Speech Project # 7 (Research Your Topic): "The Expanding Universe"

“The Expanding Universe”

A Speech Project for the Silver and White Toastmasters Club

Prepared and Delivered by Edwin D. Vinas

August 09, 2006

1.01A San Carlos

6:00 – 8:30PM

THE OBJECTIVE OF THE SPEECH (“RESEARCH YOUR TOPIC”):

• To collect information about your chosen topic from a variety of sources, and to support your points and opinions with specific facts, examples and illustrations.

WHAT MY AUDIENCE WOULD SAY AT THE END OF THE SPEECH:

• The speaker has enlightened us by saying that the universe is expanding!
• The speaker has shared his idea that 50 years from now, we will already live on other planets.
• The speaker has said that the reason why there is war on Earth is because of the wrong notion that we should battle with each other to have territories. Humans must stop from being territorial mammals to stop wars and crimes.
• The speaker has said that the universe is expanding and there is plenty of space for all of us, thereby, making it true that the biblical word from God that we can multiply ourselves as many as possible. The universe is so vast that we can have one planet each!
• The speaker has enlightened us on where we are really at in terms of human history and universe timeline.
• The speaker has envisioned an interplanetary civilization and that made us realize that this is not the end of the world! In fact, we are just on the beginning of the galactic civilization!
• The speaker has shared his research that supported his speech with facts, illustrations and explanations.

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“The Expanding Universe”

A Speech Project for the Silver and White Toastmasters Club

For the fulfillment of CTM Speech Project# 7 “Research Your Topic”

Prepared and Delivered by Edwin D. Vinas

August 09, 2006

1.01A San Carlos

6:00 – 8:30PM

* See the accompanying research paper for more detailed discussion.

* See the accompanying audience hand-outs.

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With the advancement of science and technology, the growing world population, and the depleting natural resources, one might ask “Is the universe getting near its end?” Good evening my fellow toastmasters! I’m sure some of you will disagree with me if I would say that the world is not yet going to end not even in at least the next trillion more years to come! I believe that the universe is still expanding!

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So, fasten your seatbelt as I present to you our expanding universe! Tonight, let me prove that the universe is still expanding and our world is very far from end. But why am interested in proving that the universe is expanding? If we can prove the true nature of the universe especially the planet Earth and the surrounding planets and galaxies, this will provide us humans, a chance to think on what we are doing. The problem right now is that humans are so concentrated on the planet Earth. If we can prove that the universe is still young and still expanding, humans must rejoice and instead of concentrating on wars, we must concentrate on improving our lives by conquering the vast expanding universe!

With the rate that the Earth’s population is growing, the planet would sooner be saturated and may no longer be able to support each people with decent food, shelter and basic necessities. As shown in Figure 1, Asia is one of the most populated continents on Earth. With 10 million Chinese being born every year which now sums up to approximately 1.6 billion Chinese, added with Indians, Americans, Europeans, and Filipinos…. we might ask, where will the next human generations live in this planet? Will the planet still be able to accommodate the next generation of humans that may total to 10 billion in the year 2050! Where are we going to get our food, the fuel for our cars and the classrooms for our children?

According to Population Reference Bureau (PRB), the world’s population will reach 10 billion in year 2050! Eventually population would be checked by "misery and vice" in the form of famine, disease, natural environmental disturbances and war. Looking at the pie chart in Figure 2, showing the distribution of the whole world, China has the biggest population in Asia. China and India exceed one billion persons, the United States and Indonesia are over 200 million and Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, and Nigeria are over 100 million respectively. These ten countries occupy 60% of the world population. It’s amazing how these billions of people live.

There is no such thing as “family planning” in the Bible. Family planning itself causes sociological effects because when population gets old which causes few young generations, the tendency for other countries is to buy or smuggle babies from other countries such as from Cambodia as published in Readers Digest July Edition. At the beginning of the 21st century, the overall population of the world is over six billion. I think we cannot fully control the population growth. There must be a reason why human population keeps on growing. It’s true that the Earth may no longer support the population, but the universe itself is very large. Let me further discuss to you the history of the Universe.

We are not sure how or why the Universe began. Soon afterwards there was a big bang which released radiation, particles and clouds of atoms. Gravity condensed the atoms into galaxies where stars appeared. Stars created new types of atoms when they grew old and exploded as supernovae. As shown in Figure 3, the new atoms were released back to the galaxy, and joined together into cosmic dust and molecules. New stars, such as the Sun, formed from these materials in the spiral arms and the dust and molecules formed planets such as Earth. Life appeared on Earth (we are not sure how) and soon evolved into bacteria (germs). The evolution of life was played out upon the moving stage formed by continental drift.

We are living in a world that’s bound by space and time. The universe begins with a cataclysm that generates space and time, as well as all the matter and energy the universe will ever hold. For an incomprehensibly small fraction of a second, the universe is an infinitely dense, hot fireball. The prevailing theory describes a peculiar form of energy that can suddenly push out the fabric of space. The time after big bang is described in Figure 4.

As shown in figure 5, the Earth has cooled and an atmosphere develops. Microscopic living cells, neither plants nor animals, begin to evolve and flourish in earth's many volcanic environments.

In 1609AD, five years after the appearance of the great supernova of 1604, Galileo builds his first telescope. He sees the moons of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, the phases of Venus, and the stars in the Milky Way. He publishes the news the following year in "The Starry Messinger.” Figure 6, shows the recorded years of human renaissance and technological revolution.

In 1990AD, astronomers have confirmed the big bang. Astronomers use the new Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) to take a detailed spectrum of the microwave background radiation. These studies showed that the radiation is in nearly perfect agreement with the Big Bang theory. Two years later, scientists used the same instrument to discover minute variations in the background radiation: the earliest known evidence of structure in the universe.

As shown in Figure 7, the United States has sent automated spacecraft, then human-crewed expeditions, to explore the Moon. Our automated machines have orbited and landed on Venus and Mars, explored the Sun's environment, observed comets, and asteroids, and made close-range surveys while flying past Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

After stepping for the first time in the moon, as shown in Figure 8, the United States of America is now aimed into the cosmos with the leadership of President George Bush. “Into the Cosmos”, is now the new American dream, which would bring hope to the ageing Earth and its growing population. That dream is now slowly taking place… Americans are now discovering the different regions of Mars and now mapping its vast land which will soon be converted into fertile soils in which humans can build new farms and new homes in order to continue to live. As shown in Figure 9, humans are now studying the possibility of life in Mars. Do you imagine your great great great grand children living on this new world?

But, do we need to worry if the universe is really expanding? The universe is expanding based on theoretical and standard cosmological models. The expansion of the universe doesn’t affect the size of atoms or our own planet Earth. As early as 1933, Arthur Eddington has published his book entitled “The Expanding Universe”. Fred Hoyle in 1960, demonstrated the expanding nature of the universe by analogy of a balloon with a large number of dots marked on its surface. If the balloon is blown up, the distances between the dots increase in the same way as the distance between the galaxies. In 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered that there are other galaxies outside our own. He discovered that the the universe was expanding, galaxies and stars moving away from one another like spots on an inflating balloon. Until now, scientists haven’t computed when the universe will end. Let’s teach our children with interests in science and not in holding guns! Let’s teach them to explore the expanding universe!

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My fellow toastmasters, I want to instill in the minds of the modern civilization that our world is still young and our space is so vast that we can’t even measure its boundaries! Only God will stop this world from revolving! What humans should worry about is the preservation of culture, heritage, knowledge, the development of humanity and most of all, the fulfillment of human’s true purpose in this vast creation by the Almighty Designer.

Why do we worry about the Earth's population? Indeed it is true that God gave us freedom to populate the world! Yes, the world it’s pointing to is not just the earth the many worlds beyond it. So, why worry about the soil where billions of people will stand? The rate at which the universe is expanding is faster than the current human birth rate! As written in the Bible, from Matthew 6:27, “Which of you, by worrying can add one cubit unto his stature?” My point is that since the universe is so vast and expanding, we don’t need to worry on where our future children will live. Let’s think and act to explore this expanding universe!

It is important to note that while the space in the universe is doing the expansion, there is no corresponding expansion within galaxies because of local gravity within our own star.

Even if the expansion is accelerating as the evidence currently suggests, it may not continue to do so. We do not have any good theory of why it should be accelerating at all, much less why it should do so in the future. To me, this unexplained acceleration is an indication that we do not have it all figured out yet. I am expecting surprises. Not only is the world more interesting than we expect, it's more interesting than we can expect.

The world right now is not the future because no one knows the real future. Future is just a word that describes the time beyond what is now. Our ancestors have been living 2000 years and many have prophesized that our future is during the time when technological revolutions have come. But the technologies that we have right now will soon be considered a thing of the past in the same way as we consider the past decades as the past.

What the humans should do right now is to stop in fighting and waging wars between countries. After all, why do Israel and Lebanon has war right now? I’m sure they just want to dominate their neighbor’s lands and colonize other territories. Humans have lived as territorial beings! Look at the heavens, why don’t we colonize first our galaxy! As shown in Figure 10, our planet Earth lies near the other uninhabited planets. Rejoice, the universe is still expanding! As shown in Figure 11, the universe is so wide that we can even have one planet each! But to make this a reality, we must concentrate on improving human’s capability to explore the nearby planets first. Technologies must be improved so that humans can freely travel from Earth to the other parts of the solar system. Again, we don’t expect intergalactic wars! What we need is to continuously discover what lies beyond the Earth and our solar system.

Humans have long been educated by the wrong belief that we will only exist in this planet and so are our next generation of children will only exist here in this planet. Humans have also been so troubled to discover life in the other parts of the universe. Let me tell you, there are no life on the other parts of the universe. We have just started the expanding of the universe and the Earth is the first planet hhumasn have inhabited. The scenario of our future children living in populated cities or in denuded environments with famine and crime due to overwhelming competition on the natural resources is the one that makes us hopeless! It’s now time to change our mindset. Let us not end what is not supposed to be end. For even today, we are just on the beginning of the galactic civilization just like in the Stars Wars movie!