Huge Invisible

Story by Indref on SoFurry

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An alien gives a talk on science.


Huge. Invisible.

The Neutrino Rain - Particles interact in different ways. Light bounces around rapidly, protons and neutrons stick and sloth around, and neutrinos wizz passed everything. They are produced in enormous amounts, by the depths of the Earth, and Sol, and many other processes. If you could see them, you would not be able to see anything else: just a buzzing hail filling the world.

The Multiverse Kalidoscope - At the quantum level, particals interact. Nothing is flatly there, or anywhere. An no quanta fully takes on any one state. Reality is reduced to a series of probable truths. If two or more realities are equally possible, the universe splits. Everything that can happen, does happen. You only see any one reality at a time, as a 'multiverse' dances and shimmers around you.

The Human Wave - Over time, people eat, drink and breathe. They also pass waste, sweat and shed. Slowly, every last atom in your body is replaced. After a year, not one orginal atom is left. The person you one were is entirely gone. You are not an object, you are a wave, in an ocean of stuff.

The Dead Sky - Light takes time to travel the distances between astronomical objects, like planets and stars. If Sol were to explode, we would see it eight minutes afterwards: it would take that long for the light from the catastrophe to reach Earth. The stars in the sky are, for the most part, so far away that by the time their light reaches us, they are long cold and dead. The night sky is full of ghosts, visions of stars since deceased.

The Big Plume - The Big Bang, while not entirely understood, can be summerised as a scientific theory explaining the movement of all distant stars, flying away from each other: the universe began as a tremendous explosion that blew everything in every direction. The explosion was so immense, that we bath in its afterglow: turn on an old tv, watch the grey static. That is caused, in part, by interference from cosmic rays: the left over energy from the big bang, which detonated 13 billions years ago.

The Milky Smash - The Milky Way, our galaxy, is currently in the middle of smashing into another galaxy, The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, which is tiny in comparson to our own spiralling home. Andromeda, a galaxy slightly bigger than ours, is careening towards us, and will begin colliding in 5 billion years. The Milky Suck - The center of our galaxy contains a super-massive black hole, so monstrously powerful, it is theoriesed that it may eventually claim the entire Milky Way. If this were to finally happen, it would do so steadily over trillions of years. The Milky Black - 80% of all matter in the Milky Way is unaccounted for. Like a man spinning around with a bag of hammers, we can see the effects of enormous weight/mass/gravity keeping our galaxy from flying apart. Beyond this solid and undeniable evidence, there is no further hint at what this 'dark matter' is.

The Exploding Neighbour - Sol, the warm, bright object in the sky, seems steady and benign. In reality, it is a ball of gas so large: if Earth were the size of a baseball, Sol would be 27 feet across: a squarish building three stories tall. Its immense size causes the gass-atoms at the very center to be crushed into each other, literally, forcing them to fuse, and erupt, constantly. The warm rays you feel on a sunny day is, in reality, the radiation from a gargantuan, five billion year long atomic-bomb-explosion.