Despite the launch of new carrier rockets and the development of programs for space exploration, we are still far from understanding even its foreseeable part.
As bold and unusual as science fiction is, it is always too human in its essence. No matter how exotic the locality or scientific concepts are, the end result is that the genre still focuses on human (or humanlike) interactions, human problems, trials and weaknesses. This is what we react to and what we can understand. The main challenge is to link history with human emotions, dimensions and time, while trying to convey the incredible scale of the universe.
The size of the universe never ceases to amaze. We say that its foreseeable part stretches for tens of billions of light years, but our only chance to realize this is to break matter into pieces, starting with our own understanding of the size of the Earth. The continuous flight from Dubai to San Francisco covers a distance of almost 13 thousand kilometers - a little more than the diameter of the planet. The sun is much larger: its diameter is more than 100 times the earth's. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 100 times greater - about 160 million kilometers. This distance is a fundamental quantity in astronomy known as the astronomical unit, or a. e. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977 and flying at a speed of almost 18 km / s, is now at 137 AU. from the sun.
The stars are farther away. The closest - Proxima Centauri - is located about 270 thousand AU, or 4.25 light years from us. To fill the space between our star and the proximal Centauri, 30 million suns would have to be lined up. The Vogons from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were surprised that humans did not come to the Proxima Centauri system to read the Earth annihilation notice. The joke is how incredible this distance is.
Relative position of distant spacecraft / NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Four light years is the average distance between the stars in the Milky Way, including the Sun. That's a lot of white space! The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across and contains roughly 300 billion stars. One of the most exciting discoveries of the past 20 years has been that the Sun is far from the only star with its own suite of planets. For example, the evidence suggests that planets revolve around most of the sun-like stars in the Milky Way, many of which are at such distances from their stars and of such sizes that, in aggregate, could be favorable for life as we know it.
Traveling to these planets, however, is another matter. If Voyager 1 flew towards Proxima Centauri, it would have reached it in 75 thousand years. Science fiction writers use different techniques to overcome such interstellar distances: for example, the characters are in suspended animation during long flights or travel at speeds close to the speed of light. Or they add warp drives, wormholes, and other as-yet undiscovered phenomena to their creations.
When astronomers took the first accurate measurements of our galaxy a century ago, they were shocked by the size of the designated universe. At first, scientists were skeptical that the so-called spiral nebulae in the sky images are actually "island universes" - structures the size of the Milky Way, but at great distances from us. And while most science fiction stories take place within our galaxy, a lot of astronomical discoveries over the past 100 years have focused on how much more human understanding the universe is. Our closest galactic neighbor is almost two million light-years away, and the light from most distant galaxies that telescopes can see has traveled to Earth for almost the entire existence of the universe - about 13 billion years.
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In the 1920s, we learned that the universe has been continuously expanding since the Big Bang. But about 20 years ago, astronomers discovered that this expansion was accelerating due to a force whose physical nature we do not understand and which they dubbed dark energy. It affects the temporal and spatial scales of the cosmos as a whole: and how to fit this concept into a work of art?
Galactic core GOODS-N-774, discovered in 2014 by the Hubble telescope. The image in the highlighted area captures the light of millions of newborn stars in the early universe.
The story doesn't stop there. We cannot see galaxies from those parts of the Universe, the light of which has not yet reached us since the Big Bang. What is beyond the observable universe? Our simplest cosmological models assume that it is constant in its properties even on the largest scales and extends to infinity. One hypothesis is that the Big Bang that gave birth to the Universe is just one of many (possibly infinite) such explosions, and the resulting multiverse has dimensions that we cannot comprehend.
American astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said: "The universe doesn't have to be comprehensible." Likewise, her miracles do not have to make it easier for science fiction writers to be told about them. For the most part, the Universe is empty space, and the distances between stars in galaxies and between them are inconceivably large for earthlings. Trying to capture the true dimensions of the universe and connect them to human emotions is far from an easy task for any author. Olaf Stapledon tried to do this in the novel "The Creator of the Stars", endowing the stars, nebulae and the cosmos in general.
And although we accept our insignificant size in comparison with the cosmos, our brain can only to a certain extent realize how large the universe is. This is encouraging. As astrobiologist Caleb Scharf of Columbia University said, "In the finite world, space perspective is not a luxury but a necessity." The real challenge - for astronomers and writers alike - is getting this message across to the public.
Vladimir Mirny