Space Paradoxes That Will Ruin Your Sleep

 

Say goodbye to reality as you think you know it what you are about to learn will make you question the universe around you and if you even exist do you really believe you see what you see and know what you know think again welcome the Science Reads in today's article we peel back the layers of reality and call into question our place in the universe and what you assume you know about space and time prepare for sleepless nights as you sort through these mind-bending paradoxes is there only us our universe is full of life right after all it's many billions of years old the solar system is relatively young and astronomy tells us there are at least 100 billion planets in our milky way and how many times does hollywood show us the arrival of supermassive spacecraft bringing doom and gloom to all of us so where are they Nobel Prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi asked this question in a casual lunch conversation in 1950 and fermi's paradox has puzzled scientists ever since seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence institute in California explains that fermi theorized a civilization with rocket technology and motivation could quickly colonize the entire galaxy within a few tens of millions of years every star system could be brought under the wing of empire tens of millions of years may sound like a long project but in fact it's quite short compared to the age of the galaxy which is roughly a thousand times more so where are they some astronomers use the drake equation which combines the number of stars hospitable to life-sustaining planets with other variables that lead to civilizations transmitting signals across the milky way as for the results anywhere from one us to several million in the milky way alone and remember some civilization must be the first one could that be us as science fiction icon Arthur C Clarke famously proclaimed either we are all alone in the universe or we are not both are equally terrifying a new meaning to being in the loop hand in hand with this puzzle is the bootstrap paradox named after a Robert A Heinlein time travel story a future event causes a past event which leads to that future event got it

 in the terminator movies the conscious ai global system of the future and instigator of humanity's downfall Skynet could not exist without leftover components of the t-800 cybernetic organism who we know is Arnold Schwarzenegger send back to terminate John Connor its technology is reverse engineered and Skynet and cyborgs and a long series of paradoxes were born as a result an object or piece of information gets trapped in an infinite cause and effect loop in other words where is the point of origin back to the future can we travel through time besides the universal tick tock way each of us does every day Einstein's theory of special relativity says yes at least in one direction the genius himself once said people like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion say hello to the mind-blowing grandfather paradox one travels back in time say 200 years and murders their many times great grandfather this of course means generations of other ancestors never came to be does this prevent the time traveler's existence and in that case how would this relativist a killer have traveled back in the first place if their birth was already erased time to reach for the aspirin "quoth the raven nevermore" imagine you are standing in a small grove of trees looking outwards and you can see glimpses

 of sky from beyond the tree trunks

 however in the middle of a great forest your sight is only of a solid wall of tree trunks combining the near and distant in your vision shouldn't the universe be the same after all when we gaze into the three-dimensional cosmos we are looking into septillions of stars and even though they are at varying distances wouldn't they all have light reaching us creating a brilliant wall in the sky instead the night sky is almost black not bright red or glaring white hot this Olbers paradox was first posed in 1610 by Johannes Kepler who suggested the universe only extends out so far thus the empty space and darkness but it wasn't an astronomer who first hit on the truth or what we think is the truth it was a poet of all things in 1848 American gothic poet and writer Edgar Allan poe surmised the universe is simply not old enough to fill the sky with light not enough time for starlight from

 every corner of space to reach us

 building on poe's idea astronomers conclude that yes while there may be an infinite number of stars beyond the cosmic horizon of the 13 plus billion year old universe that would keep us bathed in light every night there are too few observable stars to completely light up the sky so a poet stumbled across the likely answer maybe we should dig up Shakespeare and ask him about fermi or inflation theory or black holes speaking of digging folks up a lovely variation of the aforementioned grandfather paradox is the classic why don't we go back in time and terminate hitler paradox or maybe some middle school bully but let's stick with hitler for now it's such a popular idea that the phrase everyone kills hitler on their first trip has become a meme so how about jumping into a Delorean or blue police box and doing humanity a giant favor not so fast if you transport back and whack baby hitler you've now created a world where hitler never rises to power and world war ii does not happen that's a good thing right yes but in the process you've removed the future motivation to transport back and whack baby hitler so another paradox and of course there's always the possibility that by interfering with the previous course of history you may unleash something worse in hitler's case that's highly unlikely right when is a black hole not a black hole Einstein's general theory of relativity says a black hole's gravitation is so intense that nothing can escape it now let's define information for the physicist information is the specific state of every particle in the universe every little detail and the first law of thermodynamics says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed and the sum total of matter and energy in the universe is a constant well what happens to matter information consumed by black holes that is the black hole information paradox if there's ever a bright blinking light to remind us just how little we really understand about the universe this might be it in 1975 physicist stephen hawking theorized black holes in time will evaporate away and release their mass and energy back into the cosmos cosmologists believe the quantum information for everything that went into the black hole was preserved on its surface even as the matter was doomed so where does that information go when the black hole evaporates where did that bottle of aspirin go mind officially blown paradoxes may have no solution or be only explainable by theoretical propositions

 that can never be subjected to the scientific method perhaps time travel is forever relegated to science fiction and aliens only exist in Hollywood as physicist Stephen Hawking said the best evidence we have that time travel is not possible and never will be is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future after all wouldn't a future bill and ted have come here from 1,000 years down the road by now for another excellent adventure so what do you think about these sleepless night-inducing paradoxes will there always be mysteries that are simply unsolvable tell us in the comments