SabastianRoth Oh no this isn’t an idea that any cosmologist would take seriously. The universe is huge. It takes light tens of billions of years to get from one side to another of the part we can see when we look at the most distant galaxies in all directions. Since nothing can travel as fast as light - then any kind of a signal along nerves say or whatever the giant space monster equivalent of nerves is would take tens of billions of years too to get from one side to the other. If it has a mouth as big as the universe then it takes tens of billions of years for a signal to pass from one side of its mouth to the other never mind to its brain.
Or much longer given that nerve signals don’t travel at the speed of light. Indeed our nerve signals travel at 1 to 200 miles per hour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
It would need nerves that pass signals far faster than that but assuming it’s significantly less than the speed of light it would be more like trillions of years for a signal to pass from one side of its mouth to another.
You get fun science fiction stories about a creature as big as a universe or even bigger, but it wouldn’t really work. If it was possible, you are talking about life on such a slow timescale that it takes trillions of years for a single blink or something 🙂.
Also anything that can contact our universe needs to have a shared space-time with it. There’s pretty good evidence now that it doesn’t have large extra dimensions at right angles to all the ones we know of (may have very small curled up dimensions). A few still work with the idea but the evidence is piling up against it.
So then to get to anything else you’d have to travel within the dimensions we know about - that’s tens of billions of light years far faster than the speed of light to get to the area outside the part we can see.
That is how they think of the multiverse - so far that - well we expect the region around our immediate universe to be the same laws of physics - and a bit beyond that then it’s expanding away from us faster than the speed of light.
So even if there was some very big very slow monster out here that could eat our universe with a very very slow gulp that takes countless trillions of years - well it’s moving away from us far faster than it can travel towards us through space-time.
So it doesn’t really make much sense in terms of the physics of our universe.
Also following on from what Honour said, there’s another way to look at it. Our universe has been around for 13 billion years, various ways to calculate + - a few billion years more likely more than 13 billion. In all that time no big monster has ever eaten our universe. And there’s nothing special about this period of a century or a thousand years and that’s 13 million millennia.
So just by the age of our universe we can see it’s extraordinarily unlikely to the point of not realisticc as a possibility that anything happens to it in our millenium. Unless we had something special about our millennium. That the universe gets especially tasty at exactly our millenium.
So that’s my space cows argument.
You are safe even from mythological space cows
Let’s make up a silly idea, that you think the universe could be eaten by a “space cow”.
. Spot the cow
(This is an in joke amongst physicists, see Spherical cow)
There is nothing special about our current millenium as regards the universe as a whole. Myriads of stars and planets are born from gas clouds every day; other stars are getting old; myriads of planets are orbiting stars; myriads of galaxies continue turning; the universe is much the same as it has been for billions of years. To someone scared of mythological space cows, you could say:
"No space cow has eaten our universe for 13 million millenia, and there is nothing special about our millenium. It’s not like the universe gets especially tasty for mythological space cows at 13 million millenia exactly. So even if it was theoretically possible,there is no realistic possibility of being eaten by a mythological space cow this millenium.
In this way we are safe from anything that could happen to the entire universe.
