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Asked by infintaneousdeath to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 12 Nov 2013.
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Kristian Harder answered on 12 Nov 2013:
Yes.
Actually, one thing that goes into the direction your are asking about is that we are wondering whether the laws of nature and also the constants involved are really the same everywhere (and don’t change in time). They don’t seem to change here, so we kind of naturally assume they are constant, but we don’t really know. And because we don’t really know, we do our best to find out, as usual. For example, if the strength of electromagnetic interaction would be different elsewhere in the universe, you would be able to see the difference even over incredibly long distances. The typical spectral lines of atoms would then be different. As far as we can tell, this is not the case: atoms seem to have the same spectrum wherever we look. But we’ll keep looking with ever better instruments.
Overall, on a grand scale the universe looks pretty much the same everywhere, so there may not be much point in looking elsewhere, but
a) maybe there is more than we can see, and
b) there are definitely places in the universe that are very very different
from what we see “on a grand scale”. For example, it would really be
interesting to peek into a black hole. Except that we can’t. Or to have a
look beyond the edge of the visible universe. Except that we can’t.
Or not even looking elsewhere, but looking at other times. It would
save us *a lot* of work if we could look at the Big Bang directly rather
than just trying to figure out indirectly what happened there.
Or even *before* the Big Bang, if there was a “before” at all!
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Tim Hollowood answered on 12 Nov 2013:
It’s an interesting way you put the question: “incredibly useful”. I would say that there would be useful things out there for humanity in terms of natural resources given the limited ones on earth. There will be sources of energy to harvest if we knew how to do it. There is a super giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy which would be incredible useful to look up close (but not too close). But it’s so far away we have to make do with our telescopes which are
getting better and better. Actually it’s amazing what we can do sitting on our sofas on earth. -
Joel Goldstein answered on 13 Nov 2013:
Things don’t have to be incredibly far away to be inaccessible. We only have the vaguest knowledge of what is a few kilometres below our feet, and we have no way of accessing the huge amounts of minerals, metals and energy that are there.
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Zachary Williamson answered on 13 Nov 2013:
Yes. The universe is a vast, vast place and we only get to see a fraction of it, and experiment on but a fraction of that fraction. To give an example, there are cosmic objects called quasars located *billions* of light years away from our planet. They’re produced by planets and other stellar material falling into enormous black holes located at the center of galaxies. The amount of energy and radiation given off by these things is overwhelming: many, many orders of magnitude larger than the energies our Earth-based particle accelerators can reach.
To be able to travel out there and build an experiment near one of these things would be…very nice. We’d learn an enormous amount about the nature of our universe.
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