Questions That Still Completely Leave Scientists Speechless
The great Neil deGrasse Tyson once said something along the lines of humans have only discovered about 4% of the universe. Not only does my fear of what I don’t know going on under my feet in the ocean scares the crap out of me, but that big star filled sky does as well. It doesn’t just scare me, but it probably scares and excites scientists studying it all over the world. Since we only know a fraction of the inter-workings of the universe, there are many questions and things going on that we simply have no answer for yet.
Dark Energy
Dark Energy is the unknown force/energy that takes up around 70% of the universe. Sure, you look up and see billions of stars, but there’s also the space between those stars and the effect it has on them that puzzles scientists.
It’s said to have an unknown repulsive force on gravity, and may also theoretically be causing the universe to expand. Do scientists know what it really is? No. It’s not like the people the on the International Space Station can stick a beaker outside the hull and scoop some in for tests. Or maybe they can? Maybe dark energy is sort of like water? In a container it’s clear, but when in large amounts it’s blue. That’s not the reflection of the sky that makes it blue, that’s because it is blue.
That was just me spit-balling a random idea, but the big heads working on this still don’t know. Things may become clearer when NASA sends up the WFIRST (Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope) to determine if the expansion of the universe is from dark energy or gravitational phenomenon. Who knows? Maybe sending that up and getting the data will confuse them even more. Space is a jerk in that way.
Problems With Time
As well all know, time only goes forward. Sure, it can slow depending on how fast you’re going or how near you are to something with a major gravitational field like a black hole, but it still goes forward.
Some scientists claim that before the Big Bang that time actually went backwards. Thinking about the time before the Big Bang makes my head hurt, so we’ll hold off on that.
in the 2030s. scientists hope to have space-based gravitational wave observatories that could aid in our learning about the ripples in space before the Big Bang. Sure, we have a huge super collider that is trying to recreate the conditions, but being able to look up with big time technology could be just as good, if not better.
Dark Matter
To put it bluntly: Dark matter is an unidentified type of matter comprising approximately 27% of the mass and energy in the observable universe that is not accounted for by dark energy, baryonic matter (ordinary matter), and neutrinos
Kind of sounds like Dark Energy, right? Like Dark Energy, you can’t see it. All we know about it is that it’s inferred from gravitational effects, and scientists believe it exists because of that.
Hell, they’ve tried numerous experiments involving WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), extradimensional matter (what!?) and axions, topical defects in space-time to try to figure it out. If general relativity were a person, they’d shrug their shoulders in confusion. Nothing we’ve tried so far has given us any more information than the gravitational effects it causes.
In 2020, the ESA (European Space Agency) hopes to send up the Euclid space observatory to try to investigate dark matter and its relation to the expanding universe.
See, this is why people get confused between dark energy and dark matter.
The Multiverse and Deja Vu
Everyone has had Deja Vu before. EVERYONE. In that moment, you sort of freeze and observe everything like you’ve already experienced it. It soon passes, and so does the memory of that moment you thought you already lived. Why the hell does that happen? Maybe it’s because you did live it, but not in this universe, or maybe you already lived it, but you’re just repeating everything over and over.
According to scientists, our universe could be one of an infinite amount of repetitions like this. Maybe not repetitions exactly, but familiar enough to make that happen.
Scientists think that there could be multiple universes out there with universes swirling around inside of the multiverse. And what if that multiverse was inside of an even larger multiverse where the initial multiverse is just a universe. I think I just gave myself a nosebleed.
Future missions like ESA’s PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) will map the cosmic microwave background with resolution we’ve yet to point into outer space. Maybe it will detect radiation signatures that come from a another universe. If that happens, we will be even more insignificant than before.
How did it all start?
Sure, you learned that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang. It’s estimated to have happened about 13.8 billion years ago, but that barely scratches the surface of anything.
Firstly, is that really the beginning of the story of the universe? What happened before that singularity exploded? Was it just the singularity with nothing around it? Maybe the singularity exploded and all that surrounded it was dark matter and dark energy? But where did that stuff come from? How much of that stuff was there? How far did it reach? If you could travel in a spaceship to view the big band before it happens, what would it be like around everything?
See? That stuff makes my head hurt, but scientists are trying to figure it out with all sorts of formulas, tests, data, observatories, and everything else they have at their disposal. Maybe the universe was born by two other universe colliding? We will probably never know unless a 10th-dimensional being comes into our dimension and explains it to us in a way we’d understand.
One day we will send up x-ray imagining survey telescopes that can study the lights from distant gamma-ray bursts and what not to try to figure all this out. Maybe find out about a pre-existing cosmos that came before the Big Bang, imploded into the singularity, and then exploded again to create this universe (Loop Quantum Gravity).
Are we all alone?
To quote Ellie from the Carl Sagan’s Contact: “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” If it’s just us, which it most certainly isn’t, then it would make us feel very isolated and alone. Knowing for sure that there is nothing out there isn’t a good feeling. Knowing there is something that wants to turn us into food is also not a good feeling.
What exactly are we. Sure we’re made up of all this stuff, but we’re still not really sure how we came to be. It’s why thousands of years ago people had to create answers to solve this before science. We still cling to these notions. We looked at the stars and made constellations that resembled a man with a belt or a lion. We just didn’t know. We have ideas where it all begin in the primordial soup, but there are still many questions. From those questions comes the questions of extraterrestrials. Are they up there wondering the same about us? We try to hear radio signals from far away, but our radio signals have barely gone anywhere into our galaxy.
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner wants answers, and that’s why he is setting up a project called ‘Breakthrough Listen’ to try to really kick start the effort to find anyone out there. Once we find out that we’re not alone, I hope that all of our problems will disappear knowing that we have relatives in the stars. If there are any out there, they are related to us, because as Carl Sagan famously said: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post,UPROXX,BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com