> atoms have molecules has their parent etc. ... Surely our universe has to have a parent
Well... there's a limit to the scientific reach: when the scientists speak about "the Universe" they typically speak about "everything that is we can expect to reach using our instruments." Whatever is behind that is simply unreachable, and therefore out of the scope of the science.
But the good news is: what is reachable is immensely huge, and these far limits don't affect our lives directly, even if we can observe "what's there" (up to these limits).
In older times, some people thought that the movements of the planets, which are quite close to Earth compared to what we today can observe, affect our day-to-day life (and that was the idea behind "astrology"). Now we know it isn't so, they simply move because the gravity exits. We can observe much farther today: in the last 100 years we discovered that some of the points on the sky aren't stars but the galaxies: each point actually some billions of stars, much, much farther than the single stars we see! And we discovered that the farthest objects we can see are now some 46 billion light years from us, and that we actually see what there happened some 13 billion years ago -- not to mention that the we are actually made from the star dust (anything but our hydrogen atoms) and the rests of the "big bang" (the hydrogen atoms in our bodies)!
That's "the Universe" the scientists talk about. What's behind these limits can't predictably affect our own lives, as no signal "from this universe" can reach us faster than the speed of light: it takes 8 minutes for a light from Sun to reach us. Whatever produced some light that is 13 billion years old is now some 46 billion years away from us and changed through these 13 billion years. But we know that the "Universe" gets bigger so these objects we can never reach not even with the light from us to there, as they will continue to be even farther from us. So that's it. 46 billion light years in every direction.
Well... there's a limit to the scientific reach: when the scientists speak about "the Universe" they typically speak about "everything that is we can expect to reach using our instruments." Whatever is behind that is simply unreachable, and therefore out of the scope of the science.
But the good news is: what is reachable is immensely huge, and these far limits don't affect our lives directly, even if we can observe "what's there" (up to these limits).
In older times, some people thought that the movements of the planets, which are quite close to Earth compared to what we today can observe, affect our day-to-day life (and that was the idea behind "astrology"). Now we know it isn't so, they simply move because the gravity exits. We can observe much farther today: in the last 100 years we discovered that some of the points on the sky aren't stars but the galaxies: each point actually some billions of stars, much, much farther than the single stars we see! And we discovered that the farthest objects we can see are now some 46 billion light years from us, and that we actually see what there happened some 13 billion years ago -- not to mention that the we are actually made from the star dust (anything but our hydrogen atoms) and the rests of the "big bang" (the hydrogen atoms in our bodies)!
That's "the Universe" the scientists talk about. What's behind these limits can't predictably affect our own lives, as no signal "from this universe" can reach us faster than the speed of light: it takes 8 minutes for a light from Sun to reach us. Whatever produced some light that is 13 billion years old is now some 46 billion years away from us and changed through these 13 billion years. But we know that the "Universe" gets bigger so these objects we can never reach not even with the light from us to there, as they will continue to be even farther from us. So that's it. 46 billion light years in every direction.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-how-much-of-...
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-how-large-is...