First off, dont look at the outer wilds discussion on here, just play the game. Second - they didnt say how many letters we need to encode all of the observable supernova in a given year! So 100 billion galaxies, 1 per year per galaxy, we have around 1 billion to encode. Sorry two edits this moring, first one was right. due to math without coffee. 1e9/26^6 is about 3, 1e9/26^7 is less than one. So we might see 'SN2050aaaaaah'!
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
That's one of my favourite hints in Outer Wilds. You will see a Supernova. Not with a fancy telescope, it's visible to the naked eye, and if you watch the sky you'll see another soon enough. You can see this right at the start, and unlike the random direction of the probe launch you don't need any game lore to, if you're smart enough, put two and two together.
SwtCyber 3 hours ago [-]
Honestly one of those rare games that makes you feel like a real explorer, not just someone following a path the devs laid out.
RicoElectrico 2 hours ago [-]
As I didn't play Outer Wilds this comment confused me so I googled a little bit. The implication is "the Sun will also go supernova", resetting the cycle.
The last sentence was also confusing even if valid, but it will make more sense when you swap stuff around the last comma.
delusional 2 hours ago [-]
HUGE SPOILER ALERT. SERIOUSLY, PLAY OUTER WILDS.
It's a little more than just " the sun will also go supernova". The core conceit of the games story is that you're living in the final moments of dying universe.
aqme28 42 minutes ago [-]
The fact that there is a supernova isn't much of a spoiler. It's more like the premise of the game. It's difficult to not discover this within the first 30 minutes.
57 minutes ago [-]
IggleSniggle 1 hours ago [-]
Oh. Whoops. I thought you were saying the other comment was a huge spoiler, not that YOURS was, and I was like "eh, it's not THAT big of a spoiler." Ah, well. With that mystery abolished, time to return to the likes of Mario!
sounds of brain returning to monke
tialaramex 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, yes it will, but mostly no that's not what the hint is about. Play the game.
ben_w 1 hours ago [-]
Hmm…
So that's cool, but now I'm thinking: the distant galaxies are redshifted and time-dilated in equal proportion, and also more densly packed because the universe was smaller in the past, so I expect the actual rate of supernovas to be significantly smaller than simply multiplying 1/century/galaxy by 1e11 galaxies.
Edit: also I don't know if rate of supernovas changes over history thanks to different steller environments giving the population-1/2/3 generations of stars…
wolfram74 22 minutes ago [-]
I would imagine the supernova rate to be higher in the early universe, as we've already passed peak stellar formation rates and the heavier (and shorter lived) stars were more likely to be formed earlier when the average density of the universe was higher.
dr_dshiv 3 hours ago [-]
The most stars a person can see with the naked eye? About 8000.
And, less than half that, actually — since we can’t see the other side of the hemisphere
thih9 3 hours ago [-]
> [Supernova discovery statistics for 2021] says there were 21,081 supernovae seen in 2021
> When the Vera Rubin survey telescope goes online, it’s expected to see hundreds of thousands of supernovae per year by itself.
whoisthemachine 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe they will have to transition from Base 26 counting to Base 64!
IggleSniggle 1 hours ago [-]
It's in the article. SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa vs SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Apparently astronomers find base26 very straightforward and reasonable!
Wobbles42 15 minutes ago [-]
That is unfortunate. With only two prime factors, one of which being 13, base 26 is even worse than base 10, and it doesn't even have anatomical coincidence to recommend it. Much better to use base 36 -- we have a ready made character set for it by simply adding the digits to the 26 alphabetic characters. This gives us many more integer prime factors. Not as good as base 60, but better than base 26 and finger numbers.
IggleSniggle 1 hours ago [-]
Also, as a cousin comment alludes to, for there to be one of the above supernovae, there will also be a supernova named SN2067iamsoverystupidoopssorry and a SN2067thisnamingschemawasabadidea
Voultapher 52 minutes ago [-]
As per the post:
> That’s one hundred billion supernovae per century, or a billion per year, or about 30 per second.
7 characters of base26 gives you 8 billion combinations. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" requires ~1e48 events when going by the actual non base26 scheme. So I wouldn't be worried.
herendin2 4 hours ago [-]
If I got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year. That's scary. But I think I'm getting the math very wrong.
edit: I guess my error might be related to confusing a probability factor with the number of incidents in a period.
edit: The right answer is probably up to 1 in every 10bn stars go supernovae in the universe each year (or 1 in 10bn die and a fraction are supernovae). Thanks: yzydserd and
zild3d
yzydserd 3 hours ago [-]
A star "lasts" about 10 billion years, so you'd expect about 1 in 10 billion stars to 'die' each year, but only a tiny proportion (the very largest) go supernova.
Numbers are huge. Even tiny ratios mean something like 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.
Sounds a lot? Only about 1 star per galaxy goes supernova per century. A lot of galaxies.
Mindblowing.
arp242 17 minutes ago [-]
The lifespan of stars varies a lot by type and size, with largest stars having a very short life-span of maybe a few dozen million of years and small ones up to dozens of billions of years. I'm not sure what the average is.
zild3d 3 hours ago [-]
He mentioned a rough estimate of one per century per galaxy. Estimate for average stars per galaxy is 100 million, which would be 1 in 10 billion stars every year
dostick 2 hours ago [-]
Isn’t the answer infinity? We don’t know what’s beyond observed part of universe, and there’s infinity number of universes. If our emerged then there’s others.
andyjohnson0 31 minutes ago [-]
> and there’s infinity number of universes
There is no evidence that there are a infinite number of universes. All we know of is the one we exist in. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are a very large number of non-interacting "worlds" which may or may not be the same as "universes".
And if you meant "infinity number of galaxies" then that would require an infinite-size universe, and we don't know if that is the case for our universe. It could be, or it could be finite but unbounded.
tialaramex 2 hours ago [-]
There is no reason to expect any particular number of universes. We've observed exactly one, this one, which had to exist or else we wouldn't be here to observe that it existed.
Our universe is finite, so although it is unbounded (lacks edges) there aren't an infinite number of anything in it, galaxies, stars, M&Ms, grains of sand, atoms of hydrogen all finite.
atq2119 1 hours ago [-]
Has that really been established? The observable universe is finite, yes, but I wouldn't think that automatically implied that the universe as a whole is.
pixl97 21 minutes ago [-]
Simply put we can't know and we can never know if the universe is flat. Now, if the universe has a curvature then we could use that as a baseline for the size of the universe, but as of so far we've not detected one.
Someone 3 hours ago [-]
> If got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year
Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.
It also would mean stars, on average, do not get very old. Over 10% of the stars that the ancient Greeks saw in the sky would have to have gone supernova since then.
herendin2 2 hours ago [-]
> Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.
Yes. That fact that I'm thinking made me think I was certainly wrong
3 hours ago [-]
selectnull 2 hours ago [-]
Astronomers will find out that naming is hard once they need to name 119741st supernova.
pelagicAustral 2 hours ago [-]
I think it will be far before that, once they start hitting supernovae name jackpots like SN2026 cu*t et al.
selectnull 8 minutes ago [-]
I know :) This one was just the first to came to mind.
1 hours ago [-]
nashashmi 1 hours ago [-]
And just when we add that variable to our formula we can finally teleport ourselves on to hyperspace.
lifeisstillgood 2 hours ago [-]
No wonder the Millennium Falcon takes so longer to calculate its jump to hyperspace.
Tens of thousands a year is one an hour!
There are so many supernovae you really could bounce too close to one and that would end your trip real quick
ninkendo 2 hours ago [-]
Star Wars takes place entirely within one galaxy, and the number of supernova per galaxy is something like 1 per century, so, nah, Han was just bullshitting to stall for time while his busted-ass computer cobbled together numbers.
IggleSniggle 1 hours ago [-]
Not only that, it happened a long long time ago. I'm no astronomer; would that be more or less supernovae?
Wobbles42 9 minutes ago [-]
Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.
drbig 4 hours ago [-]
The universe is vast and full of nothing...
Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
subscribed 4 hours ago [-]
It's fun to think that at some point it will be actually vast and completely dark
We have a couple trillion years to figure out a way to fix that.
Wobbles42 7 minutes ago [-]
Or to acquire the wisdom to accept it. We certainly are far too young to have a perspective to say which course of action is better -- or indeed to define what "better" means.
loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago [-]
We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2 hours ago [-]
> We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
Spotted the republican
selectnull 5 minutes ago [-]
I guess even a republican can be right?
frainfreeze 2 hours ago [-]
Does it need fixing?
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
db48x 2 hours ago [-]
What you really want to do is put out the stars sooner then, and feed all the hydrogen into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Dump in all the mass in the galaxy and all of its satellites and everything from Andromeda and its satellites too and it will grow. Nudge Andromeda’s central black hole into orbit around ours so that they merge, etc, etc. Grow it big enough and and you can build a Birch World around it, with a surface area larger than all the planets in those galaxies put together. All of the exploration with none of the boring travel in between interesting places! You can seed it with life from every planet your civilization ever encountered and watch all those ecosystems compete and hybridize as you while away the years. How many years would you have?
While dumping matter into a black hole destroys the matter, it doesn’t destroy the mass. It just confines all of the mass in one place. Powering your Birch World is just a matter of using the Penrose process to extract energy from the black hole for the next few million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (about 3×10¹⁰⁴ years give or take a few). The stars will only last for about a million trillion years (10²⁰ years plus or minus a bit), so this plan extends your your lifetime by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.
Maximal extension perhaps, but not quite forever. Forever takes a lot more work.
mietek 2 hours ago [-]
I would like to hear what you have to say about forever.
8fingerlouie 1 hours ago [-]
Technically you can live forever in a universe that is completely empty, it'll just be a lot of cold dark nothing for eternity.
Living forever is such a strange desire, considering that complex life has existed on earth for just a fraction of the time it has existed, and humanity even less than that. I recommend watching the Kurtzgesagt video called All of History in one hour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo&t=3670s). It displays all of earths history in one hour, and humanity is merely a few seconds of it.
Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, that's 4500000000 years, and in 1300000000 years it will be uninhabitable by humans, and in another 4.5 billion years (roughly 3.2 billion years after becoming uninhabitable) it will be engulfed by the sun.
Assuming humanity manages interstellar space flight you could possibly escape earth and live somewhere else until that also dies, but in case it is not practical or possible, you get to enjoy 3.2 billion years of literally choking and being burned alive on earth.
Assuming you did escape earth (or you're immortal so escaping doesn't matter) In 1000000000000 years the last star will be born, and in 100000000000000 years the last star will die out.
You now have an extremely long time to enjoy suffocating in hard vacuum with your body being boiled by the low pressure, and all in complete darkness until the heat death of the universe occurs in roughly 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years
the_af 58 minutes ago [-]
The Cosmos (both Sagan and Tyson's) shows also display the tiny fraction of life in the history of the universe with their "Cosmic Calendar".
pixl97 19 minutes ago [-]
>Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
Please read this article first before damning yourself to an unimaginable hell.
If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
Obscurity4340 3 hours ago [-]
Really incredible video, thanks a quadrillion
ur-whale 18 minutes ago [-]
Spoiler alert:
> THIRTY SUPERNOVAE PER SECOND, over the entire observable Universe.
croes 1 hours ago [-]
Was surprised by the „Und so weiter“ in the text.
weard_beard 1 hours ago [-]
Das ist mir Wurst
darthrupert 3 days ago [-]
The whole things seems like such a massive living system that I cannot help guessing that what we think of as universe is just a somewhat large single creature.
Cyphase 4 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of this quote from Jill Tarter of SETI, specifically the last sentence:
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
I think this is not too difficult for humans to comprehend, it just doesn't address the resource appropriation and geographic property claims on this planet. Aside from generational interest, conflict areas tend to have something obviously appealing about them, so there's nothing that a bigger picture nihilism helps with.
jajko 1 hours ago [-]
Too idealistic view on human nature. We discovered vastly different cultures in the past, no hint of humility (rather exact opposite) or bonding, unless we find a common enemy.
SwtCyber 3 hours ago [-]
There's something kinda poetic (and maybe even logical) about the idea that what we perceive as scattered galaxies and physics is actually just the internal processes of something far bigger than we can comprehend.
ndsipa_pomu 4 hours ago [-]
It's an appealing idea, but surely there'd be insurmountable problems with the distance/time involved for any part to communicate to another part? It'd be like trying to run a computer with a clock that takes millions (billions?) of years to make a single tick. I just don't see that it's at all feasible and that's without even trying to guess as to how different parts can change behaviour depending on its environment (one commonly used requirement of "life").
dkersten 4 hours ago [-]
What’s wrong with it taking a billion of our years to tick? Just because we, smaller than microscopic beings compared to the size of the larger structures we observe, find it to be a vastly long time, doesn’t mean that it’s a long time for something the size of the observable universe.
For a single bacteria cell, our timeframes must seem immense too.
I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but it’s a trap to think that just because you can’t fathom the scales that makes it impossible. The universe is huge and very very old. It can afford to wait what is a long time to us for something to happen.
I do think you’re likely right in practice though, and that it is too long for the universe to be an organism. But who knows. We already know that mathematically speaking the heat death of the universe looks identical to a very zoomed in big bang, maybe we just need to zoom out a few billion orders of magnitude to see the big picture, where the vast distances and time scales we see appear as little more than micrometers and microseconds apart…
ndsipa_pomu 3 hours ago [-]
The problem with zooming out is that the speed of light sets a specific size/time scale so the more zoomed out you get, the more disconnected the big picture is. The observable universe is a mere 93 billion light-years across, so there's a limit on how far it makes sense to talk about zooming out. Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.
The scales involved are vastly different than the minor difference in scales between bacteria and us - we don't have to worry about the speed of light for anything that we currently consider alive.
mrep 3 hours ago [-]
> The observable universe is a mere 93 billion light-years across
As a non-astronomer, that number still always boggles my mind.
> Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.
Also boggles my mind. Also makes me think of doctor who when the stars start disappearing. I need to rewatch that...
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
> a clock that takes millions (billions?) of years to make a single tick
Much worse than that, the universe is enormous and it is expanding faster than the maximum possible velocity, as a result such a clock could never complete a single tick.
SwtCyber 3 hours ago [-]
Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the universe has exploded
a3w 2 hours ago [-]
exploded, he-he.
jampekka 4 hours ago [-]
I couldn't spot the supernova and there's no answer to where it is. :'(
dwighttk 1 hours ago [-]
Cross your eyes and lay the two images over each other and it pops out (bottom left of the ring)
pansa2 3 hours ago [-]
Bottom-left corner
ndsipa_pomu 4 hours ago [-]
It's in NGX 1566
deadbabe 4 hours ago [-]
Can the thread title be rewritten to be less obnoxious? “How many supernova explode every year?” is fine. This isn’t Reddit. Thread titles should not imply some kind of personality or use cliche meme speak. The all caps is definitely an abomination.
Timwi 4 hours ago [-]
Agree. For the record (in case it gets changed), the title at time of writing is “Wait. HOW MANY supernova explode every year?”.
fooker 4 hours ago [-]
Please read the article along with bikeshedding titles. It's a good one.
bonoboTP 1 hours ago [-]
The article itself is also written in that kind of quirky meme personality tone. I guess some find it relatable and humorous. Others (like me) find it obnoxious. Matter of taste or perhaps of age bracket. This is the text version of "Youtube voice", which is also evidently successful but not all like it.
deadbabe 1 hours ago [-]
No. The title sounds like low effort clickbait trash.
9rx 6 minutes ago [-]
Clickbait is appealing. This sounds like the opposite.
henryway 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like he was caught beneath landslide, in a champagne supernova… a champagne supernova in the sky
roenxi 4 hours ago [-]
We're dealing with the sum total of everything, if the true nature of things is that there are a finite number of supernovas I'd be surprised. The real shock is how small the number of supernovas is and how young everything seems to be in the known universe (the age of the observed universe is estimated at maybe double digit billion years).
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.
eurekin 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't the observable universe finite? There can't be a infinite number of anything in a space of radius R, even if R is very big.
chasil 4 hours ago [-]
Anything moving beyond the Cosmological Horizon can no longer be seen.
As I understand it, a frozen image will remain for a time and fade, growing increasingly red shifted.
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?
yzydserd 2 hours ago [-]
its 1 supernova per century per galaxy. there are many galaxies: more than 10 stars go supernova every second across the universe. tens of thousands have gone supernova since the article was posted to HN. tiny percentages in a large sample are huge numbers, you might even say 'astronomical'.
foxglacier 4 hours ago [-]
You can't compare a number of years or events with infinity. Saying it's tiny or huge makes no sense whatsoever.
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.
roenxi 3 hours ago [-]
The comparison can be made; almost all positive integers can't practically be represented in hindu-arabic because they are too large. If we're dealing with numbers that can be scribed in a few seconds they are small in a meaningful way.
We'd expect that the mathematicians would need to come up with a new notation to represent the age of the universe.
Rendered at 13:26:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The last sentence was also confusing even if valid, but it will make more sense when you swap stuff around the last comma.
It's a little more than just " the sun will also go supernova". The core conceit of the games story is that you're living in the final moments of dying universe.
sounds of brain returning to monke
So that's cool, but now I'm thinking: the distant galaxies are redshifted and time-dilated in equal proportion, and also more densly packed because the universe was smaller in the past, so I expect the actual rate of supernovas to be significantly smaller than simply multiplying 1/century/galaxy by 1e11 galaxies.
Edit: also I don't know if rate of supernovas changes over history thanks to different steller environments giving the population-1/2/3 generations of stars…
And, less than half that, actually — since we can’t see the other side of the hemisphere
> When the Vera Rubin survey telescope goes online, it’s expected to see hundreds of thousands of supernovae per year by itself.
> That’s one hundred billion supernovae per century, or a billion per year, or about 30 per second.
7 characters of base26 gives you 8 billion combinations. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" requires ~1e48 events when going by the actual non base26 scheme. So I wouldn't be worried.
edit: I guess my error might be related to confusing a probability factor with the number of incidents in a period.
edit: The right answer is probably up to 1 in every 10bn stars go supernovae in the universe each year (or 1 in 10bn die and a fraction are supernovae). Thanks: yzydserd and zild3d
Numbers are huge. Even tiny ratios mean something like 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.
Sounds a lot? Only about 1 star per galaxy goes supernova per century. A lot of galaxies.
Mindblowing.
There is no evidence that there are a infinite number of universes. All we know of is the one we exist in. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are a very large number of non-interacting "worlds" which may or may not be the same as "universes".
And if you meant "infinity number of galaxies" then that would require an infinite-size universe, and we don't know if that is the case for our universe. It could be, or it could be finite but unbounded.
Our universe is finite, so although it is unbounded (lacks edges) there aren't an infinite number of anything in it, galaxies, stars, M&Ms, grains of sand, atoms of hydrogen all finite.
Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.
It also would mean stars, on average, do not get very old. Over 10% of the stars that the ancient Greeks saw in the sky would have to have gone supernova since then.
Yes. That fact that I'm thinking made me think I was certainly wrong
Tens of thousands a year is one an hour!
There are so many supernovae you really could bounce too close to one and that would end your trip real quick
Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
Spotted the republican
While dumping matter into a black hole destroys the matter, it doesn’t destroy the mass. It just confines all of the mass in one place. Powering your Birch World is just a matter of using the Penrose process to extract energy from the black hole for the next few million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (about 3×10¹⁰⁴ years give or take a few). The stars will only last for about a million trillion years (10²⁰ years plus or minus a bit), so this plan extends your your lifetime by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.
Maximal extension perhaps, but not quite forever. Forever takes a lot more work.
Living forever is such a strange desire, considering that complex life has existed on earth for just a fraction of the time it has existed, and humanity even less than that. I recommend watching the Kurtzgesagt video called All of History in one hour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo&t=3670s). It displays all of earths history in one hour, and humanity is merely a few seconds of it.
Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, that's 4500000000 years, and in 1300000000 years it will be uninhabitable by humans, and in another 4.5 billion years (roughly 3.2 billion years after becoming uninhabitable) it will be engulfed by the sun.
Assuming humanity manages interstellar space flight you could possibly escape earth and live somewhere else until that also dies, but in case it is not practical or possible, you get to enjoy 3.2 billion years of literally choking and being burned alive on earth.
Assuming you did escape earth (or you're immortal so escaping doesn't matter) In 1000000000000 years the last star will be born, and in 100000000000000 years the last star will die out.
You now have an extremely long time to enjoy suffocating in hard vacuum with your body being boiled by the low pressure, and all in complete darkness until the heat death of the universe occurs in roughly 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years
Please read this article first before damning yourself to an unimaginable hell.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html
If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
> THIRTY SUPERNOVAE PER SECOND, over the entire observable Universe.
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)
For a single bacteria cell, our timeframes must seem immense too.
I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but it’s a trap to think that just because you can’t fathom the scales that makes it impossible. The universe is huge and very very old. It can afford to wait what is a long time to us for something to happen.
I do think you’re likely right in practice though, and that it is too long for the universe to be an organism. But who knows. We already know that mathematically speaking the heat death of the universe looks identical to a very zoomed in big bang, maybe we just need to zoom out a few billion orders of magnitude to see the big picture, where the vast distances and time scales we see appear as little more than micrometers and microseconds apart…
The scales involved are vastly different than the minor difference in scales between bacteria and us - we don't have to worry about the speed of light for anything that we currently consider alive.
As a non-astronomer, that number still always boggles my mind.
> Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.
Also boggles my mind. Also makes me think of doctor who when the stars start disappearing. I need to rewatch that...
Much worse than that, the universe is enormous and it is expanding faster than the maximum possible velocity, as a result such a clock could never complete a single tick.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon
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?
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.