Art: Boris Khmelny / Mediazona
Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow district deputy, was the first person sentenced to prison time under Russia’s law against “fake news” about the military. On July 8, 2022, he was given 7 years in a penal colony for saying that a children’s drawing contest shouldn’t be held while children were dying in the war. Later, he faced charges of justifying terrorism for discussing the Ukrainian “Azov” brigade with cellmates.
In prison, Gorinov’s health declined. In early 2024, doctors found signs of serious illness. Transferred to a prison hospital, he faced unbearable conditions: labeled “suicide-prone” and deprived of sleep as an “escape risk.”
We publish Gorinov’s essay, written in the hospital, on the Universe, time’s relativity, and the impossibility of absolute knowledge.
Do we, consumed by daily concerns and “earthly passions,” consider the scale of our world? Can we fathom it? Does the Universe’s observed state align with our “now” across its reaches?
I dedicate my small popsci story about the scale of the Universe and its observability to all those who are in solidarity with me and express their support, to all opponents of war and supporters of peace.
As a geodesist, I’m compelled by measurement. So let’s start with numbers.
The Sun, our nearest star, spans 1.4 million km. Earth, a mere 12,750 km.
Compare: the diameter of the Sun—the yellow dwarf (in this case, a scientific definition) closest to us—is approximately 1,400,000 kilometers, while the diameter of the Earth is a mere 12,750 kilometers.
To get a general idea of some territory on Earth, we use maps—shrunken images of our planet. Let’s shrink the Sun to 2 cm. For well-known reasons, I have not held any money in my hands for a long time. But it seems to me that the size of our reduced Sun will be roughly corresponding to the diameter of a two-ruble coin. Our cosmic map’s scale becomes 1:70 billion. This means that the dimensions of the entire Universe have also decreased by the same amount, i.e., 70 billion times.
At this scale, Earth orbits 2.1 m from the Sun, the width of a tall basketball player. But the Earth itself will only be visible to those with sharp eyesight. It will be a speck two-tenths of a millimeter in size.
On this dot, we live, we are born and die, we continue the human race, quarrel with each other and make peace, love and hate, wage wars, divide territories and strengthen peace, fight for power and defend our rights, destroy nature and protect it, pray to God and call upon him, explore the world around us and evolve. This dot moves in its orbit around the Sun at a speed of 30 kilometers per second. And together with the entire Solar System, it makes a complete revolution around the galactic center at a speed of about 230 kilometers per second approximately every 240 million years.
Art: Boris Khmelny / Mediazona
We can’t even see the Moon at all on our map without an optical device, since it is several times smaller than the Earth. And it will be located 5 millimeters from our planet. These 5 millimeters (the side of one square in a grid notebook) are so far the ultimate distance that earthlings have flown into space from their cradle.
The planets closest to the Sun—Mercury and Venus—would sit 80 cm and 1.5 m, respectively, from our two-ruble, but so dear to us, luminary in this scale.
The planet following the Earth—Mars—would be located approximately 3.2 m from the Sun. Giant Jupiter, 1 mm wide, 11 m out. Saturn would be slightly smaller (0.8 millimeters) and will be located 20.5 m away from our Sun.
Uranus and Neptune, 41 and 64 m. A space map hard to fold!
Despite such distances, the planets are held in their orbits, revolving around the Sun, largely thanks to the still mysterious and requiring further study force—gravitation.
We see cosmic objects in their past, never the present, limited speed of propagation of electromagnetic radiation, i.e. light’s 300,000 km/s speed.
Thus, we always see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago, the Moon—a little more than a second in the past. An observer from the orbit of Neptune sees the Sun 4.5 hours old, a distant star. At our scale, light creeps 4 mm/s.
What about the other stars? Light from Alpha Centauri takes 4.2 years to arrive. In our model, we’d find it 530 km from the Sun. In our sphere, our Sun floats alone, so dear to us as a two-ruble coin.
In our galaxy, the Milky Way, an pretty average galaxy, it takes approximately 100,000 years for the light to reach from one end to the other. Modeled, that’s 12.6 million km. And remember, the Sun is still just 2 cm.
According to various estimates, the Milky Way galaxy contains from 200 to 400 billion stars. Our galaxy is not the only one in the Universe; according to modern estimates, there are about 2 trillion of them. Andromeda, our closest, appears 2.5 million years past, 340 million km in our model.
And what size will the three-dimensional model of our entire Universe be in the scale we have set? Modern science estimates the age of the Universe to be within 13.5–14 billion years. This is how much time is required for radiation from the very first and most distant cosmic objects from us to reach the Earth and be detected by modern means of observation. In our small model, it would span 1.7 trillion km.
Personally, it is hard for me to even imagine such distances. If you disagree, multiply all the distances calculated here by 70 billion times, and you will get the real dimensions of the Universe in which we live.
Gazing in different directions, we witness the Universe’s history in different stages, never its total instantaneous state in our “now.” Observed objects may no longer exist in place or space.
Art: Boris Khmelny / Mediazona
Despite our personal microscopic nature and the negligibly small part of the world space we occupy, our deeds, our actions in the form of space vibrations—signals—go into cosmic eternity. And if humanity broadcast continuous online video of its current life into space, it could be eternally watched in ever more distant parts of the Universe in their present.
For the inhabitants of the planetary system of Alpha Centauri (if any), Alexei Navalny lives, unpoisoned. (in March 2024. — A. G.) But nothing can be changed.
To aliens 100 light-years away, we’re unborn. To the inhabitants of the planetary systems of our galaxy, we are still hunting mammoths. And for alien life researchers from galaxies several hundred million light years away from us, man as the highest representative of the Earth’s animal world does not exist at all, and dinosaurs reign.
Now, in our “present,” aliens living in the galaxies farthest from us—more than 5 billion light years away—do not see the Solar System, as well as the Sun itself, despite the fact that we see their star systems in the distant past for them. Our solar system simply does not exist for them, because it has not yet formed from a gas-dust cloud.
Perhaps, this is the essence of the infinity of the Universe?
But could we find or model an absolute vantage point to glimpse the Universe’s instantaneous totality, which may greatly surprise us? That, I don’t know. Whoever does this, becomes God.
Alexei Gorinov
Vladimir Prison Hospital
25.03.2024
Editor: Mika Golubovsky
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