albymangles

questions are always worth asking anyway i did not ask whether or not random mutations in individuals is still possible i asked whether the human race is still evolving (in a general sense). Surely if there came to be a mutation beneficial to our race it would never permeate through society and stand the test of time, as we could more quickly overcome anything hindering us through technology.

Are human's still evolving? Would the intelligence we have acquired through evolution prohibit further evolution, for example people genetically predisposed to certain diseases, etc. will still more than likely reach breeding age.

not all galaxies spin, spiral galaxies like our own spin because of gravitational interactions with matter outside the galaxy while it was forming; this spin would increase as gravitation made the galaxy smaller, eventually balancing the attraction of gravity. Elliptical galaxies do not spin as they did not pick up a rotation while forming, the attraction of gravity being balanced by individual parts of the galaxy orbiting around its centre (while the galaxy has no overall rotation). As far as your other questions galaxies are as old as the big bang in the sense that all matter was created at the big bang, this matter eventually coalesced into galaxies. Galaxy formation is undoubtably a slow process though.

I think the presumptions they were referring to were (post 40) 1. you assume our universe to extend equally in all directions to infinity 2. space time to extend outwards in all directions along straight lines to infinity 3. that this entire fabric of space-time was created at the very instant of the big-bang and I'm not even going to try with post 42... space having an 'edge' that is the furthest bit of matter in our universe? this seems to me an extremely simplistic and naive view of things (uncertainty principle anyone?!?). oh and before anyone points to my previous thread, i do in fact agree with them (post 40), I'm just not so sure that our universe is not curved in on itself making it thus finite (but there would still be no realistic boundary).

Space is infinite, and cannot be empty, as the uncertainty principle applying to particles and so-forth applies to fields (gravitational and electromagnetic, etc.) aswell. In the words of Stephen Hawking "in empty space the field cannot be fixed at zero, because then it would have both a precise value of zero, and a precise rate of change (also zero). There must be a certain minimum amount of uncertainty, or quantum fluctuations, in the value of the field. One can think of these fluctuations as pairs of virtual particles of light or gravity that appear together at some time, move apart, and then come together again and annihilate each other." It is also predicted that there will be pairs of virtual matter particles also, one matter and one anti-matter that would also continually be annihilated. Therefore the only way space can have any sort of boundary would be if it (space-time) was indeed curved in on itself, but would not be an edge because beyond it would be a complete void. It should be noted that this is nothing like space, or 'empty space' as we define it, and irrelevant to our universe.