Have we explored our whole Galaxy already?
No here's a rough analogyYou go to America to explore.So you explore your hotel roomThat's earthThen you explore the hotelSolar systemNow you might think the town is the galaxy. Nope you'd need to visit every room in ever building in the USA to explore the galaxyAnd every room on the planet for the universeGalaxy's are that big
Will humans be able to colonize the entire galaxy, and will we eventually evolved to become so advanced that we literally could control the entire universe and become gods?
The civilization are characteristied in 3 categories.Type 1 civilization - Planatary civilization (it controls the power of the whole planet) .Type 2 civilization - Stellar(it controls the power of the star)3. Type 3 civilization - Galactic (it controls the power of an entire galaxy.Now on this scale we are type zero, we get our energy from dead plants, we don't even rate on this.But if we through 100 years, then we could become type 1 civilization truly Planatary. And that would be greatest transformation in the history of mankind.
How much will it cost to map the whole of the visible Milky Way Galaxy?
Astronomers basically have, “to the best of our ability.” As technology improves, we can get more detailed maps. You could improve the process and speed it up a little by throwing a boatload of new ground & space telescopes, graduate students & astronomers at it.I think you may have a misconception about what we can do in this area. We can barely detect very obvious nearby exoplanets. Mapping “all” of them will require new technology. Similarly, we can barely detect small, dim stars far away in this part of the Milky Way.
Are you supposed to have 105 stars at the end of Super Mario Galaxy?
You should go to the center and when you beat Bowser and beat the game, try to get the remaining stars. Most of the stars that you probably need are hidden and comet stars. Search for them on the map and if you need to, use a guide (online, book, etc), but that would only take the fun out of it. :) Have fun and good luck! P.S. When you unlock all 120 stars, you unlock Luigi as a playable character. ;) This also unlcoks a 121st star, which is the final star in the game.
Given the logic that there are billions of stars in our one galaxy alone, there's no way we could ever explore our galaxy with thoroughness?
Future observational technologies might allow us to create a 1:1 star map of a significant portion of the galaxy by entirely automating the process. We couldn't possibly do this ourselves but advanced enough computers linked to robotic space observatories could complete the task in as little as a decade or two. It should even be able to give us the orbital motion of each star as it makes it's way around the galaxy. There are problems: It will always leave a large blind spot behind the galactic bulge which we will be unable to image. It will be extremely expensive - dwarfing the James Webb's costs. It's conceivable humans will never even look at the whole catalogue, not unless it's disseminated via some sort of citizen science initiative similar to galaxy zoo. http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ Our nearest attempt to do something similar is the current Gaia space mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_%28sp... which is currently creating a 1 billion star map (approx 1% of the total) of the galaxy. It's mission results should be in around 2020. The results and relative successes of that mission might determine if we can, or even want to try building a "Super-Gaia" able to tackle a more complete map as described above. Let's not forget that just 10 years ago astronomers regarded the idea of the Gaia mission as preposterous and impossible. Then the engineers took a look at it and made it a reality. If you want to map stars AND their planets, (not to mention billions of brown dwarfs lurking out there) then we're getting much deeper into scifi. You'd need a space array thousands of miles across and on multiple spectra to hunt down potentially trillions of objects along with an ability to crunch exabytes of data. That is plain impossible with current technology. As for ever physically visiting any of these stars, forget it. At least for now. I don't like to make presumptions on what our descendants will be capable of but even if it is possible to attempt interstellar travel one day I can't imagine it occurring for many centuries.
How is the picture of our Milky Way galaxy taken from the outside if we are inside the galaxy?
A2A.This is an excellent question. Most people don’t realize how incredibly difficult it is to know how the Milky Way really looks. It’s quite literally like mapping out a forest while forced to stand in one point inside the forest. You can see your immediate surrounding easily, but all the more distant objects are partly or fully obscured, and so are hard or impossible to see.One of the first serious attempts to map out the Milky Way was done by William and Caroline Herschel in the late 1700s. They used a state-of-the-art telescope to meticulously count the number of stars in patches of sky in various directions, and they used those observations to create the following map:Though this was a valiant attempt, we now know that it was hopelessly naive, because dark clouds of dust obscure almost all the stars outside our solar neighborhood. How do we know that? Because while the clouds block off all visible (optical) light, they are much more transparent to infrared, and almost entirely transparent to radio waves. So when astronomers finally figured out how to construct infrared and radio telescopes we got our first real glimpses of the more distant stars in our Galaxy. Here is a comparison of what the Milky Way looks like in each of these wavelengths:In fact, it was only in the 1920s, following the Great Debate between astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, where the consensus among the Astronomical community finally shifted to the correct conclusion that the Milky Way is just a regular galaxy. One of the many billions of galaxies filling the observable Universe. But even today, with our best space telescopes, we still only have a schematic idea of what the Milky Way looks like:All the more detailed pictures you see are either an artist’s guess, based on such schematics (see image below), or more commonly, just a photograph of another galaxy altogether.Edit:From the feedbacks I see that there’s a lot of interest in the Herschels’ visual attempt to map the galaxy. I would like to clarify that there are many valid scientific reasons you might want to do that. And indeed there have been many attempts to essentially repeat this using modern instruments. Below you can see a 3D survey from just a few years ago. Note how we can only see a tiny fraction of the galaxy using optical means.Image credit: Visualising the Sun’s neighbourhood in 3-D