<story><title>Olbers&apos; Paradox</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox#:~:text=In%20astrophysics%20and%20physical%20cosmology,infinite%20and%20eternal%20static%20universe.</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>permo-w</author><text>“[Edward Robert] Harrison argues that the first to set out a satisfactory resolution of the paradox was Lord Kelvin, in a little known 1901 paper, and that Edgar Allan Poe&amp;#x27;s essay Eureka (1848) curiously anticipated some qualitative aspects of Kelvin&amp;#x27;s argument:&lt;p&gt;Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”</text></comment>
<story><title>Olbers&apos; Paradox</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox#:~:text=In%20astrophysics%20and%20physical%20cosmology,infinite%20and%20eternal%20static%20universe.</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pontus</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t this just an issue of comparing a countable and uncountable infinity? The number of points on the unit sphere is uncountable, but the number of stars is countable. As such there are in some sense more points on the sphere than there are stars, even though there are an infinite number of each.&lt;p&gt;Take this together with the fact that intensity falls off as the square of the distance and it seems like the sky should be dark.</text></comment>