to thrive and evolve for a long time and evolve intelligence. They know how fitful red dwarf stars are, so they may only look at sunlike stars and look for gases in planet atmospheres to reveal what stage of evolution life is in. They could have methods of surveying the galaxy we can't imagine.

Physicist Greene thinks we can't prove aliens exist because Earth would not be very interesting to aliens, because we are not very intelligent. What's the point of trying to communicate with an ant hill? Michio Kaku said we don't try to communicate with a squirrel. "Nobody out there cares about us." That's why we cannot prove that advanced interstellar "aliens" exist. Which also explains the Fermi Paradox, why we don't see evidence for aliens. Rogan argues the opposite, that we would probably be interesting to any "aliens." The Kepler and TESS satellites have found FEW other "Earth 2.0s, where life can evolve long enough to become technological. The vast majority of planetary systems are hellish, most planetary orbits are not circular but elongated ellipses. 3/4 of stars are red dwarfs that have flare fits, over half of all stars are binary systems that make habitability more complicated. Exactly, especially if intelligent, technological life is very rare, and not what "Star Wars" would suggest. Yes but what is PROBABLE about a hypothetical alien that can travel to Earth, IF intelligent life is rare? The Fermi Paradox suggests they are rare. Kepler and TESS haven't found many havens for intelligence to thrive.

The center and spiral arms of the Milky Way are too densely packed with giant stars going supernova. Any life would get extinguished before the billions of years it may take to get intelligent. Earth is more isolated from explosive events in the galaxy. It is hard for me to imagine how intelligent life can evolve without super-habitable conditions, like we have on Earth. Look at the Rare Earth Hypothesis: "In the 1970s and 1980s, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, among others, argued that Earth is a typical rocky planet in a typical planetary system, located in a non-exceptional region of a common barred-spiral galaxy. From the principle of mediocrity (extended from the Copernican principle), they argued that the evolution of life on Earth, including human beings, was also typical, and therefore that the universe teems with complex life. However, Ward and Brownlee argue that planets, planetary systems, and galactic regions that are as accommodating for complex life as are the Earth, the Solar System, and our own galactic region are not typical at all, but actually exceedingly rare." Rare Earth hypothesis - Wikipedia

Do you agree with the physicist Brian Greene? I also heard this reasoning from Michio Kaku. I strongly disagree. They reason that we would be no more interesting to an ETI than an ant hill is of interest to us. There are lots of ant hills on Earth, but we don't know how many Earths there are in the galaxy, or more importantly within 1,000 light years of us. So far, Earth is very unusual and would be of great interest to any ET. The Rare Earth Hypothesis explains the Fermi Paradox, and also why we would be of great interest to ANYONE more advanced to us. Kepler Mission has NOT found many Earth 2.0s out there. Neither has the TESS (transiting exoplanet survey satellite) telescope. Most planets are hellish. Solar systems are not nice and circular like ours. Most planets don't have a big moon like we do. We are in the galaxy's narrow habitable zone. There are probably not many advanced ETs in our local of the Milky Way. Earth must be the greatest circus within 1,000 light years, IF anybody is watching us. Maybe the greatest circus in our galaxy. What do you think?

I just discovered this happened over 2 months ago. Did anyone hear this in the news? Armand Duplantis set another pole vault world record 20'4" in Belgrade on March 20, 2022. He cleared the bar by a few inches, brushing the bar on the way down. Only 2 other people ever vaulted higher than 20 feet, Bubka and Lavillenie.

"...while attempting to study genetic differences between plants in a massive undersea [Australian] meadow, their samples revealed that the "meadow" was in fact just one very old — and very large — organism." It is estimated to cover 77 square miles, is about 4,500 years old, a strange hybrid ribbon weed, that kept all chromosomes from both mother and father. "it is a haven for all sorts of sea creatures, including "turtles, dolphins, dugongs, crabs and fish," Scientists Discover World's Largest Organism, Chilling Out Under Ocean (futurism.com)