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Darwin himself stated that unless there were trillions of other galaxies out there, his theory was flawed.
Well last time I looked ...
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The Rebirth of Cosmology. New York: Knopf, 1976: "The latest estimates have ranged anywhere from ten billion to one hundred billion galaxies."
I'm almost certain that 100 billion is a trillion, guess he was right.
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What is the total number of galaxies in the universe? Sagan assumed 100 billion. Is that still valid? Recently the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) surveyed, to the faintest levels yet detected, a small area of sky. Extrapolating from the number of galaxies detected by HST to that expected over the whole sky, I calculate 130 billion galaxies, slightly larger than Sagans estimate. Then the number of stars in the universe is 400 billion x 130 billion, or about 50,000 billion billion. A billion billion. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
God sure must be busy...
Edited, Oct 24th 2008 5:33am by tarv