Universe measured to 1% accuracy.

zahratustra

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"Astronomers have measured the distances between galaxies in the universe to an accuracy of just 1%."
and
"While we can't say with certainty, it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25663810
 
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Sloan Digital Sky Survey has a nice 3d viewer for looking at the mapped galaxies, including stars in our own galaxy. Its a humongous world out there - the observable universe. I wonder how common the complex molecular processes on earth, like cells, are across the universe.
 
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They are probably not rare but, as you have said, its a humongous world out there so we ("we" as you and me not "we" as humanity) will most likely never know.
 
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Ι can never quite get my head around the various validations of an infinite universe. I quite like a ship-on-the-ocean+horizon analogy I've come across but that simply suggests that what we can observe is limited by the age of the universe and its expansion but with that in mind any claims about anything beyond the "currently" observable universe seem weird.
 
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Dear Green Place
In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is a very entertaining read, one idea about the universe is that it curves in on itself (since it couldn't just end in a brick wall or something). So if you were to keep traveling to the outer edge of the universe, you'd end up back in the middle. Or something like that. Infinity is damn hard to grasp, as you said, Kostas.
 
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Isn't that the idea of a closed universe?
 
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Dear Green Place
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