Posted by rbanffy 4/12/2025
These are tiny numbers given that we're quite possibly dealing with infinity in both time and space. I judge it one of the stronger arguments in favour of the universe being constructed (or, more likely, there is a lot out there we can't see). If god built a universe numbers like 1 supernova a century make some sense for artistic value.
As I understand it, a frozen image will remain for a time and fade, growing increasingly red shifted.
What amazes me is how young the universe is compared to life. The universe is only about 4 times as old as life on Earth.
We'd expect that the mathematicians would need to come up with a new notation to represent the age of the universe.
The fact that we are part of that life introduces some nasty sampling biases, but if we find even one more planet that shows a similar ratio, the implications will be that life is ubiquitous.
Our galaxy is to the observable universe as a tenth of a second is to your entire lifetime.
A century being the amount of time it takes earth, one specific planet to orbit its star 100 times? What about all the other planets and stars?
All the other stars and planets would have the same experience, though their local orbital periods might result in different units of expression being more convenient.
Of course, as we leave our galaxy they would also be in significantly different reference frames and perhaps experience the rate differently as a result. We are assuming that, statistically, our relative velocity is not special and they see roughly the same relationship between red shift and distance that we do.