Yes!

It's thought that around 60% of the galaxies in our known universe are spiral!

I'm not sure if that's what you were asking but there you go!

Well... It's got us in it. I'd like to think that makes it special

My understanding is the Milkyway is a fairly bit bigger than the average galaxy (which is to be expected as probability wise we are more likely to be from a bit larger than average size galaxy)

the Milky Way is the only galaxy known to contain life.

It’s actually a link to an article.

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Although there is as yet no sign of intelligent life

Also; we probably have a bit of a wobble and the galaxy is deep in the Universal sticks

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I love the fact that it's called Universe Today even though you're looking hundreds of million of years into the past.

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Especially after that sentence.

Does the Milky Way need a hug? Because the Andromeda is coming to give her one in 5 billion years.

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Well, we have the mice. And maybe dolphins.

And it’s only read in one tiny corner of the universe.

If the (let's be honest, rather unintelligent on average) organisms inhabiting one planet in one star system is enough to make a galaxy "special", I feel like the universe must be an awfully boring place.

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Not even corner, literal speck. Insignificant speck and with in that an insignificant speck of a planet. On that insignificant speck of a planet only a few thousand read it at best.

Are we fucked when that happens?

Shit we might be the most intelligent life form this universe has ever created.

Homie, we fucked way before that

Your mom is there though, let’s not discount her.

To be honest. It would be less scary than the idea of AI, Aliens, Or something like a dimensional horror

Not really, space is so huge we are so unlikely to get close enough to anything

It seems that Andromeda and the Milky Way are already in each other’s personal space (pun intended)

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It's alright, lad. Everyone wonders if their galaxy is normal.

If it hasn't been influenced by Tik Tok in 40,000 years, it will be normal.

Not at all!! The distances are so vast and gravity being, well gravity, there probably won’t be any collisions at all, just a seamless merger. Like a Galactic Zipper. We will combine like Voltron to form a bigger Galaxy. Bet it’s going to be amazing. Imagine the night sky when Andromeda is lighting it up!

Dimensional horror…so like a God? Ha

legit won't even notice afaik

Mmmm Looks like it's a bit more milky these days

If we haven't figured out intergalactic space travel within 5 billion years, we were probably already fucked.

We don't know what's normal and abnormal in space still, IMO

Ill be dirt, and so will my great to the 100th grandson.

And we're killing ourselves.

But maybe we need to so something can balance itself out? If the earth has natural cycles and systems to maintain itself, why wouldn't the solar system, galaxy, and/or universe?

This is basically our first shot at industrial technology, and we still know so little. Like running forward blindfolded. Eventually we’ll hit a wall and have to start over but it should be smarter the second. I think we’re doing alright for smart violent monkeys

....Earth will be boiled away by the sun's intense heat and will be transformed into a cloud of hot gas. Eventually, the sun will cool down and will become a white dwarf star....sound pretty normal Galaxy to me.

But your 6̶6̶,̶6̶6̶6̶,̶6̶6̶6̶ᵗ̶ʰ̶ 200,000,000ᵗʰ grandson will have to deal with it(assuming a 7̶5̶ 25 year average l̶i̶f̶e̶s̶p̶a̶n̶ generation length)

Edited because thinking is hard.

With an average generation time of 25 years, your great^200,000,000th grandson would be dirt

I nominate Voltron as the name of the new galaxy. Milkdromada or Androway just won't have the gravitas that will frighten away extragalactic invaders.

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Can you explain your points further? Are we far from a “universe core” that makes it like we’re in the sticks?

that's the scary thing... an apocalypse that doesn't kill everyone would make evolution move much faster

I was always curious why we wouldn't think globular galaxies aren't considered galaxies after a merger, in the slow slow process of sorting back out into their spirals.

Androway sounds like a sexually ambiguous MLM scheme.

Are you confusing lifespans with generations?

There are roughly 3 generations per 75 years.

Yes because the sun will be nearing its end of life at the same time and expanding into a red giant that will stretch out to fill the space currently occupied by the planets Venus and Mercury, and possibly the earth as well.

But the actual galactic merger is unlikely to see stars get close enough to disrupt the orbits of planets around our star. The orbits of stars themselves around the galaxy will change in unexpected ways.

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I mean rapid unimpeded growth has never worked and we are burning extra bright right now, you’d figure the planet telling us to slow down would raise more eyebrows

it's refreshing to hear macro perspectives of where we are right now, totally seems this explosion of energy is bound to collapse

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I don’t understand what the other guy was saying. But under most commonly accepted models of the universe, there is no center to the universe. The Big Bang happened everywhere all at once, and the universe appears to be infinite in size.

If you’re talking about the observable universe, which is just the portion of it that we can see because light has had time to reach us, then we are at the exact center of the universe simply because light travels at a constant speed and we can see the same distance in all directions.

We’re not far from the core because no such thing exists, but the Milky Way does exist in the largest known galactic void. Our void isn’t like some of the other huge ones where there’s like 60 galaxies for billions of light years, it’s just less densely populated than other regions of our observable universe

Probably won't be there any humans on earth when that does happen. Humanity will go extinct way before that.

>each other’s personal space

The pictures of what the night sky will look like are crazy. Reminds me of that old Asimov story, Nightfall.

I didn’t know that about the void, but figured there was no true “core” or at least one that we know of.

Yeah, but 3 Musketeers and Snickers are better.

No, absolutely not. Well maybe a little bit. Ok, a lot.

If you're still here in 5 billion years, you might have more problems than that.

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That’s just the solar system though (I didn’t read the article)

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I’ve seen some artists rendering of what it will look like at various points in time and it makes me said I won’t be around to see it. Before they start actually merging you would be able to see andromeda in its entirety in the sky.

....and it is part of the Milky Way!

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Yes but not because of Andromeda. The start of the Andromeda/milky way merger is about five billion years away. The sun becomes a red giant in six billion years, but it is getting hotter and larger as it approaches, the last non- random number I saw put water evaporating on earth about 1.75 billion to 3 billion years from now. Needless to say this wouldn't be good for humanity.

Both those numbers are also estimates. Very good estimates, but estimates none the less. So even if we survive water becoming dust there is a chance we will be consumed by the sun before Andromeda merges.

The merger itself while interesting probably won't do much to our system besides shaking up our neighborhood. Unless of course we are one the unfortunates to be ejected. Though all that will do is make the night sky dimmer.

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Kind of. If I remember right though there's evidence that another galaxy has already passed through the Milky Way, which isn't typical

The Sun will fuck the Earth before Andromeda.

So yes we’re fucked?

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Andromeda will give our galaxy a hug in around 5 Billion years, and create a supermassive black hole

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Nope. It has at least one guaranteed planet with an advanced civilization. :)

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We'll be fucked well before dat.

But no. The distances/ average concentration of, well, stuff is very low in both, especially stars.

Kinda hides out the Milky Way, so maybe Milkomeda? XD

"Milky way #1, all others are #2 or lower" - Sphinx

"Humans are SUPERIOR!!!" - Astronaut John Crichton

So, as I understand it the collision of the galaxy will ultimately sling some stars into space without a galaxy home. With Earth and our sun suspected of being closer to the tip of one of the spirals, what are chances we get flung off into deep space?

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"...the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. ... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young."

Are you talking about the hypothetical Gaia galaxy?

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Not sure, it's been years since I heard the claim

By who’s definition of normal?

We are all part of everything around us, created by stardust. The question should be: are WE normal?

“Do you know what gravitas sounds like? Greetings. All.”

The invaders will already be here, in our own new Voltron galaxy

Figure it’ll just turn into the “milky andromeda way”

The part in parenthesis doesn’t really track. You can’t really draw that conclusion from a sample size of 1

But why is definition?

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And before that, you were a star.

Same for your 100th grandson.

And eventually, you’ll meet each other in a black hole.

Apparently there is a low chance of any collisions because of how vast space is

Worry about gas clouds in our vicinity colliding and generating x-rays across broad swaths of the sky….

No we’re not. I know it’s a fiction story, but if you like to read, check out Stephan Baxter’s “Thousand Earths”. His character goes FAR into the future.

Essentially the prevailing theory is that although the galaxies will “collide”, the distances involved are still so vast, that if humans are still around by then, the collision will have no impact on our solar system.

Earth will be uninhabitable due to the sun heating up well before the merger.

right, but if someone asks you 'is Steve is normal?' and someone says 'well, there's this mitochondria in one of the skin cells of his foot that will operate like all the other mitochondria!' it doesn't truly answer the question.

Yeah i like how human ego thinks weare even gonna last another 5k years

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Known to us, a single inhabitant in the boonies of one arm of the Milky Way who has done little to even try to check besides a little bit of radio wave monitoring

Honestly like when people start fantasizing Dyson spheres around the sun when you need over 1 million earths to fill the sun like where do we even have the resources for that? All this talk about advancing us into the stars while the poor are still poor. We just want to move our problems elsewhere without acknowledging we’re the same.

"... 56 of the 138 galaxies studied ..." Yeah, that sample size is pretty pitiful.

What will it look like ?

The title is misleading. The article actually describes a way to see how the Milky Way might evolve. Scientists looked for galaxies with shapes and masses similar to our own. They found that some fit the structure of our own galaxy, while others fell into two groups that were different. The Milky Way as different kinds of stars in the central bulge than the outer areas. The first group had and stars the same age throughout, while the second group had "centrally quenched" bulges with star formation in the center ceasing. The authors suspect that the Milky Way could evolve into a centrally quenched galaxy.

A well described piece of truth.

Yeah we’d need many many earths worth of actual workable material to create the sphere. Let alone figuring out how it actually harvests and transports the energy. I don’t think that would ever be possible

we will dismantle mercury for the swarm

Look at the linked article they were replying to

There seems to be a bit of a calculation. If the universe is still expanding infinitely, then there has to be a "center" that it is infinitely expanding from. Take for instance a quilt, if it kept getting longer in all directions, it'll still have a center. Hope that makes sense.

not really because we think the universe is expanding equally at all points rather than expanding outward from a single point, so the “center” could never exist

So for visual sake, you have a grid of 9 dots and all dots expand and overlap each other infinitely?

I suppose the point is either that the mean size of galaxies is larger than the median size of galaxies, or else that larger galaxies have more planets in them and therefore more odds of any observer being from a larger galaxy.

sort of, universal expansion is weird and we’re not even sure everything is relative everywhere

Studying one part of the solar system can be crucial for understanding the larger system of the galaxy because it can provide important insights and context for the behavior and characteristics of the rest of the galaxy. For example, studying the planets, moons, and other objects in the solar system can help astronomers and other scientists understand the processes that shape and influence the evolution of planetary systems and the characteristics of different types of planets.

Additionally, studying the solar system can provide clues about the early history and development of the Milky Way galaxy, which is the home galaxy of the solar system. The chemical composition and age of objects in the solar system, such as meteorites and comets, can give scientists clues about the conditions that existed in the galaxy at the time the solar system formed, as well as how the galaxy has evolved over time.

Overall, studying the solar system can provide a unique perspective and a wealth of information that can help scientists better understand the larger system of the galaxy and the processes that shape it.

So how can you so confidently say no when you don't even understand it yourself?

That's why a Niven Ring is a better idea, unless you're talking about the original concept of a Dyson sphere.

Thank god we will probably die of the volcanos erupting before any of us reading this will deal with the galaxies merging.

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Our sun is 864,000 miles in diameter (more than 100x wider than Earth and obviously the biggest deal in our solar system).

Earth is 93,000,000 miles from sun.

Neptune is 3,000,000,000 miles from sun.

The edge of our solar system is kinda debatable... but should at least be considered to be 9,000,000,000 miles from sun.

Proxima Centauri? About 25,300,000,000,000 miles away. And that's our nearest neighbor in the vastness of space and "close" to us - there's a reason we don't use either miles or kilometers when talking about space.

Basically... there is just so much more "nothing" in these solar systems, with even so much more between them, that merging galaxies are akin to putting a few golf balls in a football stadium and then randomly throwing a few more onto the field. Odds are unbelievably low that any of those golf balls come into contact with each other and, instead, they all just sit on whatever grass they happen to be on and never really notice fact that there are actually more golf balls on that field. And, of course, that's simply imagining a completely flat 2D surface everything is sitting on...

Which is scarier - the thought that we really are all that, the smartest in the universe, or that we’re not?

IIRC, there is plenty of material available for such development without leaving our solar system, it’s just that most of it is out in the Oort Cloud. With the current tech we have this is not doable, but advances in space travel could make such things possible, over a period of millennia.

I do not personally think we will make it that long, environmental and societal collapse will end our species’ advancement first.

A Niven ring is just a variant. Again where do we get the resources to surround the sun when over 99% of the systems mass is literally in the star we’re trying to orbit.

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From what I read, no actually. Assuming we survived 5bln years.

Because no one understands it, but some things make more sense than others. You ok buddy?

The general accepted idea is that everything happened everywhere at once, but were not sure if thats true. (Also its kinda hard to visualize that I think)

Makes sense and what is are two different things. If you want to discuss what something probably is and theorize from there then sure, but to dismiss without giving some type of information that would contest it in some nature is not what science in any field is about. So yeah I just fine, just not to hyped of on the current climate revolveling around science.

That's why I gave a rough hypothetical to give some type of direction as to what did happen. Something that is above us naturally will be difficult to comprehend on some level, but if we can critique the information we have now, it will give insight to new comers who are looking into working on discovering these answers.

A Dyson sphere doesn't need a bunch of mass. It can be thinly spread out and enough material could be harvested from our solar system to build one.

Incorrect really, humanity has already used basically all easily accessible “exotic” resources like oil, rare earth metals, and large deposits of nuclear stuff.

If we fail now at a large scale, it’s unlikely we will ever get off the ground again because we can’t make the machine to drill oil or extract uranium without oil to run the machine in the first place, and hand pump jacks won’t cover it anymore.

This is our only chance

Where is earth located ? Is it accurate we are at far edge of galaxy

No way milkyway beats 3 musketeers! 3 musk tastes like it's missing something.

To be fair, a Dyson sphere is a bad example of your point because it's well known that a Dyson sphere is a sci-fi concept that is only theoretically possible and is obviously very far outside of our capabilities as humans currently.

There's elegance in simplicity.

Dyson Spheres? Like the vacuum? I hardly think they could survive space.

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No, that is incorrect. Imagine if the earth was expanding like a balloon. Which point on the surface of the earth would be the “center” of expansion? None would be, the universe is hypothesized to be similar

I think you are greatly missed under estimating the amount of ‘material’ that would be needed. At a distance that could be made even theoretically stable against the gravity of the sun you would need to harvest solar systems of ‘material’. Never mind you would need specific types of material not just any atoms — assuming you are spending 1000s of generations of effort (if not more) for something more worthwhile than a simple passive enclosure.

The balloon would still have a center... you can still pin point the center even if you can't feel it. What you just explained is exactly what I proposed, like a room. If you could float in the room you could be in that center while it expands. The issue with trying to explain this in a different way is that it doesn't seem possible with our current understanding. If one just said that the universe is infinite, then I can see the argument that there isn't a "center" but to be infinite and expanding... if it is theoretically infinite because it's ever expanding that's fine but then you're right back at the same issue of it having a "center" to be ever expanding from, whether you see it or not.

Given the rate of genetic mutations even if there was not many many extinction events in that time there would be nothing living that resembles a human.

No, you’re misunderstanding my analogy. In the balloon example, the surface of the balloon is the universe. The center of expansion is nowhere in the universe in that analogy. Another way to say it would be: can you point to the location in the universe which is the center of expansion? Can you go there (if you could teleport)? The answer to both questions is no.

Also I’m not sure what you were saying about an infinite universe so perhaps we agree, but there certainly is not a center to an expanding infinite plane.

What’s the pun?

I didn’t say human. I said grandson. Go far enough back and a fish is your grandfather.

Why is that expected probability wise?

Ok so saying this balloon is a perfect circle with no nipple, the surface of the balloon would be the universe and the space on either side of that surface would be nothing right?

Yup, exactly. The idea of the space on either side being “nothing” is extremely hard to fathom for me honestly, but it’s the only way to interpret an expanding finite universe (that I know of).

I mean unless the distance between the opposite sides of the surface is a number between 1 to 0 which can be infinite.

I get what you are saying. I'm still skeptical of the current idea being presented here. There are still anomalies that are seen in the cosmic microwave background that stands either for or against the current model but, it's still up for debate.

I appreciate your willingness to discuss the topic in a civil manner. Only thing I'll leave you with is to continue to question the way the data is being interpreted. It might lead you somewhere you might not have thought about

Sir you are in r/space this is NOT a walmart!

Basically there’s regions with galaxies clustered much more closely together to the point they all touch

Gaia is the reason the Milky Way has a buldge and has its current shape. You can search more about it tho.

I'm not underestimating the amount of material it would take to encircle the sun. Between the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets including oort cloud objects we would have enough material to encircle the sun many times over.

The gathering of said materials would be the issue not their abundance. As you stated, it would take multiple generations to complete the project of gathering minerals and forging them into something useful. That would be our road block, the solor system has more than enough to build the structure but we may not have the discipline to coordinate the resources and manpower for such an undertaking.

I mean it is estimated that there is roughly 10^57 atoms in our solar system bodies not including the sun. Thats all types of atoms (including argon, helium etc) -- but lets assume they are all of the most optimal material to make a 1 atom thick sphere at a distance from the sun that would not collapse or blow apart from gravitational forces or solar winds. You would run out of atoms before completing half of such a sphere. And to what end? The sphere would not do anything nor would you have a planet to power as you just used all of the available atoms to construct your partial sphere..

We don't need to build a solid structure around the sun just a loose formation of satellites. The real question would be is how dense do these satellites have to be to create an effective Dyson sphere.

I get that you and many people want something to be true, but without even the smallest bit of evidence otherwise, it remains just an unverified and untested theory.

Lol I don’t have a want for anything to be true, only to know what is.

My comment was based on scale. To say the Milky Way is the only galaxy known to contain life is true. But only to us, who have done very little in the way of exploring, know very little about what could possibly be out there, have an extremely limited number of resources to use to even begin to search for life, and have only barely begun to use them to do so.

Out of the millions of galaxies, the billions of stars and planets, which could potentially contain life, we have barely searched 2 planets with rovers, and have only searched for alien life through radio waves otherwise.

What I’m saying is we are trying to find a needle in a haystack, have done a once over of a single straw of hay next to us, and declared there are no needles in this haystack.

The explanation is not necessary, I understand your position, but our understanding of how life emerged is not advanced enough to form any such conclusions based on scale. It is just as likely we're alone. There is zero evidence that life emerged anywhere else.

Well you misstated it, so that’s why included it. I’ve not reached any conclusions, I’m merely stating that it is very strange to pretend that us humans can say the Milky Way is the only galaxy known to contain life, having barely peered elsewhere in the immensity, and knowing so little. There is also zero evidence that life emerged here. Tardigrades can survive in the vacuum of space, so it is just as likely that life came from elsewhere as it spontaneously emerging here.

>Tardigrades can survive in the vacuum of space

they survived 10 days in vacuum, that doesn't prove they can survive indefinitely, and panspermia is pseduoscience...