Anti Natalism | The edge of the Universe @antinatalism1 | Uploaded November 2022 | Updated October 2024, 22 hours ago.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
"What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind [through the universe]? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day."
Death By Black Hole, Neil deGrasse Tyson
Jose Ortega Gasset:
"Life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it up with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ideas are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."
The spacetime horizon you’re most likely familiar with is the “event horizon” of a black hole, forming the “surface”. The event horizon is the limit beyond which nothing can escape (including light, which is how black holes earn their name). Something above the horizon is visible and, perhaps with great effort, can escape to meet an outside observer. Anything below the event horizon is gone forever.
The cosmological event horizon is remarkably similar. It’s presently about 16 billion light years away, in every direction.
The cosmological horizon is caused by the expansion of the universe. You can picture this as being like ants crawling on a balloon. As the balloon expands only ants that are close to each other will be able to run into each other; more distant ants can crawl at each other at full speed, but the expansion will add more rubber between them than their movement subtracts. If something moving away from us passes through the horizon, then the last light it emits before crossing the horizon will take forever to get to us.
The universe hasn’t existed forever and a lot of stuff has happened in its history, so the oldest light we can see doesn’t come from close to the cosmic event horizon. Even so, the same slowing/reddening effect is visible to the naked eye.
The event horizon is not just a boundary in space, it is in some sense a boundary in time. Someone falling into a black hole shouldn’t notice anything too exciting at the event horizon. Extreme gravity and the terrifying knowledge that your falling into a black hole notwithstanding, passing through the event horizon shouldn’t be something that really stands out to you.
The first galaxies date to when the universe was a bit under an billion years old, with a redshift of a bit under ten, meaning that light coming from them is ten times as stretched out and the galaxies appear to be experiencing time at a tenth the usual rate. The oldest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background, which has been traveling for 13 billion years and redshifted by a factor of 1100. We can’t see any farther with light; the CMB is like the blue of the sky, completely overwhelming the sky behind it.
askamathematician.com/2020/06/q-how-big-is-the-universe-what-happens-at-the-edge
Horizon at the edge of the universe
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
"What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind [through the universe]? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day."
Death By Black Hole, Neil deGrasse Tyson
Jose Ortega Gasset:
"Life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it up with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ideas are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."
The spacetime horizon you’re most likely familiar with is the “event horizon” of a black hole, forming the “surface”. The event horizon is the limit beyond which nothing can escape (including light, which is how black holes earn their name). Something above the horizon is visible and, perhaps with great effort, can escape to meet an outside observer. Anything below the event horizon is gone forever.
The cosmological event horizon is remarkably similar. It’s presently about 16 billion light years away, in every direction.
The cosmological horizon is caused by the expansion of the universe. You can picture this as being like ants crawling on a balloon. As the balloon expands only ants that are close to each other will be able to run into each other; more distant ants can crawl at each other at full speed, but the expansion will add more rubber between them than their movement subtracts. If something moving away from us passes through the horizon, then the last light it emits before crossing the horizon will take forever to get to us.
The universe hasn’t existed forever and a lot of stuff has happened in its history, so the oldest light we can see doesn’t come from close to the cosmic event horizon. Even so, the same slowing/reddening effect is visible to the naked eye.
The event horizon is not just a boundary in space, it is in some sense a boundary in time. Someone falling into a black hole shouldn’t notice anything too exciting at the event horizon. Extreme gravity and the terrifying knowledge that your falling into a black hole notwithstanding, passing through the event horizon shouldn’t be something that really stands out to you.
The first galaxies date to when the universe was a bit under an billion years old, with a redshift of a bit under ten, meaning that light coming from them is ten times as stretched out and the galaxies appear to be experiencing time at a tenth the usual rate. The oldest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background, which has been traveling for 13 billion years and redshifted by a factor of 1100. We can’t see any farther with light; the CMB is like the blue of the sky, completely overwhelming the sky behind it.
askamathematician.com/2020/06/q-how-big-is-the-universe-what-happens-at-the-edge
Horizon at the edge of the universe
