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All of Existence Condensed to a Dot: Light or Dark?

If all of existence was viewed from so far away that it seemed a dot, would it be dark or light?

  • Dark

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • Light

    Votes: 3 60.0%

  • Total voters
    5

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Imagine all of creation as we know it, the whole universe with all its billions of galaxies containing billions of stars, and then imagine you viewed it from such a distance that it was the size of a single dot (think of a pixel not a marble). Now imagine you viewed that dot from a place beyond our own universe. What do you think that singular dot would look like? Would it be dark or light?
 
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ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
you seem to be describing the earliest moments of our universe. At that scale, everything would be plasma, hence 'light.'
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
you seem to be describing the earliest moments of our universe. At that scale, everything would be plasma, hence 'light.'

I'm not. Let's rephrase the question. Imagine the universe as it is, then imagine that you saw it from so far away that it was a singular dot. The universe is not condensed in this impossible hypthetical, your perception of it is.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
I'm not. Let's rephrase the question. Imagine the universe as it is, then imagine that you saw it from so far away that it was a singular dot. The universe is not condensed in this impossible hypthetical, your perception of it is.

Hmm...

A 'mainstream astrophysicist' would tell you the question is nonsensical because there would be no 'outside the universe,' and the perspective you seek would not be possible from within the universe. You could go to a really, really empty region - a 'void' - and look towards a galaxy cluster, but that would be partial.

A rarer breed of astrophysicist that subscribes to the more exotic and controversial aspects of 'string theory,' would say the other universe could exist, but 'seeing' from one to the other would be somewhere between 'extremely difficult' and 'impossible,' and even then you wouldn't get that kind of view.

That said, on another site, there is the occasional bit of speculation as to what conditions in other universes may be like - substituting quarks for electrons, for example, would make for some really exotic types of matter, or tweaking other atomic principles that would prohibit the formation of complex atoms (a universe where the periodic table stopped at say, element 20 or whatever.)
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
Well...if it was so small, it would have to look like a light or it could not been seen at all. Since the further away one gets, the more the light is diffused, it might matter how far away one was to answer the question.

But, anything next to infinity is indistinguishable from zero. So, if I got far enough away, it would be zero...including light.
 
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Well so the light from our universe would not have traveled that distance yet, so one might think the dot would be dark.

Then again, how is the viewer viewing it if light hasn't traveled that far? (Incidentally, there's a reason the night sky doesn't appear to be a total field of light.)

Is the background dark or light, heh?

I think it's a rather nonsensical question. For me, it's like a Tarot card. What do I see, looking at this question from a distance? My very first thought was that the Universe is far more dark than light—because nonsense has never stopped my mind from working.
 
Well, it would depend on the angle from which you're looking at the universe. See, matter and especially matter radiating light isn't spread evenly throughout the universe (why this is is actually still one of the bigger unanswered questions in astrophysics...). Galaxies form in clusters which in turn form clusters of clusters. As a result, there's dark spots and light spots. So if you are holding the universe in the palm of your hand and you rotate it, it would twinkle, depending on if you're looking at a dark or a light spot.
 
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