Oh Carl...your "billions and billions" was off by a wee bit.

[davidmash]

Current estimated run in the several trillions of galaxies that exist. I find it hard to wrap my head around the number much less the the size of the universe to accommodate all of them. I wonder how many other places have someone staring up in the universe wondering who else is out there.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/galaxies-in-universe/

If you take the deepest image ever created of the distant Universe, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, and extrapolate over the whole sky, you'd estimate there were ~170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. A detailed theoretical simulation predicted far more faint, small galaxies than we've seen, upping the expected total to closer to 2 trillion. But recent observational evidence shows that even that estimate is far too low. Instead, there are between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies out there. Carl Sagan's "billions and billions" was far too low of a guess.

[barry12345]

Math has estimated for a long time. That there is other life out there somewhere. Or has been or will be. Human existence on this planet will be little more than a blink in time compared to the age of the universe.

[cmac2012]

I am going to cut Carl a break on this one. I imagine if he had said “trillions and trillions” back when, people would have rolled their eyes. He was pretty sure there was a whole bunch of them.

[pj67coll]

Originally Posted by cmac2012

I am going to cut Carl a break on this one. I imagine if he had said “trillions and trillions” back when, people would have rolled their eyes. He was pretty sure there was a whole bunch of them.

Slightly pedantic I know, but In his book "Billions and Billions" Sagan claimed that he never actually said that in Cosmos. However I'm pretty sure that I heard him say "Trillions and Trillions" referring to stars. It could be false memory on my part but as I have the series on DVD one of these days I'm going to watch the entire thing from start to finish again just to find out the truth.

- Peter.

[davidmash]

Never intended as a slight against Mr Sagan......just an example of how science advances and expands our knowledge every day.

[pj67coll]

Yes, I get that. Just could't resist the comment on the phrase and the "mystery" surrounding it.

- Peter.