Unveiling the Universe: Is Everything Alive?

Earth a node in space that is coming to life these are The Satellites we've launched into orbit around ourselves in order to communicate faster explore the universe and study our planet among other things our little living planet is spinning at one thousand miles per hour and traveling around the Sun at close to 70 000 miles per hour the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is estimated to contain between one and two million large asteroids and many smaller ones further out we will see objects in the Kuiper belt there could be trillions of comets within the Kuiper belt many are larger than 60 miles in diameter these comets move about the solar system causing Havoc at times as you can see the solar system is a large dynamic system it is alive with motion with that said have you ever considered which way or in what direction the solar system is moving through the Galaxy most of us think of it as a static system we understand that planets revolve around the Sun but beyond that we don't really discuss its movement as a whole the solar system is traveling around the Milky Way galaxy on a 60 degree angle between the galactic plain and the planetary orbital plane let's look at its side profile and you can see the Milky Way disc in the background the entire solar system is moving around the Galaxy in a clockwise motion at about 500 000 miles per hour and it is doing so at about 60 degrees from the galactic plane as seen here let's zoom out so you can get an idea of its positioning in the galaxy let's Zoom back in so again Galactic plane planetary plane at 60 degrees additionally we actually Bob above and below this Galactic plane over the course of about 60 to 70 million years right now we are a bit above the galactic plane and we are heading up and in 15 million years or so we will start to head back down with all this in mind it's moving in a way that I never really thought about until I saw a video on it from DJ sadhu credit to him for this clip his link is in the description while this is not to scale it gives you a good understanding of the movement the sun is cruising around the Galaxy as the planets rotate around the sun the planets and Sun are on the same plane so they are not being dragged behind the Sun or forming any type of wake or Vortex but with that said this is still a great depiction of the Solar System's movement around the Galaxy the solar system itself is wrapped up in a giant protective bubble called the heliosphere it helps Shield us from dangerous incoming Galactic radiation and our solar system actually has a tail this Helio tail is made out of solar wind plasma and magnetic fields while not depicted perfectly here it does stream out from the Sun in all directions while some believe it is more like a comet with a tail there are other models of our protective bubble but the heliosphere is not the end of the sun's influence beyond the heliosphere there are more objects under the gravitational influence of our sun the theoretical orc cloud is an immense spherical clouds surrounding the planetary system and extending approximately one light year from the Sun it is one or two thousand times bigger than the orbit of Neptune moving out we can see that the entire solar system is moving through an interstellar medium of very low density hydrogen gas more specifically we are moving through the local Interstellar cloud Alpha Centauri and Sirius are also pictured here the entire cloud is about 30 light years in length and its movement is indicated by the blue arrows as we move out we see our local Interstellar neighborhood it's approximately 50 light years across and contains about 1 000 star systems many of these Stars also have their own family of planets orbiting them we are orbiting the Galaxy at 137 miles per second most other stars are also orbiting the Galaxy at roughly the same speed but the Stars around us are also moving randomly relative to one another so that means that the distances between the Stars around us are not fixed and they pass by one another from time to time the position of stars in the sky appears fixed to us on small time scales but they are moving and interacting it's a dynamic and ever-changing system about every fifty thousand years a star will pass near our solar system that may not sound very frequent but over the time that light has been on this planet eighty thousand wandering stars have passed near our solar system it was recently discovered that a small binary star system shows a star passed through the Oort cloud about 70 000 years ago it would have looked much bigger than a normal star in the night sky could these Close Encounters provide a chance to visit other star systems and planets could these Close Encounters have enabled various life forms to spread across the Galaxy more easily with all this in mind we are doing this dance around the Milky Way galaxy with some 300 billion other star systems each of them containing their own planets we are not just in our own little isolated bubble we are connected to the solar system local star groups and the Milky Way like little atoms speeding around the Galaxy Center are we part of a larger more complex entity let's continue our journey if we Zoom way out from our Interstellar neighborhood of 50 light years across to about 1 000 light years across we can see what's known as the local bubble this area which keep in mind has about 7 million other stars cruising around in it is called the local bubble because it doesn't contain a lot of gas and dust this bubble was created by a series of supernovas 14 million years ago a supernova occurs when a massive star dies when it dies it explodes and pushes out gas and debris in all directions leaving behind a supernova remnant at the edge of the bubble created by the Supernova gas and dust fall in on itself due to gravity and new stars are born this bubble isn't specific to us we just happen to fly into it about 5 million years ago there are likely hundreds of thousands of these explosion creation bubbles spread out in the spiral arms of the Milky Way bouncing into each other and interacting in fascinating ways like these newborn Stars our solar system formed with thousands of other stars and giant clouds of gas and dust thousands of new stars are born out of the death of old ones stars reproduce by exploding evolve through stellar nebula and metabolize using Fusion it's the circle of life a very different kind of life the Stars not only gave birth to other stars they also gave birth to planets which in turn gave birth to you allow me to expand on that during the early days of the universe the only elements around were hydrogen and helium when enough of these elements coalesce together under the force of gravity the first stars were formed from those early Stars heavier elements like iron were created and then spread throughout the cosmos when new stars were forming out of these elements planets like ours with iron at their core were possible so I'm not exaggerating when I say that other stars gave birth to our sun and our planet let's zoom out and look at the Milky Way as a whole at the center is a supermassive black hole Sagittarius say with a mass equal to 4 million of our sons when the black hole at the center of the Galaxy occasionally eats up a star some of the star's matter gets shot out in jets that are nearly as fast as the speed of light this superheated material hits clouds of hydrogen creating a series of expanding bubbles known as Fermi bubbles needless to say many things about the center of the Galaxy remain a mystery around the black hole is the Ten Thousand light year wide the lactic bulge full of gas dust and the mass of about 10 billion stars these stars are mostly old red giants from the early days of our Galaxy's evolution the galactic disc which is approximately 1 000 light years thick extends from this Center to about 100 000 light years across as you can imagine it is difficult to see the entire structure of our galaxy from within currently we believe there are four spiral arms but the nature of the Spiral arms is still debated we don't know if they are stable or if they dissipate and reform over time Stars gas and dust are more tightly packed in the arms which leads to Star formation as mentioned earlier the Stars within the Galaxy generally move at the same speed as each other with some variance if we look at the movement of almost 75 000 nearby stars in this three perspective video we can see that over millions of years All of the Stars mixed throughout the Galaxy most of the stars have a disc like orbit like our sun they stay close to the galactic plane and form long strips that eventually twist themselves around the Galaxy keep in mind that this is just a sample of 75 000 Stars extrapolate this across the entire galaxy and you can imagine how Dynamic and vibrant it is there are a large number of stars orbiting beyond the outer edges of this disc forming the galactic Halo some of the stars in the Halo are the result of collisions from other galaxies this is a video of the movement of 40 000 Stars over the next 1.6 million years the entire galaxy is swarming with stars in every direction the Milky Way is much more active and complex than previously imagined data from Gaia an Esa Observatory Mission has also found Stars traveling through the Milky Way at very high speeds these stars are coming from separate more distant galaxies one last thing about the Milky Way we know that gas is blown out of the galactic disc by supernovas and Stellar winds and that gas falls back into the Galaxy to form new generations of stars in a kind of recycling process but how do all of these pieces fit together what exactly is going on here well we don't know we only discovered its existence 400 years ago the Galaxy is not isolated either it is constantly absorbing interstellar clouds and dwarf galaxies these collisions Infuse the Galaxy with new material generate more star formation and affect how the Galaxy evolves the Galaxy itself likely formed from the Collision of many smaller dwarf galaxies recently Gaia found a family of thirty thousand interspersed stars moving through the Galaxy because their motion is separate from the rest of the Milky Way It is believed that our galaxy collided with a smaller dwarf Galaxy some 10 billion years ago and these are the remnants of that Collision the Sagittarius dwarf Galaxy a small nearby galaxy has collided with the Milky Way at least three times these collisions are still happening today there are several other dwarf galaxies around us that we will merge with in the future the entire Galactic disc is a busy active place its satellite galaxies are constantly interacting with it creating movement tension and shaping the Galaxy the Galaxy is obviously alive with motion it may not be alive in a biological sense like us but it is certainly going through a process of birth growth change Evolution and death it is alive in a way that is foreign to us this begs the question have we too narrowly defined what being alive means based on our humanistic biases to me the behavior of the Galaxy challenges the very idea and definition of what being alive means what is it doing as a whole unit how will we see the Galaxy in a couple hundred years as some type of super organism that goes through its own type of evolution we could be like the cells of the Galaxy or galaxies themselves could be the cells of a larger organism it is difficult to see the big picture from within does a cell know that it is inside of a larger entity these intelligent cells interact with their surroundings and live their own lives but they never realize that the whole thing is alive it doesn't understand all of the interrelated processes that allow its Universe to function there is an intelligence embodied in the human body but this intelligence doesn't understand the intelligence at a higher level because it is so wildly different from it we are like a cell or bacteria in this way we are inside of this entity trying to look outside of itself we can't determine if it is alive from our perspective we would have to be outside of it to determine what's really going on our perspective is just a small and limited perspective of the whole life forms see different things at different levels and amoeba sees this and we see this and something of a higher order sees more of the whole there are different abilities and access levels for different species can we truly understand something that we are in it could very well be beyond our brain's ability to grasp we don't really understand it so how can we assume whether it is alive or not all we can do is try to explain its movement and behavior but beyond that we don't really know what's going on more on that later let's expand out to the local group here you will see that we are surrounded by other galaxies each of us pulling on each other in about 4 billion years we will collide with the largest massive Galaxy in our Cosmic backyard Andromeda the Andromeda galaxy which is 2.5 million light years away is currently speeding toward us at over 670 000 miles per hour as it gets closer our night sky will change drastically galaxies are not the static systems we once believed them to be they are a moving breathing system galaxies themselves are bound together as part of even grander structures this is the Virgo supercluster made up of about 20 000 galaxies the Virgo supercluster is only a lobe of an even greater supercluster laniakea made up of one hundred thousand galaxies each with hundreds of billions of their own star systems and planets this is laniakea our home supercluster that red dot is the Milky Way galaxy the large feather structure is about one hundred thousand galaxies bound together by Mutual gravity the lines represent Cosmic flows the path galaxies migrate alone we are heading in the direction of a very dense region in space called the Great attractor here is a neighboring structure called persist Pisces in red together with laniakea they form the Pisces cetus supercluster complex a Galaxy filament there are an estimated 5 to 10 million other supercluster complexes similar to this that exist in the observable universe these Galaxy filaments consist of walls of gravitationally bound Galaxy superclusters these walls and voids form web-like structures throughout the Universe it was also recently discovered that some of the filaments that make up the cosmic web are spinning the filaments are like giant tubes made up of millions of galaxies and some of these tubes are rotating what is really going on here well once again we don't know our understanding of the universe is a moving Target and we are still in the very early days of our scientific Journey this Cosmic web is from the Millennium simulation project each yellow dot is a Galaxy the purple streams represent dark matter why does this Cosmic web resemble a brain why do the patterns in nature seem to repeat themselves at varying levels could it be that it's all a part of the same process all part of the same living entity what exactly does it mean to be alive we have some very specific ideas about what being alive means but are they accurate the definition of life is something along the lines of it can maintain itself grow self-organize reproduce and respond to stimuli but there is no universally accepted scientific definition of life the boundary between living and non-living always seems to be expanding outwards we used to think that we were the only intelligent living things this was a consequence of our human biases and limited understanding of the world as we learn more about the complexity of nature we expanded our understanding of life and intelligence from ourselves to animals we equated being alive and intelligent to things that are similar to us we assume that only things that behave like us and think like us and have brains like us are intelligent but the more we learn about the Deep inner workings of nature the more we realize that the things that are not similar to us like insects plants cells and bacteria are in fact alive we are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we consider alive and intelligent now we are asking if viruses and his spores and Maze solving slime molds are somehow intelligent and alive we see that swarms self-organizing Collective systems have a type of intelligence that we do not fully understand we question whether systems such as networks of trees and ecosystems have a type of intelligence we have yet to fully recognize they don't have a brain like us but there is certainly some type of intelligence there we are beginning to see that our definitions of life and intelligence are quite limited and heavily biased why has it been so hard to pin down where Life Starts and where it ends it's because we've made some fundamental errors along the way our first mistake was to assume that there is a line between living and non-living things everything in nature is made from the same stuff atoms there's actually no real separation between dead and alive only a line drawn in the sand based on our humanistic concepts of what it means to be alive based on certain behaviors and characteristics the only difference between dead stuff and Alive stuff is a definitional one a categorical one I think a better way to frame things is to look at it as Schrodinger did Schrodinger declared to think of living organisms in terms of their molecular and atomic structure there was no Great Divide between the living and non-living they all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry the line itself really isn't the main issue it's fine to have a distinction between things that behave differently and definitions based on those behaviors the problem is that we forget that it's just a definition that it's just a concept the real problem is the deep meaning we've given to that line that dead matter gives rise to life we said this point this right here is where life begins but there is a major problem with this life isn't some well-defined property that materials possess there's no discrete identifiable something that living matter has and non-living matter doesn't have it's all the same stuff a carbon atom in your body is no different from a carbon atom in Iraq again the distinction between life and non-life is a categorical one it is just a way of slicing up the world but there isn't any slicing up in nature and in the universe we just slice it up with our minds we haven't always seen the world as we do today as a mechanistic material world made up of separate objects most of which are typically dead dumb matter the mystics sages and Greek philosophers saw the world as a whole universal life force alive a Soul and Spirit they saw that the world and Sky were in a state of constant transformation it was alive with motion Plato believed that the universe is a single living creature that contains all living creatures within it the Ancients understood that all is deeply connected and interwoven all is part of a harmonious whole including ourselves the way we see the world today is really a result of the Scientific Revolution Galileo's quantitative science of the physical world combined with Newton's Clockwork Mechanical Universe helped to create a split between mind and matter we no longer saw the world as a single harmonious whole under this new set of ideas matter itself was considered inert lifeless and meaningless it was stripped of its intrinsic nature and reduced to Its Behavior and movement the world was seen as a dead Clockwork mechanism that was set in motion According to some eternal Forces or laws the Mind matter split which began 400 years ago with the Scientific Revolution has led us down a road of isolation and separateness from nature and the universe now I'm not denying science is obviously very useful and has allowed us to manipulate the world in amazing ways it's been extremely successful which is why it's such a dominant worldview today it's shaped our modern world and enabled us to make amazing discoveries and will continue to do so but what have been the consequences of looking at the world in this way as separate dead parts this worldview has created a deep dualism between man and nature we see ourselves as separate from the world out there we see nature as something that is at our disposal we have lost that deep connection and Cooperative spirit with nature which has led us to feel alienated from the universe the truth is there are no separations in the world or in nature or in the universe except for the ones we create in our mind it is all one universal process that we are a part of calling it alive or dead doesn't really mean anything it's really none of these it's the universe we need to think of it not as simply alive or dead but an ongoing process that we are still deeply ignorant about the universe and the nature of it is much more complicated than we currently understand we're just beginning to understand this unified process of immense complexity as we keep learning about the shortfalls of our models how incomplete biased and limited they are the more we will understand that the universe is not only a dynamic system that we are deeply integrated with but the whole thing could be aware and intelligent in its own way possibly of a higher degree which would make it very difficult for us to see that it is aware from our tiny perspective as we are now learning things don't need to think as we think to be considered intelligent and aware systems themselves seem to have some type of intelligence how are the Galaxy and universe any different we can no longer justify seeing the world through the current lens we can no longer view ourselves as separate independent beings surrounded by a dead universe what would it be like to remove that line we've drawn in the sand and view ourselves as active participants of a larger more complex system we should attempt to see feel and understand our deep interconnectedness with all that is around us we should see ourselves as we really are as part of the universe integrated with it and connected to it in a unitive process seeing the planet and universe as part of us leads to other priorities it would assist us in creatively participating and cultivating the natural world we need to actively cooperate and learn from this organic sustainable system we live in if we want to flourish let's start by becoming more aware of our interconnectedness with nature I understand that we all feel very independent from the world around us we feel very much like separate beings in a hostile environment I get that too but this is just a trick of the Mind you the real you is much bigger than your human form it is much bigger than your human mind why do we feel so separate I will get into that in the next video thanks for watching foreign

Channel: Wisdom for Life

Views: 559,265

Keywords: universe, space, consciousness, panpsychism, cosmology, philosophy, space documentary, paradigm shift, nature of reality, cosmic consciousness, is universe alive, universe is aware, milky way galaxy, solar system

Id: lDk-9zZ_NQQ

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023