Do you believe?

h4rm0ny said:
Yes. The universe "ends" if by this you mean does it have a boundary. That boundary is not an edge in Space, but an edge in Time. The Universe has only been expanding for a finite time. Thus the physical matter of it has only expanded so far. But more than this, the dimensions of which it is formed (up and down, forwards and backwards, left and right...) have only expanded so far as well. If you want to ask yourself what exists beyond that edge, then ask yourself what exists beyond the South Pole. Or the North Pole. Or any point on the surface of a Sphere. The universe proscribes the directions in which you can travel. The universe contains the directions in which you can travel. You can no more go beyond them than a being walking along the surface of the Earth can go beyond the Earth. Set off in a space ship and travel forever in any straight line and you will arrive back at where you started because the universe does not allow straight lines. Space-time itself is curved.

And if by the Universe "ends" you simply mean that at some point in time it ceases to be, well then either it all starts to fall back in on itself and we get a Big Crunch, or it just keeps on going and going getting thinner and thinner like the atmosphere as you climb a mountain. Eventually all heat and matter is dispersed and there is nothing but cold and lonely molecules hanging in the void.

And if none of that works for you, there's always this:

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I did mean boundry, so yeah thats a good point the curve does seem a good answer :)
 
hornetstinger said:
Totally absurd analogy and you know it.

Life exists here. So it's probable it exists somewhere else.
Someone won the lottery. So it's probably if you play enough you'll win.

Your numbers will one day come up. Even if the lottery had a billion balls, if you lived long enough you would win.

On the other hand there is no supportive evidence of any supernatural beings, so nothing we can base it on. So you cannot predict god(s) exist just because we can't disprove it.

Can you disprove that a planet exists of chocolate? No you can't. But it's highly unlikely for one to exist.

Now if Mars was made of chocolate then you can predict another planet somewhere in the universe is also made of chocolate.
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There's no evidence of life on other planets... none at all. There is the possibility of some water, etc, but absolutely no evidence of any life except that which exists on Earth. None. Zilch. Nada.

As for your other point - an ultra-low probability actually is considered impossible. Beyond a certain very small chance we can and do say that such things will just not happen, ever.

For example, the probability of randomly combining a few billion atoms and ending up with a fully functioning Hotpoint washing machine signed by Elvis. You might be tempted to say that "with enough time and enough combinations this will happen." In reality, it will never, ever happen no matter how long you run the combinations.
 
I remain unconvinced. The problem with humans is that we have no context for anything that does not have boundaries, or anything that exists without an origin. The universe may just have appeared one day from absolutely nothing, and there was nothing before the big bang; as this does not fit with our understanding of science that seems impossible.
 
Why should it be impossible? Two photons in a lab have the exact same state even though they are separated by a distance. the distance doesn't matter one bit, if one photon's state changes, the other mirrors that change instantly due to entanglement. Quantum mechanics breaks our understanding of how things "should" work, yet it's right there in front of us working. In the future, the internet will not be limited to just fibre optic cables spanning the sea floors around the globe, it will be solar system wide thanks to this.

Universe is weird, yo.

But you know the real issue here? China could be our overlords. They've just beaten everyone else to the above by teleporting photons from Earth to an orbiting satellite.

http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-...-on-way-to-ultrasecure-communications-1.22142
 
mrk said:
Why should it be impossible? Two photons in a lab have the exact same state even though they are separated by a distance. the distance doesn't matter one bit, if one photon's state changes, the other mirrors that change instantly due to entanglement.
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so in Star Trek as soon as they fired a photon torpedo and it hit something, all the others stored on the ship would explode too :-D
 
dbilsborough said:
I remain unconvinced. The problem with humans is that we have no context for anything that does not have boundaries, or anything that exists without an origin. The universe may just have appeared one day from absolutely nothing, and there was nothing before the big bang; as this does not fit with our understanding of science that seems impossible.
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Time is a property of the Universe, therefore there is no "before" the Universe. The road comes to a stop. At least as far as we can tell.
 
wolfie138 said:
so in Star Trek as soon as they fired a photon torpedo and it hit something, all the others stored on the ship would explode too :-D
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Efour said:
When they fire it why doesn't it just blow up where they want instantly (+_+)
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You fools! in the famous documentary, Star Trek, they don't create the photons in pairs, so they are not entangled to begin with!

Duh!
 
Logic prevails once again!

Edi: mind you, that would be a fun trick for an enemy agent to do to sabotage Start Fleet, slip in a couple of tangled torpedoes and provoke the ships to fire them.
 
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