it's one of the scariest places many can
think of the most wonderful to others a
place we haven't really visited beyond
low-earth orbit for over 30 years
this is space we don't exactly know how
many stars there are in the universe we
can make estimates though but these
estimations are limited by the
technology available to us today once
new and better technology comes along
we'll be able to see even further out
into space and discover even more stars
and thus the estimated star count
increases but it's quite beautiful
though is it just seemingly flying among
the stars like this at 100 mega parsecs
per second
except what you're seeing is not stars
these are galaxies each galaxy
containing millions billions and even
trillions of stars most of which have
their own planetary system with
celestial bodies circling around it
truly gives you a sense of scale how
small we are just a tiny speck in this
sea of space dust but as we can't know
for certain how many stars and/or
galaxies there are let's take what we do
know and what we do know is that the
observable universe contains at least
170 billion galaxies we also know that
their own average sized galaxy the Milky
Way has around 400 billion stars so we
can use that as a template now take 170
billion galaxies multiply that with 400
billion stars and we get the number 6860
liyan possible stars in the cosmos
lack holds one of the most mysterious
objects in the universe everything about
them is just taken to the extreme in one
way or another they twist and bend space
and time around them somebody found to
rotate close to half the speed of light
they can be smaller than an atom or
billions of times more massive than the
largest known star they even stop tall
and if you wanted to destroy one
well you can't whatever you throw at it
will just be added to its mass and
energy lasers bullets nuclear warheads a
unicorn the Avengers a star a galaxy
google plus another black hole it would
all just be consumed but they're not
completely indestructible though they
have one sworn enemy one weakness time
wait long enough and eventually black
holes evaporate because of something
called Hawking radiation this radiation
causes the black hole to slowly lose
mass over long periods of time in part
one I talked about the largest known
galaxies in the observable universe I
see one one zero one which is estimated
to contain about 100 trillion stars on
the other side of the spectrum the
smallest galaxies found so far is called
segue two and only contains the tiny
amount of one thousand stars the galaxy
is also very very old the stars are
believed to have formed more than 12
billion years ago meaning that they were
most likely among the first stars to
have formed in the universe in 2023 we
might have a reality TV show on Mars
this is if the Mars one project is
successful Mars one is an organization
with the goal of establishing a
permanent colony on
only last year people could apply to be
one of the colonists to go there and
thus leaving Earth forever to spend the
rest of their lives on Mars over two
hundred thousand people applied but only
for carefully selected individuals will
be sent there in 2023 and every step of
the cruiser knee will be documented and
every two years for additional colonists
will descend to Mars and colonies plan
to expand this way over time the ISS is
pretty cool and all but you know what
would be even more awesome a big-ass
doughnut in space now I'm not
even kidding here that's at least what
NASA thought would be a great idea back
in 1975 when it was proposed to build a
doughnut-shaped Space Station codenamed
Stanford torus that would simulate
artificial gravity and almost like a
little sidenote support over 10,000
people so of course they soon realized
that going from Cerro manned Space
Station's to a space city of 10,000
people was kind of a big step not to
mention that it would take decades to
get the material needed up there more
money than the whole economy of the
United States after NASA had
successfully landed on the moon in 1969
with Apollo 11 several other Apollo
missions took place all the way up to
the final Apollo 17 mission before the
program was cancelled but that was
actually not the plan NASA had already
prepared for Apollo 18 19 and 20
missions after Apollo 17 the plan was to
get this colonize the moon with six
people living on the lunar surface for
up to 180 days but the reason this never
took place is of course almost as always
money
a lot of you have probably and at some
point at least imagine what it would be
like to be living in space and well it
would be pretty uncomfortable
first of all you have to work out every
single day for several hours to prevent
your bones and muscles from shrinking
due to the lack of gravity this includes
your heart which will become weaker and
smaller due to the same effect
you'd also become taller in a very
painful way as your intervertebral discs
that cushion your spine would slowly
drift away you would see bright light
flashes that you close your eyes because
of the radiation that the Earth's
atmosphere
normally filters out you will have
trouble tasting things and feeling sick
because of fluids in your body acting
really weird in zero-g
bacteria also starts going crazy and
becomes much more effective while your
immune system starts weakening basically
if you get sick you can die and as if
that weren't enough reasons to not want
to live in space you can't have sex
either like ever without gravity your
blood pressure decreases so for guys it
just becomes impossible to get it up
a common myth about space that's often
seen in movies and TV series is that
asteroid fields are full of asteroids
very close together and travelling
through one is next to impossible or at
least very dangerous however this isn't
true at all
space is guy ganti and asteroid fields
are no different where the flying chunks
of rocks are separated by huge distances
in fact when NASA sent a probe through
the asteroid belts in our own solar
system it had a chance of one in a
billion to actually get hit by an
asteroid a dream of many including
myself honest a is the prospect of
someday being able to visit other stars
other planets and maybe just maybe we'll
find that we're not alone in this
universe but with the knowledge we have
today just how likely is that will we
ever be able to take a quick road trip
to kepler 22b and check in at the local
hotel for 50 space coins well we can
never know for certain but unfortunately
the chances of that seem very slim at
best the biggest issue is that to get
anywhere on such a large scale we need
technology that can somehow overcome the
light barrier and when I say overcome I
mean we really need to go much faster
than the speed of light the closest our
Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years
away meaning it would take four point
two years to get there if we could
travel at the speed of light and I'm not
even accounting for how long it would
take to start and slow down during this
journey time dilation and the fact that
it would take another 4.2 years if you
wanted to go back or send some sort of
message to people back on earth and with
the current understanding we have of the
universe faster than light travel just
isn't possible at least not in the
traditional sense we have not observed
anything
faster than the speed of light so what
options do we have well believe it or
not but there is in fact a slight
possibility that a version of the warp
drive from Star Trek could become a
reality sometime in the future it's
called the Alcubierre drive and the way
it works in theory is that it wouldn't
move the ship at all but instead moves
and bends the space around the ship and
thus overcoming the light barrier
without breaking any physical laws
basically instead of moving across a
plane you move the parts of the plane to
take you across it but as you can
understand developing a technology that
could bend space and time itself is not
an easy task if even possible but at the
moment if we want to go faster than the
speed of light while also overcoming
complicated issues such as time travel
the theoretical Alcubierre drive seemed
to be our best bet