Zed and the Disappearing Galaxies: A Futuristic Fable

Once again Joe makes a superb job of misrepresentation of science by equating the big bang theory with a religious belief like creationism. The Big Bang theory rests on relatively solid imperical ground whereas creationism absolutely requires the complete and utter absence of any evidence,since it is predicated on the supposed actions of a supernatural being using poof magic that must leave no physical evidence of itself,lets it be mistaken for a natural phenomenon. Congrats to Joe for making an @ss of himself for the xxth time...we didn't think you could pull it off again...hats off to u.

I'll try a serious reply. (It will be the first.)

The reason we would find Zed irrational is that he places so little value on (what for him are) ancient science texts. This does seem a mistake. Scientists must rely upon the work of their colleagues, and this includes not only the ones alive at the time they work, but the ones that came before. Mere passage of time does not lessen the value of past scientific work, so long as it evinces the same care as current work.

Is this supposed to be analoguous to current debates about the origin of life or the universe? If it is, your point must be that current scientists are irrational in the same way as Zed. Is your point then that scientists today should take seriously texts - i.e. the Bible - that seem to cast doubt on their views? If so, then the analogy breaks down. The Bible is not careful scientific work. Indeed it's not scientific work at all.

Is the point instead that, like Zed, current scientists don't admit certain possibilities that should be admitted? Is it that they should not dismiss out of hand ID as an account of either life or the universe? Perhaps that point could be granted. But it's a small point. All that it asks is that we admit the bare possibility of a thing.

Yawn. An antiscientific "fable" from a hypocrite.

You can't expect your point to be taken seriously while you use the very fruits of science to spread this trash. I say that it's time for you to put your money where your mouth is. Take your house off the power grid, because electricity and everything that uses it is a product of physics. Sell your car, because the internal combustion engine is a product of chemistry and physics. The next time you or someone in your family gets sick, don't you dare go see a doctor because modern medicine is dependent on biology, physics, and chemistry.

The fact is, you can't have it both ways. You either accept the scientific process as a whole, and learn to understand how that process works, it's strengths and weakness, or you do not. You can't pick and choose the parts that you like and the parts that you don't like based on your religious proclivities because all the fruits of science are all derived from the same fundamental process. You can write the very same kind of fable against gravity, or electricity, or medicine, and it would be just as nonsensical, but you don't dare do that because you know that would make you look like a complete idiot. So you pick an area of science that you don't understand very well and don't like, and then you write a piece of tripe like this. The problem is that you still look like an idiot when you do so.

There really should have been an 11th commandment. Thou shalt not be stupid.

Some of the more vitriolic commenters here are missing Joe's main point. Nowhere does he refer to Zed as relying on some sort of "faith." Instead, Zed is relying on his observation of the facts, and that alone, to come to his conclusions. The trouble is, Zed cannot have infinite knowledge of the current state of the universe. Even more difficult for Zed, is that he also cannot have infinite knowledge of all states of the universe from the start of the universe to now. There are realities that he simply cannot observe (things past, things future, things too far away, etc.). The main point is that Zed ought to show some humility and recognize his limitations as he tries to comprehend a universe that is vast, both spatially and temporally.

How is Joe stupid for making this point?

As an aside, I think Joe's analogy makes an interesting case for methodolgical naturalism. For those who disagree with Zed, they will not be able to make scientific measurements to bolster their theories. For the purposes of scientifically observing the current state of their universe, they will have to limit themselves to only the facts they can currently observe. If an astronomer measures the distance to the stars, and the stars are observed to be so many millions of light years away, how can that astronomer be expected to come to the conclusion that the universe is only 10,000 years old? For the purposes of scientific experimentation, he has to take the observation for what it is.

As for your point,yes there is indeed a limit to empiricism and what it can accomplish but while i do agree that tradition has some value,if only to serve as a starting point before moving on to whatever lays next,faith serves absolutely no usefull purpose whatsoever when it comes to the aquisition ok knowledge.

The point is that this is one of those stories you think has a point but it doesn't.

This has nothing to do about the limits of empiricism. Empiricism is limited to stuff we have empirical evidence for. There's plenty of situations where we have no choice but to shrug and say "we don't know" because evidence either doesn't exist or has long since disappeared. We don't know where Jimmy Hoffa ended up or who Jack the Ripper was. Barring the invention of a time machine or an unexpected discovery we will almost certianly never know. Likewise you probably will never know what time you woke up 34 days ago and what songs played on the radio as you drove to work because you never bothered to record the information and it's long since left your head. The only difference is that Joe wrote up a little sci-fi story in an attempt to make this sound more profound than it really is.

I don't see the argument about faith. What is the future society supposed to take on faith? That there's more than 6 galaxies? Why? Assuming that none of our observations survived why would that future society make such an assumption? They might have good reason to question why they assume there cannot be more than 6 galaxies. If you assume, as in the story, that the future society does have access to our ancient records then the issue should be evaluted based on those observations. Since they should have 10 billion years of pictures of millions of galaxies slowly disappearing from sight that would seem to be pretty good empirical evidence of Tombcee's theory.

In fact that brings up an interesting point about Joe. About a year ago when we were arguing about cosmology and the 'odds' of life developing. The argument was based on a calculation of how many atoms are in the universe. Some of us pointed out that you can't know how many atoms are in the universe, you can only know how many atoms are in the visible universe. For all we know the universe beyond what we can see consists of more and more galaxies for infinity.

I do believe it was Joe himself (and Gordon) argued you can't make any assumptions about what you can't observe blah blah blah. Even back then I think someone pointed out by that logic you'd eventually be arguing there's only one galaxy because the universe's expansion will put everything beyond the visible range at some point!

Nice to see how quickly the shoes change.

I think people are missing Joe's point. Which is how do we know what is true?

Zed has info from a very, very long time ago that contradicts the current empirical evidence around him. So what does he trust? Does he trust what he currently sees, or does he trust what someone wrote in the past? What was written in the past appears to be scientific, but what if they were wrong? There is no real way to know unless he went back with a time machine. So Zed either has to take on faith that the old history which is currently untestable is true, or the current theory which is testable is true.

What if a scientist tested an event 200 years ago and came to a very reasonable conclusion about the event based upon available evidence, but the event is passed and there is no known way to duplicate it? What if the past test seems to contradict what we know now? Do we dismiss the earlier work because of the primitive measuring tools?

Earth & Stars,

I can think of an example of that. Pliny the Younger wrote about witnessing the Pyroclastic Flow from Pompeii's eruption. Until modern times this account was treated with skepticism but we have had plenty of opportunities to observe that is a feature of many volancic eruptions.

However such accounts are only as good as they are. There's plenty of 'one off' ancient accounts that we are right to be skeptical of. To me this isn't so much a matter of faith but simply the weighing of different types of empirical information.

Your grandfather telling you there were dragons when he was a boy is no less emperical information than the DNA sequencing of a bird. Empiricism never argued that all information is to be treated equally. 99% of science is debate over what type of weight different pieces of empirical information should be given.

OJ's murder of his wife is also not empirically observable but I do not believe he did it on faith but on empirical evidence.

Likewise both evolution and the Big Bang are theories supported by empirical evidence. No they are not 'directly observable' but if you think about it most things in life are not directly observable. When you use a calculator you cannot directly observe its workings and you usually do not directly check its results but your trust in it is based on empirical evidence.

Perhaps you're using faith in a loser sense such as "this traffic light is red but I have faith it will turn green at some point in the future" or "I have faith the bank isn't going to screw up my direct deposit this month". I'm using faith in a higher sense which means to believe in something that either defies empirical evidence or is beyond it.

In that sense it requires faith to believe Christ walked on water because the empirical evidence is that liquid water cannot support the body of a man. It takes faith to believe God created the universe with the intention of you coming along at some point because this is beyond empirical observation.

I agree with Jeff Doolittle and "Earth and All Stars" that Joe makes a valid epistemological point.

We don't know more than we know. All our accumulated knowledge is little more a collection of flickering candles in a vast ocean of dark ignorance. Since we spend most of our time using our candles and trying to make new ones, it is easy for us to forget just how much we don't know.

On the other hand, it is revealing that Joe needs to reach 100 billion years into the future in order to compose a fable about how science may be little more than religious faith in disguise.

One hundred billion years is a long time. The earth is only about 4.5 billion years old. The visible universe is about 13 billion years old. Our sun will burn out in less than 15 billion years.

Humanity itself might not make it more than 100 or 200 years from now if we are not careful.

So to serve up a fable based on such an absolutely huge length of time is not necessarily saying very much about our situation here in the 21st century.

If science today can yield results about cosmology that appear to be reproducible for a good 60 or 70 or 80 billion years, then that is probably something we should be pretty satisfied with. It's actually a pretty remarkable accomplishment.

How well will Christianity be received (or even remembered) 60 billion years from now?

"Earth and All Stars", you make the point (in comment 17) that we should believe Jesus walked on water if a credible person claims to have witnessed it.

However in Joe's fable, Zed is not rejecting something, like walking on water, which violates the laws of physics. He is only rejecting a theory (the expanding universe) which no longer has any direct, reproducible evidence for it.

If I tell you that last night I walked on water, you don't judge me to be incredible because you weren't there, but because walking on water is strictly impossible.

Matthew,

It is impossible to walk on water by what we know about nature, but if you saw somebody actually do it then you'd probably tell someone. If you and a dozen of your friends saw someone do it you might write it down and tell people about it. If you saw this same person do a couple of dozen things that seem to defy everything you know about nature you'd probably be amazed. Then again, maybe not. Even if you were convinced this person did it in some unexplainable way, most people wouldn't believe you.

Many people saw what Jesus did and didn't automatically believe. If someone showed up at your house today and did seemingly impossible things in front of you, and claimed to have the power of God almighty you still might not believe. (Perhaps he is an alien? Perhaps you have been given drugs? Perhaps you are insane?)

The issue isn't the availability of scientific tools. People back in Jesus' day darn well knew that people didn't walk on water.

At some point it does come down to faith and trust. If someone I trust totally in life tells me something seemingly impossible, I won't throw out a life time of trust just because it doesn't jive with how I think the world works. This is the essence of the Christian faith. My entire existence seems to tell me that this universe and world is a lost cause of purposeless death, destruction, and insanity. In contrast to this which assails my senses there is the Christian hope which offers genuine joy and the possibility of an existence in communion with the creator of the universe. This is the shocking and audacious claim of Christ, hope.

Or course, before one could accept any miracle in the bible, one would have to accept there is a God capable of doing it. If a God exists with the power to create the entire universe, then the miracles in the bible become possible. Otherwise, if there is no God, any explanation to a seemingly supernatural event, however bizzare or obscure, is preferable to a supernatural explanation.

Earth and All Stars,

Many people saw what Jesus did and didn't automatically believe.

If you believe Jesus walked on water and performed other miracles, then I respect your right to believe it.

In fact, I won't even argue that you are wrong. I'll just say that I don't believe it, and I hope you respect that as well.

Also watch carefully the use of the word 'credible' when it gets inserted here. If we are talking about an ancient text then what makes for a 'credible witness' when we may have no way to determine who this fellow was and may not even have his original written statement but only copies made hundreds of years later?

In Joe's story, Zed's society apparantly, the entire collected works of our 21st century physics still exists. That would be pretty potent credibility IMO.

What if instead the only thing that survived was a child's story etched on a stone tablet that says "Once there was a billion galaxies, then an evil clown ate them". Should Zed equally give this credibillity?

Matthew,

Of course I respect your right not to believe it.

Boonton,

The accounts in the NT are historical in nature. The geographical locations as well as the cultures they describe are very accurate. There of course has been a whole lot of debate about this.

I think your analogy of your grand father seeing dragons is a bit off at this point, but would make more sense if he pointed out the exact location with very accurate historical info, and could back up his claim through a seemingly miraculous event.

The problem would be is that I bet you'd have to see the supernatural event even if three or four of his friends swore an oath that they witnessed him doing something. Also his power would have to make sense with other things you accepted as true. For instance if you thought that aliens form Mars granted certain people powers, then your grandfathers claims of dragons and miracles would makes much more sense and seem credible.

The analogy is still poor because the miracles in the Old and New Testament are predicated on the fact that God exists, He is all powerful, and He is eminent. If any of these things are false, then the defense of the spectacular claims of Christianity fails before it starts.

In the case of grandpa and dragons the whole analogy would have to change.

I believe Jesus' claims because it correlates with the original premises about God I stated.

I'll try to summarize:

I think, based upon logical arguments and evidence in the natural world a God exists.

The next question is whether any of the world religions seem to accurately talk about this God. I think that many of the religious get things right.

Then who gets the most things right.

So I arrived at Christianity.

This whole train can be derailed if God doesn't exist in the first place or is completely unknowable.

Earth and All Stars,

I think your analogy of your grand father seeing dragons is a bit off at this point, but would make more sense if he pointed out the exact location with very accurate historical info, and could back up his claim through a seemingly miraculous event.

As is Homer's history of the Trojan War, nevertheless while we give some of the historical info credibility we still do not find the accounts of the more fantastic elements to be sufficient empirical evidence to establish them (although I'll grant you they are empirical evidence).

I think your analogy of your grand father seeing dragons is a bit off at this point, but would make more sense if he pointed out the exact location with very accurate historical info, and could back up his claim through a seemingly miraculous event.

True, as I said though it isn't enough to say 'there's empirical evidence for X'. Out of ten million pages of science text 9,900,000 are probably devoted to debating which pieces of empirical evidence indicate X or Y.

Although I still think there's a disconnect between establishing an event took place and asserting that demonstrates a particular reading of the event. For example, I said before if someone discovers a 2000 year old videotape of Jesus walking on water that doesn't prove the Christian faith. Why should walking on water prove you created the entire universe? Why not prove that you are just a beign with the power to walk on water (a fascinating power but not in itself proof you're the one who created the universe)? Or why not proof that water, for some reason, altered its nature briefly and one fellow just happened to luck out that he tried walking on it at that moment? (You may remember a Steve Martin movie called, Leap of Faith, its premise was that he was a shameless faith-healer who was a complete fraud. One day, though, a real miracle happens during one of his services and a crippled boy seems to be healed. While everyone thinks he did it, he is in fact shaken to the core).

Your credibility argument doesn't just attack Christian miracles, but all of history. Most of what was written in the ancient would would be totally suspect by your standards.

No it wouldn't.

In the case of Joe's example, the ancient seemingly scientific evidence wouldn't be credible as it defies all known science at that future time.

Actually it would fit in perfectly with known science. The hypothesis would predict that in Zed's age nearly all the universe's galaxies would be undetectable and they are. The expansion of space could be confirmed by carefully tracking stars that got thrown out of the visible galaxies. If, say, a cannister of the last 10 billion years of Hubble telescope pics were found the hypothesis would predict they would show many galaxies disappearing as they passed the visible horizen...this could be tested.

LIKEWISE today when we talk about the known universe we talk about the visible universe which is something like a ball 13 billion light years around us (actually I think more like 100+BLYs because of the expansion of space). If you were living in one of those galaxies on the edge of our visible range today what would you see? Well to your left you'd see our galaxy at the edge of your visible range. But what about to your right? Perhaps galaxies we can't see. Perhaps some great barrier like in the old Star Trek. Who knows? Today we don't make assertions that only the visible galaxies exist, we assert we can only speculate what exists beyond the visible galaxies. If tomorrow space aliens in warp drive ships show up holding pics they took from beyond our visible range we can see if our speculations are right or not.

US--------------Them--------------------------?????
Milky Way-------Galaxy X-----------------------?

Bontoon you said, "No I wouldn't. We have no idea how probable or improbable such a thing is. One reason is we only have, at best, an outline for how such a thing may have happened so there are too many blanks to even begin to make such a calculation. Some think that life is quite probable and given a decent place or even halfway decent place like Mars or Europa you're almost certain to get it if you can wait around a billion years or so. There are others that suspect the odds are more like 4 in a galaxy."

First, I think that using the outline of what we know would need to happen would still yield tremendous odds. Second, it seems to me that you have just stated a belief in something for which, by your admition, there is very little evidence. To me this is you placing faith in something pretty important. I realize you disagree. This is how this discussion startd so I guess we're getting no where. So I'll bow out for now.

God bless.

The one thing I've never seen a satisfactory explanation for is - if everything is speeding away from the central point of the big bang (or whatever it is people want to call the central locus for the sudden beginning of the observable universe), how did all those galaxies collide that scientists have declared as having collided?

Ucfengr,

You've got it backwards. Bush is a Nazi, and he is going to persecute organized religion in order to break all resistance to his totalitarian dictatorship.

Aren't you on Karl Rove's e-mail list?

Earth and All Stars,

My entire existence seems to tell me that this universe and world is a lost cause of purposeless death, destruction, and insanity.

There is a lot of death, destruction, insanity, and meaninglessness in the world.

But that is a very one-sided and incomplete summary, a list filtered by severe pessimism and grief.

Our world is also a place of great beauty and love, civilization and harmony. In addition, the tension between the forces of light and darkness adds a lot of drama, and not a little meaning to our lives.

The atheistic view says that the material world is in flux, that the world as we know it is transitory. When we discover this great truth for the first time, it is scary and perhaps depressing. But it is also a great challenge, perhaps the greatest challenge one faces in life, and to meet it bravely is a source of profound meaning and dignity.

We are all in this together, after all, and we shouldn't be ashamed, or immobilized with regret, to accept the world as it is. Even the Bible acknowledges the harsh reality that you allude to, althought, of course, it advocates a very different approach to life than I do:

Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
and also madness and folly.
What more can the king's successor do
than what has already been done?

I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
just as light is better than darkness.

The wise man has eyes in his head,
while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
that the same fate overtakes them both.

Then I thought in my heart,
"The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?"
I said in my heart,
"This too is meaningless."

For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
in days to come both will be forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise man too must die!

So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

[Ecclesiastes 2:12-17]

I would suggest that a satisfactory post-Christian response to the Preacher of Ecclesiastes is that life is good, a precious gift. It is possible to live life happy and grateful that we are born to it in the first place. We can be happy and grateful that we share such a wonderful experience for the limited time that we have it.

After all, if life weren't good, if life weren't really good, then we wouldn't regret its passing so much.

If, in contrast to me, you find consolation in the church of Jesus the Nazarene, then I wish you all the best with it. But please be aware that there are alternatives to religious faith that are meaningful and worthwhile.

Thank you for the explanations, Boonton.

I particularly like the example you give of mis-calculating the odds for a lottery.

I don't know whether your explanation for colliding galaxies is correct or not, but it is reasonable. I consider the Big Bang to be an interesting theory, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it totally replaced in 500 years time.

2. The expansion of space happens but it's very tiny between two points so to even notice it you need a lot of distance. For galaxies that are close the forces of gravity trump the expansion of space so they will collide and attract each other.

That explanation doesn't work for the galaxies that are speeding apart after colliding. Maybe you haven't seen that photo of the galaxy that stripped nearly all the stars from the galaxy it collided with and now they are off in perpendicular directions. That's what the description of the photo was at least.

Smm,

If two galaxies collide, their momentum will allow vast pieces of them to keep on going after the "collision", since most of a galaxy is just empty space, and the galaxies can just pass through each other to a greater or lesser extent.

Even the pieces of a galaxy that gets ripped off have not actually physically "collided" with another star or stars -- they just got caught up in the enormous gravitational field of the ripping galaxy.

Smm,

Third, if gravitational attraction between the two galaxies was strong enough to cause two galaxies to overcome angular momentum to the point of near perpendicular collision angles, then there should be more evidence for oscillation/recollision between the two galaxies.

You're still assuming that the two galaxies capture each other and merge into one gravitational system.

That isn't necessarily the case. In fact, I would think it more likely that most encounters between galaxies would be "ships passing in the night", especially if they were approaching each other on nearly perpendicular trajectories in the first place.

Perhaps you could find a link to the picture of the specific collision you have in mind so we can see what you're looking at.

That explanation doesn't work for the galaxies that are speeding apart after colliding. Maybe you haven't seen that photo of the galaxy that stripped nearly all the stars from the galaxy it collided with and now they are off in perpendicular directions. That's what the description of the photo was at least.

Why wouldn't it? In the story about the galaxies visible in the future I think it mentioned that even then the expansion of space could be observed by tracking stars that got tossed out of the galaxy...but you'd have to track them for several billion years at least to notice it.

To use the speeding plane analogy, this would be like setting off some fireworks on the plane's wing. Yes sparks will fly all over but the system itself continues moving away from its original point.

First of all, I don't think Boonton understands singularity with respect to the Big Bang theory.

I don't think anyone can really understand a singularity. Unless you're keen on mathematics (which I'm not, at least in terms of the ranks of astrophysics) you're only understanding it indirectly by analogy. Even if you are keen on the mathematics I've read that our models tend to break down when you reduce space to a point.

Anyway the Big Bang assumes our visible universe was a single very dense point at the beginning. But that says nothing about the entire universe. That point could have been contained inside a large normal looking universe (in other words maybe we are just a spec of some other universe that has grown dramatically in size like a tumor!). Or it could be that the entire universe was infinite and the Big Bang happened throughout it. If you could travel in the Enterprise back to that point you'd see a universe that was infinite, not a point. But it would be super-dense all over and then it would start expanding and cooling down. The piece that would become our visible universe would have been only a point back then but it wouldn't have looked any different from the rest of the universe. That comes back to the question of what is beyond our visible universe? If it is simply more and more galaxies just like our visible universe then I don't think the above scenero is wrong & it doesn't mistate the idea of a signularity.

As an aside, I also believe that if mankind survives as long as it would take for most of the known astrological bodies to go beyond our current ability to see that we will have by then improved technology to the point of being able to see even farther away than we currently do... to the affect that somebody else will write similar insipid article in the New York Times lamenting our future inability to see to the farther reaches of space.

Perhaps but not if the speed of light holds. If nothing can go faster then there's no 'warp drive' or 'hyperspace' that will ever let us see beyond the visible horizen no matter how good we get. Then again, who can really say?

That isn't necessarily the case. In fact, I would think it more likely that most encounters between galaxies would be "ships passing in the night", especially if they were approaching each other on nearly perpendicular trajectories in the first place.

From what I read galaxies are organized into clusters and then larger superclusters. In general collisions would be happening inside those clusters. The clusters would be like the planes in my analogy and the galaxies would be the people partying inside of them. I think it would be truely rare to see a galaxy that was tossed with such violence from one cluster that it ends up in another (unless it happened closer to the start of the universe).

When you see a picture of a galaxy that they say suffered a collision, if you find out where it is and where the colliding galaxy is I'd bet it's all nicely contained inside a cluster which is generally moving away from us.

Well, that's just it. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that galaxies should be traveling in nearly perpendicular directions when considering the Big Bang theory. Explosion/expansion in space (especially without containment walls or without any sort of reflecting surface) should not yield near perpendicular trajectories leading to collisions or even head on collisions (sorry, no photo accompanies the article).

Well let's see the plane takes off from NYC and you're watching it from there. You have x-ray, telescopic vision so you can see thru the tail. Inside is a massive mosh pit as people party to heavy metal. Two people run into each other in the center asile and bounce away from each other. Relative to each other wouldn't their movement be nearly perpendicular and yet the whole system is moving away from you?

This doesn't seem any different than two stars within our own galaxy nearly colliding and moving off in perpendicular directions. While this happens all the time we know the stars are following an overall movement in orbit around the galactic center.

That would appear to be closer to the Steady State theory. The prevaling trend of thought with regard to the the Big Bang theory is expansion from a compact singularity,

I'm sorry but I think you're wrong about this. The Steady State theory was that the universe was always what it appears to be now. 60 years ago or so this seemed to make sense since the universe appeared to consist of nothing but the Milky Way galaxy and it was made of stars that seemed constant and unchanging.

The Big Bang theory says our visible universe started as a singularity or near singularity. How long it was a singularity before the bang or what caused it to go from singularity to bang is not addressed. But the important word is visible and often that word is dropped and science writing talks about the universe forgetting to mention it is only talking about the visible universe.

We don't have any idea what lies beyond the visible universe. One guess is that it is just more universe like ours maybe for infinity or maybe just beyond our little bit of visibleness. If it is infinite the Big Bang could still hold either as an event embedded inside a larger universe (like blowing a bubble) or as a uniform event throughout the entire universe. since we cannot observe beyond the visible universe there's no way to test any theories about it but it's lazy to get in the habit of speaking as if that it doesn't exist.

As Joe's story pointed out, the expansion of the universe implies that our visible universe is actually shrinking (so slowly now that we can't notice the stars and galaxies disappearing on the fringes).

Those galaxies are formed from the general material that made up the cluster, which was moving in the same general direction from the beginning of the organization of the cluster. If anything, the organization of the galaxies within a cluster should be somewhat similar to the organization of the planets within our solar system. The last time I checked, there didn't appear to be any danger of the planets in our solar system colliding head on, maybe the odd asteroid or comet, but planet, no.

True but you're catching the solar system at the end of the story. Even now we get the spare comet that is flung out of the system. No doubt back in the day it was a lot more dramatic. Still as the material of our solar system fell into each other due to gravity it generates a lot of action including collisions and deflections. The galaxies scientists say are now colliding or have collided would be no different. It's just a larger manfistation of the material of the cluster slowly settling itself down.

My previous comment was unfortunately diverted to the dead-letter office. I wish I could remember what I said, maybe that would provide a clue as to why it was 86'd.

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