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In reply to the discussion: UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,862 posts)the Big Bang. And the Big Bang is widely accepted, to say the least. It is what does make sense, even though astrophysicists acknowledge they haven't a clue what might have come before, or how every single bit of matter in the Universe was somehow originally contained in a very, very small space.
When I do a google search for number of stars in Milky Way I don't come across the numbers you are quoting.
And just because you have some kind of gut feeling that the speed of light isn't a basal number, well your feeling just doesn't jibe with what's known.
You might want to read up on how it is we know the age of the Universe. It has to do with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is left over from the Big Bang. It took a while for the CMBR to be accepted for what it was, rather than, for instance, scattered starlight from distant galaxies. And it is exactly that CMBR that proves the Big Bang and also shows that the Universe is going to expand essentially forever, not recollapse or even reach some sort of equilibrium where it stops expanding but doesn't collapse.
Here's an interesting factoid: Right now, some 13.6 billion years after the Big Bang, it is still possible to find proof of the it, mainly the CMBR is still detectable. Some many billions of years in the future, all of the galaxies in our local group will have merged and have become one extremely large galaxy. By that time, every other galaxy in this expanding universe will have gotten so far away that their light will no longer reach of. So astronomers and astrophysicists in that distant future will have no way whatsoever of figuring out that there is anything else out there besides our giant galaxy, and will also have no way of determining the age of the universe, since the CMBR will no longer be detectable. We are living in a rather fortuitous point in time.
The expanding universe does not need a continued input of energy. If you think that, then you are falsely inferring from an internal combustion energy model, or something like that.
The possibility of multi-universes is reasonable. It's unlikely that we will ever be able to demonstrate it, however.