The Euclid telescope, just launched today, will be able to observe galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. Here’s the largest map I could find (1 billion light years) that includes the Milky Way, Laniakea, the Shapley supercluster, the Perseus–Pisces supercluster, and the South Pole Wall.
https://irfu.cea.fr/Projets/COAST/southpolewall-graphics.html
Going through the list of largest structures on Wikipedia trying t o piece it together into anything the mind can grasp at once is difficult. Especially when one has one map image, and another has its own, and how they fit together is confusing. What’s really frightening to me are the voids. I mean space itself is pretty immense, and just tackling the empty distances between our solar system’s planets is hard, but there are places that are devoid of anything for giga-parsecs. Like, completely nothingness.
Just reading this has my fear of the incomprehensible unknown tingling.
Deep Space is neat, but the thing that really gives me a fun sense of philosophical vertigo is Deep Time. My favourite exploration of that is the video Timelapse of the Future, which shows time passing at a rate that doubles every five seconds (ie, time is passing at a rate of one year per second for five seconds, then two years per second for the next five, then four years per second, etc.)
The last stars in the universe go dark at around the 5-minute mark. The video as a whole is about 30 minutes long.
If you want a more uplifting view of that future, Isaac Arthur’s Civilizations at the End of Time playlist goes into great detail about how intelligent life can persist throughout that entire duration and still have a good time.
And of course, there’s the famous Isaac Asimov short story about this, “The Last Question”.
I admittedly have not read a lot of Asimov but The Last Question is one of the few stories I’ve read in full (it helps that it’s a short story) and I absolutely loved it!
That was an amazing video! Thanks for sharing.
Wow I just so happened to jump back on here and check out the Timelapse video right as my THC tablet kicked in. 10/10 highly recommend the experience, no pun intended.
Even better, there are a handful of galaxies scattered here and there inside those voids.
If the Milky Way had been one of those galaxies then we wouldn’t have known that other galaxies existed in the universe until the 1960s.
I just watched the entire history of the universe’s newest youtube video and they touched on that… their videos always blow my mind
That’s an oddly terrifying thought. Which makes me wonder… you know how stars sometimes get ejected from their parent galaxies and end up free-floating through the universe, all on their own?
Imagine if a star got ejected from one of those galaxies, managed to travel far enough away the parent couldn’t be seen without advanced telescopes, and then life evolved on one of its planets.
That civilization would grow up in a world without stars. The sky at night would be pure black nothingness, except for the pinprick light of any other planets in the system. And then, after assuming their solar system was the entirety of existence for thousands of years, only in their culture’s equivalent of the 1960s do they see the first light of other suns.
I seem to recall a few scifi stories with civilizations like that.
Hitchhiker’s Guide had one that couldn’t see the sky, I remember. So they developed without ever thinking of anything beyond them.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov is kinda like that, it’s set on an Earth-analogue planet that orbits a system of six stars, so it’s never actually dark, except for one total eclipse every 3000 years.