More Big Questions

This year in 4G we've had our "Big Question Times". This week we wrote either some new questions, or ones we still wanted answered more fully:



Any ideas?

Revisiting Big Questions

4G have had a little break from their Big Questions. But this week we found time to reply to some of them in the comments. (You can do this any time!)

We also sketched some pictures of some of our questions.

 

This week's Big Questions in 4G

More Big Questions

There are always Big Questions coming up, but we try to give them a little time on Thursdays in 4G. After we'd looked back at one or two of the questions from last time, we had some more to ask:

We discussed Maia's and Tobias' questions, and wondered what it was that made humans so different from other animals, that we have a history, that while our bodies haven't changed much since the time of the cavemen our culture has. Humans are unique like that. Why is that?

Pablo thought it was because of our hands, and there's a lot of sense in that. Animals like cats and dogs can't really hold things because all their four limbs end in feet. We have hands, and so we can use tools!

Of course there's a lot more to it than that. What do you think? How did cavemen learn how to learn? And where does language fit into all this? Any answers?

Big Questions

The last few Thursdays we've made a little time for some big questions that have come up, and some more that have come to join them.

We haven't had time to answer them all. Some of them would be very hard to answer. So, for now, we just asked the questions.

For Ryan's question, we did a bit of Googling. We just asked the question and here's one answer we found on the ESA site. It says there are about 10¹² stars in the Milky Way. 10¹² means 1 with twelve zeroes after it. That's 1,000,000,000,000. The Milky Way is a galaxy, a bit like this one:

Each little speck of light is a star.

The website then says there are 10¹² galaxies in the Universe. So, 1,000,000,000,000 galaxies.

We multiply those together and we get 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the Universe! That's called a septillion, and it's a lot more stars than we guessed at first!

We also began to look at Cristina's question, and strayed into secondary school territory, talking about elements. Here's a song we looked at:

We've got a lot more big questions:

and still more to come...

Do you have any answers to any of these big questions?

Do you have any questions of your own?