“The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
You have left it vague what exactly puzzles you so about what we now know about the Universe.
Yes, the average distance between the galaxies is quite immense, in comparison to what we are used to. If you think the galaxies themselves are particularly dwarfed by that average span, you are mistaken. Our has a diameter of 100,000 light years. Look up the distance to the nearest large one, Andromeda. I grew up with the figure of 2.2 million LY. ISTR that the last time I looked it up the estimate was a bit higher, but it does not affect my point. Several dwarf galaxies are much closer.
Asimov once compared the separation to molecules in a gas.
If you want to consider something really spacious, consider the comparison of star-suns with their average spacing (out here in the “suburbs” of the Galactic * spiral arms). Alpha Centauri A is something like half again the diameter of our sun, Sol. Let’s ignore that and just consider the distance to it, also ignoring Alpha Centauri B, Proxima Centauri, and of course the planets of our system.
We have a ratio of about 25 MILLION to 1 from the distance between the two bodies and the average diameters of the two. Or about 50 million times the average of the two radii. The volume comparison of a sphere centered on Sol and landing on Alpha would be something like 125,000 times a million million million! (We could substitute a billion times a billion for the second part of that.)
This is very far away from the separation of molecules in even a rather rarefied gas.
It is even more extreme than that because 4 out of 5 stars (in the spiral arms) are either orange dwarfs, red dwarfs or very “tiny” white dwarfs. Red dwarfs tend to be about a third of Sol diameter, with orange presumably intermediate.
(This may seem wrong to those of you who have heard that the sun is an “average” star. Now, that all depends on how you are setting up the statistics for evaluating what is “average”. “Average” is sometimes meant to be close to median or even mid-range. I’m sure the three are precisely the same-- on any perfect bell-shaped curve.
Now many things work out close to such an ideal, but many other things are quite skewed one way or another. You can check the stats for yourself, but I have double checked that only one in five are as wide as ours or wider.
At the same time a star must be at least a fifth of Sol’s mass, and very few stars are more that 5 times as massive. Again, if you look at a sampling or luminosity on a logarithmic scale, the dimmest red dwarfs are about 10 magnitudes further down the list (with higher numbers, BTW) while very few stars are more than about 12 magnitudes higher up (with lower numbers).
If this is still confusing, consider an analogy. We as humans are much smaller than a Great While Whale, while much larger than the smallest visible life form. From that point of view we are rather close to the center of the range. Yet, if you were to write down all animals larger tan us, it could fit on a single page. Whole volumes would be needed for the smaller.)
Getting back:
I try to avoid overthinking things that puzzle me, but are well established bit of scientific knowledge. I do however find it hard to get my mind around stars condensing out of the interstellar medium, as opposed to galaxies from the intergalactic medium.
Not for me…
/Christopher Reeve voice
- (Upper case) Galaxy and galactic refers to our own little pinwheel, as for example loose “open” clusters of stars within. For clusters of galaxies (lower case) we use “galaxian”.
I would just like to take this time to thank the supernovae for achieving the fathomable and sending elements across what, to some, were unfathomable distances, so that I could look back and ponder this: “I suppose that isn’t very unfathomable that the supernova happened, and that elements were strewn as far as they were, because as I am here to ponder it, thanks to it happening.”
Besides, “INCONCEIVABLE” is more fun to use when you’re mind is blown. 
Wow, Fifteen posts into this thread before someone quotes Adams’ words of wisdom on the subject. This message board is slipping.
My theory is that it’s happened more than once, by the way…
Don’t make me go all Inigo Montoya on you…
And frankly, the entire process of doing so almost certainly generates more than a pound of earth-bound garbage in the process, so even with arbitrary amounts of money to spend, it would still be pointless.
nm
It’s the same thing with energy and water. Neither one is a problem when money isn’t involved. Everything comes down to the almighty dollar bill. We have the technology but it’s to expensive. Good thing that is slowly changing
There are a million religions on this planet but never forget that the dollar bill is the god on this planet.
Glad to be of service!
Money is nothing more than an exchange medium. Saying it’s expensive to, say, launch objects into space is another way of saying it takes a great deal of energy, resources and human expertise (experts who are not going to work for peanuts) to get it up there.
Of course these factors are crucial when it comes to assessing whether something is worthwhile, or even feasible.
Would you pay a million dollars for a glass of water? Yeah, if you were dying of thirst and some asshole had the only glass of water, and you actually had a million dollars, blah blah blah.
But in real life, when people complain about water they’re talking about water to be used for some purpose. Like, they want water for their farm. And why do they want water for the farm? To grow crops. And then they will sell those crops at a profit.
So yes, they could head to Costco and get cases of bottled water and pour it all on their almond trees. Except they’d never be able to sell the almonds for more than the cost of the water. So they don’t need just water, they need water at a certain low price, otherwise they can’t make a profit on their farm. So if you get free water from the mountains you can make a lot of money growing almonds. If you need expensive water from a desalinization plant you’ll go bankrupt.
So complaining that it’s all a matter of money misses the point. Nobody is complaining about the price of water for thirsty people to drink. That’s a few cents. But a few cents a gallon for water adds up when you’re pouring millions of gallons onto your fields.
When you look up at the stars - just remember that you are seeing light that took thousands of years to get here. Some of those light sources have probably ceased to exist by the time we see them with a telescope.
As an aside; on the BBC a couple of nights ago, they were discussing binary stars (there was a nationwide exercise for people to spot them in the data) and it was mentioned that because they all “twinkle” at different rates, and those rates are known, they have solved the old SF problem of navigating in deep space.
And how did we go 32 posts without somebody posting the obligatory
Monty Python song?
Which doesn’t work, because the light you’re seeing is thousands of years old. In that time, a variable star’s period could change, or even stop varying at all. There are ways to find your position, but that’s not one of them.
Yes but how far down?
Twenty minutes.
Surely, you can’t be Sirius
If by ‘twinkle’ you mean occlusion of a doublet due to a transit, that is hardly the case. The stars that we see transits of would likely not show as transits from another position. Detailed observation may still give a characteristic period that can be seen in the motion of the star but that is much more difficult to see. Interstellar navigation across long distances would likely rely on observing pulsars and possible magnetic field patterns, although depending on the distance and time travelled these may vary significantly. This isn’t really a problem we need to worry about for the near future, though; we lack the ability to send objects beyond the Kuiper belt for the foreseeable future, and barring some revolutionary advance in propulsion technology we won’t travel far enough to need anything but the planetary ephemerides for detail positioning in interplanetary space though it would be advantageous to have a solar orbiting constellation of navigation and communications relay satellites analogous to the GPS and TDRSS systems we use for territorial and LEO navigation and communications.
Stranger
Puny human brains: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Consciousness
You really should learn to avoid Frogstar World B (my hometown).