I mean, it's not my theory, I'm most certainly not an astrophysicist either, so it could well be a primordial one, sure. I think the documentary in which I saw it mentioned, and I couldn't tell you the name, they're my background noise, the idea that it was captured as opposed to native to our solar system.

At this point, the answer is "probably not".

There's been a bunch of math and predictions to indicate there might be, it's possible, but every time someone says they've figured out where it is, where it should be, it.... isn't.

At this point, it's hard to imagine missing anything significant, or at least, anything significant that reflects light, like a planet would.

A small, stellar black hole, however, could easily remain undetected directly while still showing up regularly and frustratingly in our math. Is it likely? No, not at all. But it's possible, and that's fun, the idea that we might have a black hole orbiting our sun beyond Neptune is a fun one.

I feel like you fundamentally misunderstand my point, which I should remind you isn't even my point but instead a generally accepted property of infinity. It's literally "an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters", this is the exact sort of thing that saying is about.

Nothing you've said is downright impossible, so straight up mathematically, as in "we can prove this with math" and not "this is a difference of equally credible opinions", that makes it eventual. Do the stars and shapes in the sky need to match? That's less probable, only, not impossible, so it STILL happens an infinite number of times. There are an infinite number of exactly-like-earth copies staring at an infinite number of identical-to-ours-skies because that's ONLY fantastically unlikely, not impossible, and given an infinite number of opportunities to happen, it will, according to the math, according to presently considered "proven" properties of infinity, happen an infinite number of times.

I am trying to be super clear here, we do not disagree, you are simply wrong. You can believe or not believe whatever you want, go nuts, but according to math, the people who study math, and the fundamental rules of probability (which is just math), this is how a genuinely infinite universe would work. None of this is opinion. These are the facts about infinity.

I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive or condescending here, but you're not arguing with me, you're arguing with the institution of "math", this is not what I say, this is what we find when we actually sit down to calculate how infinity works. I'm sorry, genuinely, but you're just wrong here.

Ok, well, I think you're wrong about a lot of that.

A recreation of just the solar system would do. What Andromeda is doing, or any other galaxies, or hell, most of the milky way, is kind of irrelevant to the Earth. Nothing happening in one of the other spiral arms is making a difference here.

And it has nothing to do with pi. That's... I don't know where you're getting that. Pi is for the geometry of circles.

It's dead simple. The odds of recreating the entire solar system is 1 / an unimaginably huge number. Whatever that unimaginably huge number is, it still fits into infinity an infinite number of times. In an infinite universe, therefor, you get an infinite number of identical solar systems, be they earth's or literally any (every) other solar system.

This isn't my idea or conclusion, either; this is a generally accepted consequence of infinity. In a truly infinite universe, every event, no matter how improbable, HAS TO happen an infinite number of times. They can be separated by great distances of space and time, but they do happen, they never stop happening, they're infinite too.

Getting lost in the symbolism or the examples is, forgive me, kind of pointless. They're only value is in helping illustrate, and any flaws in those metaphors is kind of irrelevant to flaws in the actual nature of infinity. Pi is just that, relative to this conversation, an example, a way to explain how infinity works, it's not at all relevant otherwise.

Alright, there's a bit to unpack here and I apologize if I explain something that doesn't need to be explained.

The digits of pie all repeat, and in fact, as near as we can tell, do so infinitely.
There are an infinite number of 9's in pie. There are an infinite number of 5's.

What they don't have is a pattern. And that's fine. No one said there had to be pattern. But any sequence of numbers, 123, 6845436, 666, whatever, will not only show up eventually, but if pie is truly infinite, will repeat an infinite number of times. Just not in a pattern.

And no one said it had to be a pattern, in fact, it would be weird if it was. Pie is not a pattern, but somewhere in there, or rather an infinite number of "somewhere's" in there, can be found every sequence of digits, of any length. I can rattle off a ten-thousand place number, it's in there, somewhere. Probably.

I'm not a mathematician, and pie might not follow the true rules of randomness that would otherwise govern something like this, so maybe there aren't a thousand 9's in a row in pie because of the rules of the equation from which it's derived, but there are definitely an infinite number of 9's.

You have to make a few assumptions to get to "yes". Not only is the universe infinite, but so too is the proliferation of matter, the density and variety, etc. Everywhere has to have had the same amount of "when" too, and who knows how that works or whether the universe exists as a static infinity or a growing one. Our sphere of observation would indicate the former, but we can't really say what fraction of the universe, if it's anything other than infinite, we might see.

But if all of that holds true, then no matter how unlikely this exact configuration of not only matter but also events is to reoccur, it does so an infinite number of times. No matter what the number is, the one in however many trillions of trillions chance of it happening, the opportunity to do so remains "infinity", and that's what the whole expression about monkeys and type-writers means.

It's not really something do we do well with, conceptually. Our brains don't really do "infinity", it was at no point a factor in our evolution and trying to imagine it is probably only something widely attempted over the last two hundred years, we're not equipped to do it. The math makes sense, but the imagination can't follow that road. I mean, unless you're Einstein or Newton or some shit, seems like they did exactly that sort of thing.

... you see I pointed that out twice, right?

You're kind of right. We live in the expanding cloud of the "explosion" (not an explosion) and everything we can see and measure is really just facets and manifestation of that explosion (not an explosion) that could be just as easily though of as "ripples" as anything else.

Now, whether we're expanding "into" anything, or across the surface of anything is anyone's guess. We don't really know what lies beyond / below the universe, whether there's some larger "structure" that hosts the multiverse or not. M-Theory says there is, but we haven't any experiments to verify M-Theory, at least, not yet.

I think it's really important to distinguish between "intelligent life" and just "life", because these are two vastly different questions.

Life is, I think, going to be everywhere. I think we'll find evidence of it on Mars, I think it might well be in the clouds of Venus (surprisingly good place for life to evolve, actually) and it's almost certainly below the ice on Europa, I'd bet a considerable sum on that. As for outside of the solar system,. then it's just math, we can be fairly certain there's life "somewhere", if not in the Milky Way, which is a lot of stars, then certainly in other galaxies, which represent orders of magnitude more stars.

But intelligent life? That might be really rare. Just look at how smart we are, compared to the next smartest creates (Corvids, dolphins, elephants, ants); it's not even close, their best tool is a stick and we have robots on Mars. We're so much smarter than anything else in nature.

Our intelligence is an aberration, and honestly represents as great a leap forward mentally as "wings" did for insects or "breathing air" did for fish / amphibians. It's a giant leap, and it might be statistically unlikely enough that we're alone in the Milky Way. It'd be silly to posit we're alone in the universe, no matter the odds, there's too many chances for something comparable to us not to exist somewhere else, but we might genuinely be alone in our galaxy, which as far as observation / communication / travel might as well be everything there is, we're never going to Andromeda, that's not going to be a thing.

Depends how you align them. Conventional wisdom says to add racing stripes first, then line any flaming decals up with them so that all the speed is focused in the same direction.

I mean, so would artificial wormholes, but we have no idea how to make those either.
Speculative, non-existent technology is not the answer to "why haven't we done this yet". The jury's out on whether or not there's any way to circumvent the speed of light, but if there is, we've no earthly idea how.

Wouldn't the Curvature engine as we currently understand it, the Alcubierre Drive require more energy than the output of the known universe?

Wonderfully thorough answer.

I decided to check some math, and yeah, our fastest ever spacecraft, rounding up, goes 700,000 kmh. At that speed, it would take 156,000 years to reach the nearest black hole.

I didn't even consider the transmission problem, but yeah, conventional communications are a non-option at a fraction of the distance.