Enjoy
Fluffy is the most intelligent known thing in the universe of billions of stars. Fluffy is god.

kiint
yes

Redlof
No, you'll only encourage more to come. Next thing you know photons from every galaxy will start showing up on our doorstep.

Enjoy
Just so it's not that "dark matter"

crote
These starts are for Enjoy's comment.

And also the video.

Banal Intercourse
This is the movie they show people in order to kill them in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

Enjoy
I'm still trying to process that one. Is there an astrophysicist in the house?

jreid
I'm guessing it's relative - if two objects are moving away from each other at 0.75 times the speed of light, their relative speed to one another would be 1.5 times speed of light.

Or something like that. IANAAP.

erratic
jreid is right. One important point to consider is that the big bang is not how it is shown on the science channel as an explosion into space, but rather more like empty space "filling up" space in between an infinite mass of matter with no center or edge. it's more like a "big condensation" than a bang, with gravity condensing matter into clumps while more and more empty space pushes the clumps apart.

Agent #1
If two things are moving away from each other (or toward each other) at 0.75 c they are actually only moving at a speed of 0.96 c because the universe is awesome that way. The way galaxies move away from each other faster than the speed of light is because they're not actually moving. Like erratic said, the space inbetween them is just filling up. Like if you draw dots on a balloon and then blow it up, the dots don't move, the surface of the balloon just gets bigger.

phalsebob
Just make some damn warp drives already.

Syd Midnight
It also means that half the universe is permanently cut off from us. We will never even be able to SEE most of the universe, because it's expanding faster than its light can catch up with us. We can only see a small slice of the universe that "blew in our direction" during the Big Bang, so to speak.
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=27256

Camonk
I'm gonna say they used their space voodoo magic.

Udderdude
The same way they built it and got it up there. SCIENCE!

glasseye
Very high quality engineering.

Albuquerque Halsey
multiple exposures over multiple orbits, layerd on top of one another digitally.

Rape Van Winkle
Magic.

egglab
it's a backup plan for when we run out of resources or nuke the crap out of everything.

kiint
not really, we still have no viable backup plan besides having some astronauts eating each other after six months while the ISS re-renters the atmosphere in a spectacular fiery display that the remaining mutants will enjoy greatly. Id say at this rate (which sure aint the rate we had 50 years ago) we might be succesful diaspora in 100 years.

THA SUGAH RAIN
so in this future without resources, we are somehow going to engineer a way to transport 7 billion people to another planet, where we will somehow terraform the entire place with yet unknown technology. That sounds believable.

Helena Handbasket
Because space and science is cool dumb-ass. Cool and FUCKING AMAZING. Not only that but I'm pretty sure I could find a naked world-destroying lady, and I'm pretty sure at billions of dollars cost.

Rape Van Winkle
Yeah, Sugah. We're taking everybody.

fatatty
There's also other people out there. This video should be evidence enough of how inevitable that is.

And they probably have a lot of things that are more interesting than a naked lady. Although our tiny monkey brains don't think there's anything more interesting than a naked lady.

RockBolt
If you've ever used a laptop or digital camera, amongst hundreds of other everyday technologies, you can thank the space program

http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html

http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/spinoff.html

fluffy
Also the zillions of dollars we spend on space end up being recirculated right here on Earth. It's not like that money ceases to exist just because it's used to learn about where we come from and where we might be going.

phalsebob
They are looking for your wisp of a soul in the cold depths of the void.

THA SUGAH RAIN
If I had a soul I would have sold it for hookers and blow by now.

SecretJunk
It's because for some fucked-up reason we're lucky enough to live in a no-doubt very transient age, where we have inherited and developed a bunch of cool toys and ideas, but before we've used them to completely wipe each other out. These toys are just cool enough to help us understand, just a little, the question "Where the fuck are we all REALLY from". And goddamn it will it be an insult to everything that's ever existed if not even a tiny fraction of us seizes this opportunity to use the toys to get a good stab at the fucking question.

Syd Midnight
You don't have to resettle 7 billion humans to move the species, you just need to resettle a few hundred and send a couple litres of frozen sperm with them.

kiint
just like in 2012!

Desidiosus
Sometimes I'm not ashamed of being human.

Konversekid
Only when humanity stops focusing on itself does it become respectable.

RockBolt
Pax Mundi by Stefano Principini

http://tiny.cc/u5dcx

FISTFULLofSOUL
yes.pussy.

CornOnTheCabre
no :(

kennydra
no.

Charles
Yes. everyone else is lying. bitch