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Could The World Exist Without The Universe.?

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modeller | 17:48 Fri 26th Apr 2013 | Science
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For instance if we only had our galaxy , could our world have still been created ? If for instance could the big bang have been a little bang resulting in a single galaxy with its solar systems , one of which was ours. ?

The reason for the question is I was told today by a cleric we are unique but it needed the whole universe for us to be created.
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The reason for the question is I was told today by a cleric ........
---------------------------------

and it was there that unfortunately I lost all interest.
If the little bang created just our solar system, we would survive.
We would look up to the sky at night and see no stars.
Otherwise things would be the same.
Apart from Roswell. That would'nt have happened!
surely , wer'e not saying that the size of the universe was dictated by the size of the big bang ?
Tell your clerical friend that everything is unique.
Well isn't that just self-centred...

I can't answer that question. My gut feeling is that it ought to be "no", because to create a universe with just our galaxy would need fine tuning to a ridiculously high degree (you've have somehow to fix it so that everywhere else there was nothing).
Google strong and weak anthropic principle.....pretty arrogant of the cleric
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ChillDoubt //and it was there that unfortunately I lost all interest.//

That's exhibiting a closed mind which we associate with the Theists . Please ignore what the cleric said, he's entitled to believe what he likes as we all are.
I'm more interested in reality which I hope you are.
He said that cosmologists say, the earth could only be created as part of the whole universe because it needed , and I quote ( stars and pulsars to feed us nutrients ) . Now I know we have got nutrients and water from meteorites but would that have required a whole universe to supply our needs. Or could that have been achieved from our own galaxy.

If earth like planets really do need the universe then I believe there could be thousands of planets that could support life similar to earth.

However to get back to my question how big a universe is actually needed
to create just our earth.?
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jomifl // Tell your clerical friend that everything is unique //

He's no mug , he knows that, but what he means by unique is that we are the only planet supporting any form of life and especially human . He doesn't reject the possibility of some alien life but very much doubts it.
Hmm - well if the standard Big Bang model is correct, the very simplest of elements - hydrogen, helium, some of their isotopes etc - were formed shortly after he big bang.

All heavier elements are hypothesised as being formed out of the process of supernova nucleosynthesis.

So I suppose in that sense stars and pulsars offer "nutrients", and you would need plenty of supernovas to account for all the elements that form pretty much everything.

From your posts, it would seem to suggest that your cleric friend believes humanity to be unique in the universe. If he means that, across all of time and space within the universe to date, their has never been another species identical in attributes,chemical signature and fundamental desires as humanity, he might well be right - but if he means the presence of an intelligent life form that have motivations and fundamental desires similar to humanity, then I think he is wrong, although we have no evidence for that as yet.

The only evidence for life of any kind that we have in the whole universe right now is found entirely on our own planet.

As to the idea of a kind of little big bang - That idea does not sit easily with me, although I cannot explain why. I think it is because it sort of implies an explosion within a pre-existing void, and that would be a very poor description of the current standard model.

Were there, hypothetically speaking, a creator, whose sole intent was to create humanity on the one planet, Earth, then that creator must be extraordinarily profligate to need the whole universe as the building blocks..
The problem with the cleric's position is that it assumes that we are the only thing that matters; that, somehow, the Universe cares about us. I would make two counter-points.

Firstly, very quickly in its early life the Universe is believed to have got very large and did so very fast. This means that in fact the Universe as we see it, according to most estimates, is not that much more than 1 part in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of the size of the total Universe. That figure is perhaps a couple of zeros too big and also depends on Inflationary theory being correct, but in practice it means that almost all of the Universe is too far away from us to ever had had or ever have any influence on us whatsoever.

Secondly, even in the Universe that we can see many of the galaxies in the far distance are similarly too far away for any supernoval explosions to have reached us. I mean, we can see some of them, but the matter that follows will travel far slower because it's heavier. I can't really make a realistic estimate of this, but it's likely that at best only galaxies within say 10 million light years of us can have been involved in providing the raw materials for our life. I can't make up my mind if this is a conservative estimate or far too small, because it's off the top of my head -- but you can easily see how such a figure might arise. You need to work out how far a reasonably heavy element can travel in, say, ten billion years at most, given the energy of a typical supernova explosion. It won't be all that far in the grand scheme of things.

What this boils down to is that, even assuming we were the only thing that mattered, the only space that matters to us, that can be important to providing our materials for life, is the tiniest, tiniest fraction of the Universe - both the visible one and, if you believe in Inflation, the "invisible Universe" that is forever disconnected from us. As a result it is certainly wrong to say that the entire Universe was needed for us to be created. And if we were needed to be created, then the rest of the Universe, in the words of Dr. Arroway from the film Contact, "seems like an awful waste of space".
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This link is not all that relevant to the thread but I thought you might like to see it. http://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/universe-scale-topic/big-bang-expansion-topic/v/a-universe-smaller-than-the-observable

Thanks for all your posts.
modeller,Your clerical friend may know that everything is unique (how could it not be?) but he doen't know this..
/we are the only planet supporting any form of life/
He may surmise but he knows that as much as he knows god exists ie not at all.
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^^^ I agree I thought I said that, however as you say it is his assumption.
I said to him even if his god exists why would he create an entire universe
and only put humans on one minute part of it.
His predictable answer was , he wants to share his glory with us all.
I said 'well he's not making a very good job of it as 50% of the worlds population don't even believe in his existance. '
Like most religious people he's full of sh1 t.
Tell him that only about 2.36 parts in 10^23 of God's glory will be shared with us (the 10^23 from inflation - the 2.36 is an estimate on how much of the universe we will eventually be able to see based on red shift considerations).

And then watch him brush that aside.
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jim I would send him the Video Contact but that's a Sci-fi film and of course he would reject it. I need a more Scientific video to make that point. Or to show that a universe far far times smaller could also create an earth.
As I said.....
The video Contact is an odd one for him not to watch, since it's entirely open-ended. At the end the religious guy makes the point that "our goal [as scientists and religious thinkers] is one and the same: the pursuit of truth."

We can argue for ages on which scheme is more likely to get to the truth, but Contact is not an attack on religion as a whole; only religion that leads to self-imposed blindness and irrationality.
Again.....
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I've no doubt he would claim that even 2.23 parts would be wondrous and eventually we will see it all. He will no doubt add that the glory is beyond what we see but is the accumalated love in all our hearts. and the shared love of god's.
I know it's a load of bilge but that's the way their minds work. They can/will not see the other side of the love coin is hatred and violence or if they do do it's the work of the devil,.

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