I wrote this for the god-soaked morons at the Wall Street Journal.

"If you look at the universe and study the universe, what you find is that there is no evidence that we need anything other than the laws of physics and the other laws of science to explain everything we see. There's absolutely no evidence that we need any supernatural hand of God."

-- Lawrence Krauss

I wrote this for some god-soaked cry babies at the Wall Street Journal but what I wrote was not published. Christian assholes hide behind censorship. The stupid, it burns.

"The existence of the universe"

Your god thing didn't magically create the universe. We have something called "science". Look it up.

By the way, what created your imaginary god thing? The usual excuse is "God always existed". That's just being childish.

Your God is equal to Santa Claus. It's for children and for people who never learned how to grow up.

Also, the child abuse thing. It's brainwashing and it's disgusting.

Look at what's out there.

The galaxies NGC 5257 and NGC 5258, each anchored by a supermassive black hole.NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans

My favorite galaxy. An interesting fact: This universe has 125 billion galaxies. That's 125,000,000,000 galaxies. Our galaxy has 100 billion planets. These facts kill the idea that the Earth is a big fucking deal.

I answered a dumb question.

"Do atheists wish that a God existed?"

I would not want to live in a universe where magical god fairies were real. Fortunately, that's the way it is. In this universe fairies are impossible.

Somebody said he was an "agnostic atheist". In other words, he thinks fairies might be real. The stupid, it burns.

I wrote this somewhere else.

There will always be research opportunities in every branch of science but scientists have good ideas about virtually everything including how life got a foothold on Earth four billion years ago, and how something can come from nothing.

My point is the magic god fairy of the gaps has run out of hiding places. The fairy never had anything to do therefore it's not real.

I answered a very stupid question about the Magic Man.

"Will God punish someone for voting for Biden?"

The magical master of the entire vast universe is probably not interested in the politics of one country on a little insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere.

I answered a question about reality.

"Atheists, what are your beliefs on human existence? This comes from a place of genuine curiosity. I am trying to collect information on what atheists believe to be the source of the universe and human existence. Evolution is a big one, but I am curious if there are other schools of thought that I'm missing."

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You need to throw out the word "beliefs". If something is a belief then it's wrong and it should be thrown out. I don't "believe" anything.

Science can explain everything including evolution, abiogenesis, and how something can come from nothing. It's science. Anyone can look it up. Magic god fairies are not required.

One more thing: Anyone who thinks a god fairy is real, or might be real, is insane and not too bright. This is equal to the Easter Bunny fantasy.

Some people never grow up. They want to live in their childish "Everything is magic fantasy world." There is no cure. The brain damage can't be fixed.

Scientists have figured out why is there something rather than nothing. A magic god fairy was not required.

BBC Earth          BBC Earth

Some physicists think they can explain why the universe first formed. If they are right, our entire cosmos may have sprung out of nothing at all.

By Robert Adler

November 6, 2014

People have wrestled with the mystery of why the universe exists for thousands of years. Pretty much every ancient culture came up with its own creation story - most of them leaving the matter in the hands of the gods - and philosophers have written reams on the subject. But science has had little to say about this ultimate question.

However, in recent years a few physicists and cosmologists have started to tackle it. They point out that we now have an understanding of the history of the universe, and of the physical laws that describe how it works. That information, they say, should give us a clue about how and why the cosmos exists.

Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because "nothing" is inherently unstable.

This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science's two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Here, then, is how everything could have come from nothing.

Particles from empty space

First we have to take a look at the realm of quantum mechanics. This is the branch of physics that deals with very small things: atoms and even tinier particles. It is an immensely successful theory, and it underpins most modern electronic gadgets.

Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as empty space. Even the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness.

These so-called virtual particles don't last long enough to be observed directly, but we know they exist by their effects.

Space-time, from no space and no time

From tiny things like atoms, to really big things like galaxies. Our best theory for describing such large-scale structures is general relativity, Albert Einstein's crowning achievement, which sets out how space, time and gravity work.

Relativity is very different from quantum mechanics, and so far nobody has been able to combine the two seamlessly. However, some theorists have been able to bring the two theories to bear on particular problems by using carefully chosen approximations. For instance, this approach was used by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge to describe black holes.

In quantum physics, if something is not forbidden, it necessarily happens

One thing they have found is that, when quantum theory is applied to space at the smallest possible scale, space itself becomes unstable. Rather than remaining perfectly smooth and continuous, space and time destabilize, churning and frothing into a foam of space-time bubbles.

In other words, little bubbles of space and time can form spontaneously. "If space and time are quantized, they can fluctuate," says Lawrence Krauss at Arizona State University in Tempe. "So you can create virtual space-times just as you can create virtual particles."

What's more, if it's possible for these bubbles to form, you can guarantee that they will. "In quantum physics, if something is not forbidden, it necessarily happens with some non-zero probability," says Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.

A universe from a bubble

So it's not just particles and antiparticles that can snap in and out of nothingness: bubbles of space-time can do the same. Still, it seems like a big leap from an infinitesimal space-time bubble to a massive universe that hosts 100 billion galaxies. Surely, even if a bubble formed, it would be doomed to disappear again in the blink of an eye?

If all the galaxies are flying apart, they must once have been close together

Actually, it is possible for the bubble to survive. But for that we need another trick: cosmic inflation.

Most physicists now think that the universe began with the Big Bang. At first all the matter and energy in the universe was crammed together in one unimaginably small dot, and this exploded. This follows from the discovery, in the early 20th century, that the universe is expanding. If all the galaxies are flying apart, they must once have been close together.

Inflation theory proposes that in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe expanded much faster than it did later. This seemingly outlandish notion was put forward in the 1980s by Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and refined by Andrei Linde, now at Stanford University.

As weird as it seems, inflation fits the facts

The idea is that, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the quantum-sized bubble of space expanded stupendously fast. In an incredibly brief moment, it went from being smaller than the nucleus of an atom to the size of a grain of sand. When the expansion finally slowed, the force field that had powered it was transformed into the matter and energy that fill the universe today. Guth calls inflation "the ultimate free lunch".

As weird as it seems, inflation fits the facts rather well. In particular, it neatly explains why the cosmic microwave background, the faint remnant of radiation left over from the Big Bang, is almost perfectly uniform across the sky. If the universe had not expanded so rapidly, we would expect the radiation to be patchier than it is.

The universe is flat and why that's important

Inflation also gave cosmologists the measuring tool they needed to determine the underlying geometry of the universe. It turns out this is also crucial for understanding how the cosmos came from nothing.

Einstein's theory of general relativity tells us that the space-time we live in could take three different forms. It could be as flat as a table top. It could curve back on itself like the surface of a sphere, in which case if you travel far enough in the same direction you would end up back where you started. Alternatively, space-time could curve outward like a saddle. So which is it?

There is a way to tell. You might remember from maths class that the three angles of a triangle add up to exactly 180 degrees. Actually your teachers left out a crucial point: this is only true on a flat surface. If you draw a triangle on the surface of a balloon, its three angles will add up to more than 180 degrees. Alternatively, if you draw a triangle on a surface that curves outward like a saddle, its angles will add up to less than 180 degrees.

So to find out if the universe is flat, we need to measure the angles of a really big triangle. That's where inflation comes in. It determined the average size of the warmer and cooler patches in the cosmic microwave background. Those patches were measured in 2003, and that gave astronomers a selection of triangles. As a result, we know that on the largest observable scale our universe is flat.

It turns out that a flat universe is crucial. That's because only a flat universe is likely to have come from nothing.

Everything that exists, from stars and galaxies to the light we see them by, must have sprung from somewhere. We already know that particles spring into existence at the quantum level, so we might expect the universe to contain a few odds and ends. But it takes a huge amount of energy to make all those stars and planets.

The energy of matter is exactly balanced by the energy of the gravity the mass creates

Where did the universe get all this energy? Bizarrely, it may not have had to get any. That's because every object in the universe creates gravity, pulling other objects toward it. This balances the energy needed to create the matter in the first place.

It's a bit like an old-fashioned measuring scale. You can put a heavy weight on one side, so long as it is balanced by an equal weight on the other. In the case of the universe, the matter goes on one side of the scale, and has to be balanced by gravity.

Physicists have calculated that in a flat universe the energy of matter is exactly balanced by the energy of the gravity the mass creates. But this is only true in a flat universe. If the universe had been curved, the two sums would not cancel out.

Universe or multiverse?

At this point, making a universe looks almost easy. Quantum mechanics tells us that "nothing" is inherently unstable, so the initial leap from nothing to something may have been inevitable. Then the resulting tiny bubble of space-time could have burgeoned into a massive, busy universe, thanks to inflation. As Krauss puts it, "The laws of physics as we understand them make it eminently plausible that our universe arose from nothing - no space, no time, no particles, nothing that we now know of."

So why did it only happen once? If one space-time bubble popped into existence and inflated to form our universe, what kept other bubbles from doing the same?

There could be a mind-boggling smorgasbord of universes

Linde offers a simple but mind-bending answer. He thinks universes have always been springing into existence, and that this process will continue forever.

When a new universe stops inflating, says Linde, it is still surrounded by space that is continuing to inflate. That inflating space can spawn more universes, with yet more inflating space around them. So once inflation starts it should make an endless cascade of universes, which Linde calls eternal inflation. Our universe may be just one grain of sand on an endless beach.

Those universes might be profoundly different to ours. The universe next door might have five dimensions of space rather than the three – length, breadth and height – that ours does. Gravity might be ten times stronger or a thousand times weaker, or not exist at all. Matter might be built out of utterly different particles.

So there could be a mind-boggling smorgasbord of universes. Linde says eternal inflation is not just the ultimate free lunch: it is the only one at which all possible dishes are available.

As yet we don't have hard evidence that other universes exist. But either way, these ideas give a whole new meaning to the phrase "Thanks for nothing".

Well done! "Everything and Nothing: What is Nothing? (Jim Al-Khalili) | Science Documentary | Science"

I'm not going to worry about this.

What will happen when our sun dies?

Posted by Deborah Byrd and Eleanor Imster in SPACE

May 11, 2018

What does death mean, for the sun? It means our sun will run out of fuel in its interior. It’ll cease the internal thermonuclear reactions that enable stars to shine. It’ll swell into a red giant, whose outer layers will engulf Mercury and Venus and likely reach the Earth. Life on Earth will end. If the sun were more massive – estimates vary, but at least several times more massive – it would explode as a supernova. So … no supernova. But what? What happens next? An international team of astronomers recently used a new stellar data-model that predicts the life cycle of stars to answer this question.

Their research is published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy. It suggests that the sun is almost exactly the lowest mass star that – at the end of its life – produces a visible, though faint, planetary nebula.

The name planetary nebula has nothing to do with planets. It describes a massive sphere of luminous gas and dust, material sloughed off an aging star. In the 1780s, William Herschel called these spherical clouds planetary nebulae because, through his early telescope, planetary nebulae looked round, like the planets in our solar system.

Astronomers already knew that 90 percent of all stars end their active lives as planetary nebulae. They were reasonably sure our sun would meet this fate. The key word here is visible. For years, scientists thought the sun has too low mass to create a visible planetary nebula.

Albert Zijlstra of the University of Manchester in England is a co-author of the study. He said in a statement:

When a star dies it ejects a mass of gas and dust – known as its envelope – into space. The envelope can be as much as half the star’s mass. This reveals the star’s core, which by this point in the star’s life is running out of fuel, eventually turning off and before finally dying.

It is only then the hot core makes the ejected envelope shine brightly for around 10,000 years – a brief period in astronomy. This is what makes the planetary nebula visible. Some are so bright that they can be seen from extremely large distances measuring tens of millions of light-years, where the star itself would have been much too faint to see.

Will that be the fate of our sun? Will it – at the end of its life – become briefly visible to alien astronomers on planets millions of light-years away? These astronomers say no. They say their new models predict our sun at the end of its life, though forming a planetary nebula, will remain faint.

Read more about this study from University of Manchester

By the way … what next? Eventually, the planetary nebula will disperse and fade. With its thermonuclear fuel gone, the sun will no longer be able to shine. The immensely high pressures and temperatures in its interior will slacken. The sun will shrink down to become a dying ember of a star, known as a white dwarf, only a little larger than Earth.

A Christian fucktard asked a question about the beginning of the universe. Someone answered the question. I'm adding it to my list of favorite quotes.

"Does a snowflake create itself? No, it forms through known natural processes. Same with the universe, though the processes aren't fully understood. Cosmologists don't study the origins of the universe and suddenly realize that a god must have made it; most of them are atheists despite studying the universe in more depth than you ever will. The fact that you don't understand the relevant science does not mean that some god made the universe."

-- gillie

Who cares about this little planet in the middle of nowhere. Look at what's out there.

The Atlantic

SCIENCE

Galaxy Brain Is Real

Looking at the long views from the Hubble space telescope might be good for you.

MARINA KOREN - Twitter

December 1, 2020

In December of 1995, astronomers around the world were vying for a chance to use the hottest new tool in astronomy: the Hubble space telescope. Bob Williams didn’t have to worry about all that. As the director of the institution that managed Hubble, Williams could use the telescope to observe whatever he wanted. And he decided to point it at nothing in particular.

Williams’s colleagues told him, as politely as they could, that this was an awful idea. But Williams had a hunch that Hubble would see something worthwhile. The telescope had already captured the glow of faraway galaxies, and the longer Hubble gazed out in one direction, the more light it would detect.

So the Hubble telescope stared at the same bit of space, nonstop, for 10 days—precious time on a very expensive machine—snapping exposure after exposure as it circled Earth. The resulting image was astounding: Some 3,000 galaxies sparkled like gemstones in the darkness. The view stretched billions of years back in time, revealing other cosmic locales as they were when their light left them and began coasting across the universe.

“I still love looking at that image,” Williams told me earlier this year, as Hubble celebrated its 30th anniversary in space.

Hubble, the most powerful telescope in orbit, is still producing dazzling observations of targets near and far, from the familiar planets of our solar system to the mysterious suns of other worlds. The mission might be one of the easiest scientific endeavors to maintain in the middle of a plague. When I visited Hubble’s mission-operations center in Maryland last December, only one person sat inside the control room, all the staff that was needed to manage the mostly automated telescope—and, it would turn out three months later, when the state reported its first COVID-19 case, the right number to avoid tangling with a virus that thrived in close quarters.

Hubble has quite a clear view of the universe from its perch in orbit, away from the atmosphere that warps and blocks cosmic light from beyond. Its images are, to use a very nonscientific word, pretty. You don’t have to be an astronomer, or to know that the galaxy you’re gazing at is called NGC 2525, in order to appreciate them. These images can serve as momentary distractions, small bursts of wonder, and they might even be good for the mind. At a time when the coronavirus has shrunk down so many people’s worlds, Hubble can still provide a long view—a glimpse of places that exist beyond ourselves.

Imagine yourself at a scenic vista somewhere on Earth, such as the rim of the Grand Canyon or the shore of an ocean stretching out past the horizon line. As your brain processes the view and its sheer vastness, feelings of awe kick in. Looking at a photo is not the same, but we might get a dose of that when we look at a particularly sparkly Hubble picture of a star cluster. The experience of awe, whether we’re standing at the summit of a mountain or sitting in front of a computer screen, can lead to “a diminished sense of self,” a phrase psychologists use to describe feelings of smallness or insignificance in the face of something larger than oneself. Alarming as that may sound, research has shown that the sensation can be a good thing: A shot of awe can boost feelings of connectedness with other people.

“Some people do have the sense when they’re looking across millions of light-years, that our ups and downs are ultimately meaningless on that scale,” says David Yaden, a research scientist in psychopharmacology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and who has studied self-transcendent experiences, including in astronauts. “But I think [space images] can also draw our attention to the preciousness of local meaning—our loved ones, people close to us, this Earth. It’s not a leap that I think always occurs, but I think the benefits flow to people who do make that leap."

The experience is like a miniature version of the “overview effect,” the mental shift that many astronauts have experienced after seeing Earth as it truly is, a gleaming planet suspended in dark nothingness, precious and precarious. Astronauts have put this feeling into some lovely words over the years, but few have described it as succinctly as the Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who saw Earth from the moon in 1971: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”

Most of us aren’t astronauts, and we’ll never see “the big picture” quite like that. On Earth, photos from a giant orbiting telescope, capturing the grandeur of the cosmos, are as close as we can get. The appeal of these images is durable enough that a website called Astronomy Picture of the Day has been running since 1995, the year Hubble reached into a dark void and plucked out glittering treasures. The site looks just as it did 25 years ago, with the no-frills Times New Roman look of the early internet. Robert Nemiroff, an astronomer at Michigan Tech and a co-founder of the website, told me that pageviews are up by about 75 percent compared with last year’s, starting with a spike in April. These visitors didn’t leave behind any clues about their intentions—perhaps people were simply spending more time online, cooped up inside; perhaps they were looking for a jolt of feeling that would shake their perspective out from within the walls of their own home.

That’s the hope of Judy Schmidt, who spends hours each week with Hubble observations. Schmidt, an amateur astronomer, sifts through years-old telescope data and cleans them up, producing radiant images. One of her fortes is brightening shadows that ’90s computer software missed, uncovering previously unseen features. In a way, Schmidt curates the cosmos and hangs them in the ether of the internet, where people can pass through, like museum visitors, and tilt their heads at a particularly impressive bit of space that, for a moment, might make them feel small, but in a reassuring way. “I just hope that their life has improved for even just the few seconds that they took to look at it and they thought, Wow, that’s out there,” Schmidt told me.

MARINA KOREN is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

"We're All Made of Stardust. Here's How." Smithsonian Channel - "13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a big bang and the atoms it created would find their way into everything: from celestial stars to the human body."

Someone asked a question about reality. Christian fucktards are too dense to understand.

Why do we attach the existence of religion to "Earth"?

Religions are developed based on the premise of a 'supreme creator' existence. They all not only violently conflict with each other, they all also center around the attachment to earth. Why would we be so vain to assume our little piece of rock is the foundation for where God decided to leave his message? We wouldn't even be able to cross our own galaxy if we traveled for 100,000 years at light speed, yet earth is unanimously the base of God's word. Try to wrap your mind around that. There's roughly 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on earth, yet octillion's of stars occupy the universe. God knows this because he's omnipresent and he's simultaneously among each and every one of those stars and their planets, and of all those many worlds, he's going to bestow his message to a tiny area on one planet. He's going to leave his word on our little area of land and have a few primitive bipedal organisms who happen to live here write down conflicting accounts about it on little pieces of parchment in a single planet amongst octillions. That would be the extent of his sacred recorded interaction with his massive creation.

-- Goku

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I wrote this answer:

Well done question. I tried to explain the exact same thing to Christians. But they don't understand. They have an incurable stupidity problem.

I asked a dumb question. Someone else wrote an answer which I agree with.

Why did God create 2 trillion galaxies?

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

"Why do you think god has the ability to create galaxies? All gods are invisible, can’t talk, can’t write, and no one has seen any of them do anything that can be verified by unbiased observers, so why should we believe they can create galaxies when they can’t even create their magic script books themselves?"
-- Anonymous

Sean Carroll - The Biggest Ideas in the Universe - Two hours

I'm adding this to my list of favorite quotes. It's about Carl Sagan's speech about a pale blue dot.

It is a good quotation, explaining how tiny and insignificant the Earth is in comparison to just our solar system, let alone the universe, and how anyone who attaches any importance for us on the grand scale of things is just fooling themselves.

There is no "grand plan" for the inhabitants of that "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

-- Princess

Pale Blue Dot

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Carl Saga’s famous Pale Blue Dot speech given at Cornell University in 1994

It was a natural process you stupid fucking uneducated moron.

"You can't look at the billions of galaxies and stars and the vastness of the universe and deduce that something much greater than us created it."

Translation: "I don't know anything about science therefore the Magic Man did it."

Idiot America is infested with millions of these fucking retards.