The BBC has hosted an astronomy night which resulted in the discovery of another exoplanet around a distant star. This is good news in the search for interstellar life. The Universe would have to be trillions of light-years across by now, the edges travelling faster than the speed of light, due to the initial acceleration given to the Universe by the big bang. The expansion of the Universe is speeding up as time goes on, there is some force that is increasing the expansion, theoretically, the expansion could continue until the matter in the Universe itself was ripped apart and space was nothing but empty blackness. This is a scary thought, but this is trillions of years in the future and we will not be around by then. In Doctor Who, they went into the year 100,000,000,000,000 and there were still normal humans around, but this is unlikely, we would not be in any recognizable form by then, we would have evolved into something quite different and quite scary. Possibly we could look like alien greys, with no hair and larger brains or even something based on technology if we decided to store our consciousness on a computer chip and exist as sentient machines.
It is good that many people are still interested in astronomy, rather than the Kardashians or Big Brother. That brain rotting program is still going on overseas, the Endemol company that run this show are still flogging the dead horse and subjecting willing viewers to this trash. But the Carl Sagan documentaries about space really are better viewing than the trash on mainstream television, his space ship he goes around in is quite stylish indeed. He had an unquenchable obsession with space and man-kinds future in space, now we are spending money on wars against Islamic races, they are a people that have invented great technology – technology that western races could have learned from such as the Minaret towers that cause air to rise within them taking away hot air from below in the process and cooling water reservoirs at their base and providing free cooling to the buildings they are a part of. What a good idea. The ancient Chinese had aluminium in ancient times, this and other strange things that ancient peoples could manage such as moving 2000 ton obelisks in Egypt and 1200 ton stone blocks in ancient Lebanon. These feats are not repeated today, there have been claims by a man recently that he could do this, but only with small blocks.
He would not be able to move the immense 1200 ton stone block left in the quarry near the terrace of Baalbek in Lebanon, which is an enormous block of stone that required unknown technology to move it thousands of years ago. The Romans built on the terrace of Baalbek, but they did not construct the actual platform, which uses stone blocks between 300 and 800 tons fitted together with perfect precision that we could not manage with our technology the way they did. If we ever reach an alien planet we could possibly encounter ruins of an alien civilization or even intelligent life on a distant planet. That is the ultimate dream, that we could encounter another alien lifeform. Some say that we already have encountered alien species and that we are working with them and that our suddenly rapid technological progress is due to the reverse engineering of alien technology. Who knows, but we would need a little proof before that was an accepted hypothesis by any stretch of the imagination. Life can exist anywhere though, there are fish that live in sulfuric acid. And the lifeforms that live in 400-degree water at the bottom of the ocean. I can not forget the theory that there could be balloon style lifeforms floating around in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
The most amazing theory is that a Neutron star could have a lifeform that exists in the liquid interior. What sort of life would that be that lived in an environment of unimaginable pressure and very hot conditions indeed. The novel Dragons Egg, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon’s_Egg supposes that it could be possible for sesame seed-sized lifeforms could live on the surface of a Neutron star in 67,000,000,000 times Earth gravity. What would the surface look like from the perspective of such a small life form, with the bending of light due to the immense gravitational pull? There is even a theory that life could exist in the Sun, but I would think that space travel would be denied to such a life form. There are some people asking this question, but Yahoo Answers is not the place to ask anything about technology or the conditions on a star. But looking up Astronomy questions on the old Yahoo Answers made me want to lose all faith in humanity. The gravitational pull of the Sun is 28 times that of the Earth, the mass of the Sun is 333,000 times that of the Earth and the surface temperature is 5,800 degrees kelvin. That is what the Yahoo poster is confused with.
If the Sun had a gravitational pull of 333,000 times that of the Earth then the solar system would be a little different indeed. The Sun is only a yellow dwarf, 1,470,000 KM in diameter, VY CANIS MAJORIS is 3,000,000,000 KM in diameter. I have wondered what it would be like if we were living on a planet orbiting such a large star, but it throws out so much of its matter into space, that this most likely would be very lived indeed, the massive coronal mass ejections if they struck a planet like Earth would possibly erase all lifeforms on the planet in one go. If we were orbiting that star, if it was more stable, then it would take up the whole sky, and the light from it would be red instead of the yellow-white light we get from our star. Still, it is nice to dream. They have not featured such a large star in the Star Trek series. That would have been a very cool episode indeed, imagine the tiny Enterprise compared to a 3,000,000,000 KM wide star, that is the distance from our star to the orbit of Saturn. It is hard to imagine such a large star existing at all, but it does. Super large and extremely, hot stars such as this one created carbon compounds in their cores as well as iron early on in the life of the Universe, that is why they say we are made of stardust.