Earth to Major Tom:

What would be the effect of giving space atmosphere? Perhaps man creates a bacteria that spreads verry fast and produce’s breathable oxygen and it starts to fill the vaccume of space, Now i understand this process would take A long ammount of time, but what would be the effect on the sun, blackhole, or any other spacial body?

Universe might collapse under its own gravity - too much mass?

actually that might be a good thing… from what i understand the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate… eventually… therell be thermal equilibrium ( all stars and such will go out) … anyhoo…oh wait uhh… extra air cant stop tthat… Damn cosmological constant ! :slight_smile: besides, i doubt we’ll still be here anyway…

So air in space would be a good thing? for the system.
But i think blackholes would be the problem like water in a sink with no stopped drain.

I have a hard time contemplating this one. Perhaps because there is not enough mass on earth to fill all the empty space out there. For this bacteria to produce bacteria, the O[size=59]2[/size] will have to come from somewhere. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Now that I put some thought into this as I was typing, I’d say nothing would happen. And when I say nothing, I mean absolutely nothing. If would make motion impossible. For something to move it has to go where everything is not. It has to go into empty space. So all the atoms in the universe would be packed so tightly together, that nothing would happen. It’d be Parmenides’ seamless, unchanging One.

hmmm all heavenly bodys motion would stop because if not for the bacteria but the oxygen would produce a resistance eventually halting all moving objects. it would be sorta like weightless water maybe.

Space is quite big. Maybe the planets/rocks are the equivalent of nitrogen/oxygen atoms in the air…or maybe its just a nonsensical idea. :laughing:

I think Dawkins description of the proportions of matter to empty space in our universe at the moment is something like a vacuum room 100 m wide, long and high (could be wrong on the proportions here, will have to look it up sometime to check). Put a single grain of sand into it and blow it to smithereens, scattering it about the room. That’s how much matter there is to space, so it could never happen. And of course the room is always getting bigger.

Talking hypothetically, if you could create matter out of nothing, our guest would be right, it would collapse very rapidly into a big crunch, but only if this hypothetical atmosphere could move faster than light. If it couldn’t I don’t think it would even have a chance of filling a miniscule proportion of the universe if the universe carried on expanding, doesn’t matter how much time you give it.

And as you are hinting at as soon as the expanding field started hitting a blackhole it would feed this at an exponential rate just speeding up the process of turning the entire galaxy into nothing more than a bunch of black holes as several sci-fi writers have predicted will the the final fate of the universe.

Though I must admit I’m not sure what you’re talking about stoic, I have no problem moving from here to there and there’s always atmosphere in the way.

A good thought. But regardless of whether the universe is finite or infinite, it would be impossible to fill it with air.

For starters, matter cannot be created nor destroyed. This means that the air would have to form from something else, i.e. exploding stars. However, there is just not enough mass to fill the volume.

Secondly, if that were to happen, you would find that it would be impossible to spread evenly throughout the universe. Each molecule of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc. has it’s own gravitational pull. Eventually, you will observe that the air you had previously dispersed equally has now formed into monumental clumps of condensed atoms, compressing under it’s own gravity and fusing together. So, you would be creating stars, in essense.

Lastly, trace gasses in space have very little effect on the larger bodies. A black hole will continuously pull in matter regardless of the quantity and matter caught in the gravity well of a star would merely burn up in the solar heat and radiation. There would be one major difference in space, though. People would be able to hear you scream. :slight_smile:

I know nobody really knows the answer to this but what happens to the matter in a black hole since it can not be destroyed?

Energy and mass is constant right and the universe is limitless

If you filled Space with gas(air), all that would necessarily happen, is the creation of infinetly more planets/suns. One of the reasons you don’t see a ton of gas clouds in space, is that they tend to get rid of themselves over time. They clump together and form stars.

There are some known gas clouds that expand millions of light years…Slowly but surely these gas clouds will dissapear, and in their place, will form stars and planets. It is interesting for us to be able to observe them, because it gives us some incite into how our own sun and solar system were created.

I haven’t read anything that gives a definitive explination for what happens to mass when it enters the singularity of a black hole…Although we do know a few things. It loses all volume, but has infinite density. And it doesn’t go to some alternative unvierse, or just “dissapear” or something, because black holes decay there mass over time…Which all but debunks the romantic idea of a worm hole.

We can NEVER know what happens to mass inside a singularity, but we can make rational guesses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of mathematical modal comes out in the future.