Space What is Happening? Space is a strange place. It is not empty even though it looks empty, it is not hospitable and it is not a void as it has been pictured in many movies. Let me ask you one of my famous questions, if space was empty could it expand? Some scientists think it is expanding, others believe objects in space are traveling faster and faster away from each other. I have mentioned this in the past, but now some scientists have been able to quantify how fast things are moving away from each other and the answer is ten percent faster than after the Big Bang took place. When scientists talk about warp drives and bending space this blows my mind and probably yours also. While it is true space is not empty, it is probably the emptiest thing we will ever find. We live on a world which is subject to all the things which could happen to any body in space. Our planet could suffer immense destruction not only from asteroids, meteors and other bodies in space, but also from all different types of radiation from exploding stars and such. Yet after all the years we have been on this planet we have just started to learn about these dangers. Perhaps the ancients were better off than us, since they didn’t know about them. Empty is a subjective term. One might say a room is empty because it has no furniture in it and yet, it is not truly empty because there is air inside the room and in that air are all sorts of particles. Space is sort of like that. The International Space Station has life on the outside of it, the part which is in space and the life is a fungus. We don’t know if the fungus is harmful to humans or not and one has to wonder what mechanism it uses to survive in space. The question is did these organisms come from somewhere in space or somehow came up from the earth, maybe by riding on one of the rockets which went to the space station? This brings up another question which is, does some alien life live in space? Not much has been found out about the fungi, but they have been discovered on other spacecraft. What we know is some contain carcinogenic and immune-depressing compounds. Humans are germ factories and because of this if they are not in some sort of suit which covers everything, they will be leaving microscopic organisms where ever they go. This could turn out to be a big problem when it comes time to have contact with extraterrestrials, if that time ever comes. Meeting with them could be bad for them or if they are like us and are carrying organisms in their bodies, it could be bad for us. Aliens who live in space would be much better suited for space travel than we are, because they would have to be resistant to much of what is going on in space and seemingly would not need oxygen to breathe. The question which is being asked by some people is since the universe is expanding, are the sun and planets moving further apart? You would think they would, but scientist think the expansion of the universe does not affect galaxies internally. They believe the galaxies are getting further apart, which means all those articles which state someday every planet will be on its own with nothing near it are wrong. It does make one wonder how every galaxy can be moving away from the others; wouldn’t you think the motion would be random and some would move toward others. It seems this way since galaxies do collide so they can’t all be moving away from each other. As a matter of fact, our galaxy is due to collide with Andromeda. How can this happen? The answer to this puzzle appeared in Scientific American. A scientist stated the dynamics of the universe all come down to scale. If two galaxies are close enough to each other their gravitational pull towards each other will override the weaker force pulling the galaxies apart. This does make sense. Some have said there is a force in space which is tremendous on an unimaginable scale and out of our sight which is responsible for pulling the galaxies away from each other. There is a theory which states the reason for the expansion of space is new space is being dumped into our universe from somewhere else. It is like filling a tub with water, as more water pours in, the amount of water in the tub increases. I don’t see how this would force the galaxies apart, but there you are. Space is essentially almost nothing which makes this belief strange. It is also thought there could be something in our universe which creates more space. It is believed not every galaxy is moving at the same speed and as you get further away from us galaxies move faster away. The scientists say they know this, because the light shifts from the galaxies and the faster they go the more light shifts to the red. There is a problem which came up with this idea a few years ago and it was caused by the fact some very old and far away galaxies didn’t show the right amount of red shift, leaving scientists scratching their collective heads. Now they believe they have solved this problem and the old galaxies which are not showing the correct amount of red shift are not showing it because they are moving toward other galaxies even though they are far away. This is offsetting the red shift and so they are still very far away and moving away from the other galaxies they are not being attracted to. There are some very strange things in space and NASA has found a diamond planet and an asteroid made of platinum. They have also found a planet on which titanium oxide is snowing on. What we might find in space might even rival the most imaginative imagination. We are just beginning to understand space and what is out there, we might have reached a fraction of one percent we understand and could be astounded once we get out of the solar system. Most scientists believe physics will be the same in the entire universe, but scientists have been wrong before. Could there be even a few planets where the current laws of physics do not apply? We have to be ready for anything and everything once we decide it is time for human space exploration.
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