[HN Gopher] First images from Euclid are in
___________________________________________________________________
First images from Euclid are in
Author : mooreds
Score : 1210 points
Date : 2024-10-21 20:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dlmultimedia.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (dlmultimedia.esa.int)
| ur-whale wrote:
| I wish there was a standardized way to let folks who run a
| website such as this one know how much a casual passer-by viewer
| enjoys the byproduct of their work.
| nhumrich wrote:
| There is. It's called dwell-time
| ur-whale wrote:
| You might be staying there a long time because you're fuming,
| so: nope.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| You are of course right that there are lots of potential
| motivations for spending extra time on the page. But it
| will likely be interpreted as enjoyment in the absence of
| other feedback mechanisms.
| miunau wrote:
| If you're in the EU (particularly Germany, France and Italy,
| who are the three largest funders), you can let your
| representatives know you appreciate ESA's work.
| runj__ wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me! Just sent a couple of emails to
| my representatives!
| dylan604 wrote:
| You used to be able to sign a guestbook
| arlort wrote:
| Esa has social media accounts, pretty sure some intern will see
| if you ping them, I don't imagine they get much traffic
| bbor wrote:
| Really impressive work, thanks for sharing. The video, that is --
| the astronomy is indistinguishable from magic and thus way beyond
| the reach of words like "impressive", obviously. I do find it a
| little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more
| stuff" is an important next step, but godspeed nonetheless.
|
| ETA: For those who love space but are similarly OOTL on the
| specifics of modern missions: this is from a telescope launched
| to the L2 point (next to Webb!) last July, and is currently a bit
| over 1/6th of the way through it's expected lifetime.
|
| Details here:
| https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...
| and obv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29
|
| In comparison to Webb, it's focused on ~visible light _surveys_
| of the medium to far range, whereas Webb was built for ~infrared
| _investigations_ of very distant objects. It was budgeted around
| 1 /4th the cost of Webb (and ended up being ~1/20th due to Webb's
| costs running from $1B to $10B...) See
| https://www.jameswebbdiscovery.com/other-missions/euclid/euc...
|
| If you're looking for a new wallpaper, it would be hard to beat
| this 8000x8000 pic it took of the Perseus _galaxy_ cluster,
| casually depicting 100,000 _galaxies_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29#/media...
| The discoverer of galaxies, Kant, would literally weep. We're
| lucky to live when we do!
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with all of your sentiments, but I don't
| think that Kant discovered galaxies or had much interest in
| them. That honor goes to Messier or Hubble, I believe.
| not2b wrote:
| Messier catalogued many objects, some of which were galaxies,
| but he did not know what they were. It was Hubble who first
| figured out (in the 1920s) that there were definitely
| separate galaxies.
|
| https://lco.global/spacebook/galaxies/history-discovery/
| bbor wrote:
| That's why I love this fun fact so much :) He spent a good
| deal of his life on natural science before turning to
| philosophy, not unlike Newton and Liebniz -- he just happened
| to be way better at philosophy than science. It doesn't help
| that Newton's plan was alchemy-based, ofc.
|
| Anyway, from Kant's Wikipedia: In the
| Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular
| hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had
| formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also
| correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of
| stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning
| gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae"
| might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new
| horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it
| beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.
| From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical
| issues, although he continued to write on the sciences
| throughout his life
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam
| that "look at more stuff" is an important next step
|
| Observation is the most basic step of science. By viewing, we
| can find evidence of theoretical concepts or see something that
| conflicts those theories so they can be discarded or tweaked.
| It's not like there are experiments that could be used to test
| theories, so observing is all there is
| xipho wrote:
| Life on Earth is the same. If we are to get off Earth, we
| need to know what life to bring with us. We need to look a
| lot more, and much more closely at all the evolutionary
| products out there to make those decisions (if we arrogant
| humans can indeed even manage the intricacies of such an
| endeavor).
| bikamonki wrote:
| So many solar systems out there, life evolved in many planets for
| sure. No proof but no doubt.
| tomrod wrote:
| We have proof. Us.
| wyldfire wrote:
| The posit was "life evolved in many planets for sure" but
| your evidence is "us"?
| tomrod wrote:
| We are a necessary but insufficient part of the proof of
| life. One cannot say "no proof" when necessary proof has
| been achieved. All that remains is a second example -- the
| first took several billion years to achieve self awareness.
|
| Like they say, the first million is the hardest.
| nashashmi wrote:
| But that is a belief that says it can happen again. It is
| not a proven belief. And the whole reason we are looking
| out in space is to prove it.
|
| But I don't think we will find it. Life is special. The
| earth is special. And all the planets and all the stars
| and all the solar systems and all the galaxies cannot
| make something special again. So alas, we are earth. and
| we are all that is out there. And the rest of the
| universe is just there for our awe. That is how special
| we are.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Life? Probably. Something that has thinking capabilities? Much
| more doubtful.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| One proof is that we are thinking, and so are dogs, cats and
| monkeys to a lesser extent.
| ekianjo wrote:
| That's Earth. There is no model to say that life always
| goes on that way. We just have no clue.
| virtue3 wrote:
| "Astronomer Frank Drake created a formula to estimate the
| number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky
| Way. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modified the
| equation to calculate the odds that Earth was the first
| intelligent life in the universe. They concluded that the
| odds of Earth being the first are less than one in 10
| billion trillion, which suggests that other intelligent
| species have likely evolved."
|
| 1 in 10 billion trillion is some pretty serious odds.
|
| It does get more complicated if we factor in life
| happening quickly enough without an extinction event.
|
| But after looking at images like this there is just NO
| WAY we are the only ones.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I don't really doubt that life with human-level (or
| greater) intelligence has evolved at least a few times.
|
| What I'm more pessimistic about is how long such
| intelligence might live. How many civilizations reached a
| point of harnessing nuclear power and then wiped
| themselves out with nuclear war?
| bigiain wrote:
| I think even that's perhaps a warped anthropocentric view
| of intelligence?
|
| Think about other earth-centric scenarios, and try and
| imagine if dolphins or octopuses or fungus or maybe even
| insect colonies or plant ecosystems had "won" and become
| the apex lifeforms on earth instead of humans. I wonder
| just how different concerns like "civilisations" and
| "war" and "nuclear power" would have played out in those
| cases? I wonder if assumptions like "industrial
| revolutions" and the inevitability of scientific
| discovery being used in detrimental ways like we have
| done with nuclear science actually correlate with
| "intelligence"?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| It's not even clear that the ants haven't won.
| bigiain wrote:
| That 600 times zoom-in on 1% of the eventual survey of
| 1/3rd of the non milky way sky... Shows a couple of
| galaxies, which if the milky way is "typical" represent a
| couple of billion stars.
|
| Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so
| (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to
| 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten
| trillion planets.
|
| That's about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that
| if you categories these by any four properties
| (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then
| you'd expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D
| space.
|
| So even if you believe Earth is unique along four
| critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per
| galaxy that also have those attributes within a
| percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you
| have tens of thousands or even millions.
|
| We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly
| more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and
| even thrived.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy
| trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-
| mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The
| branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a
| severe limit upon their complexity.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Then use _that_ as one of the four critical parameters.
|
| E.g.: You might believe that _some_ variability in
| conditions (hot-house Earth, iceball Earth) is required
| to "kick start" evolution. Okay, then simply pick out
| the subset of the parameter space with that amount of
| variability.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it
| should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as
| more thought experiment than reality.
|
| It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place
| odds on all the important events necessary for us or
| something like us to come into being. At the time this
| equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood
| how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.
|
| In reality, we just don't know the many factors that
| might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure
| lottery falacy to reason about the statics that
| specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange
| reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single
| sentient species in our universe, that species would come
| to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of
| their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone
| wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability
| that someone will win twice.
|
| Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from
| being the one despite all the statistical huffing and
| puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special
| we are when we find another or once we have surveyed
| enough planets in depth.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The Drake equation has maximum smarts of a human
| predicting something when they can't physically reach
| past their moon yet.
| caust1c wrote:
| I think there's a pretty compelling argument that could
| be made that matter assembling itself into conscious
| beings follows pretty naturally from life itself, given a
| long enough time horizon and assuming the properties of
| basic elements holds constant throughout the universe
| which seems pretty likely.
| billti wrote:
| I'm no physicist/biologist, but I always find it odd when
| they look for water on other planets to see "if life
| could exist".
|
| Sure, maybe that's a requirement for the type of life we
| on earth know about, but I don't see why other elements
| couldn't have also formed in just the right way to be
| able to reproduce, and maybe eventually "think".
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon
| based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so
| dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which
| interact in interesting ways.
|
| Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as
| naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some
| chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based
| life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic
| connections that carbon does.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I think you fail to see the sheer probability just from
| the number of galaxies and the timeline itself where life
| can form and extinguish in even few million years. Every
| planet in the universe gets various amount of tries over
| eons
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| And thats just how life on earth happened to iterate in
| recent terms. For most of the history of life on earth,
| it was unicellular. It could have just as easily remained
| a planet of unicellular life for another few billion
| years if it weren't for a few chance mutations that
| happened to be slightly more competitive over the
| background.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| FOH with that solipsistic nonsense
|
| _Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen._
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That's hardly proof considering these examples all share a
| common ancestor. I ask you, can you communicate with a
| slime mold? Even the slime mold is more similar to
| ourselves than any potential life we'd find elsewhere, as
| we share a common ancestor.
| colordrops wrote:
| What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It
| doesn't say anything about the spread of different types
| of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample
| size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult
| it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Knowing physics is roughly same every where in the
| universe, same rules of biology will apply elsewhere
| where if conditions meet, maybe earth is one of many
| conditions that can form life.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Within those rules are a lot of things that can get by
| under them. Take two points in earths history bound by
| the same physical laws and life can look dramatically
| different. You can think of it like how we all use the
| same microsoft word but that doesn't lead to the same
| exact book being written independently twice or more
| often. The amount of permutations to be taken along the
| way is a countless number probably far larger than the
| number of habitable star systems in the universe.
| colordrops wrote:
| There's no reason to believe that because the physics are
| the same the biology will be the same. that's a big
| ungrounded assumption.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Because there are probably an uncountable number of
| different turns life could have made instead to lead to
| dramatically different outcomes. Life iterates on itself.
| Mutations on top of mutations. Mitochondria could have
| just as easily never been enveloped by our eukaryotic
| ancestors and life would look a hell of a lot different
| today.
| colordrops wrote:
| Having a high cardinality of permutations doesn't say
| anything one way or another about the probability of life
| arising. it's just hand waving.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I see no reason to doubt.
|
| I think at the scale of the universe life even thinking
| capabilities life is almost certainly inevitable.
|
| What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive to a
| galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
|
| Universe is too big, we're all too far apart. Civilizations
| come, civilizations go. Some may not be on a planet where
| even rocket travel may be possible - no source of energy
| dense enough. Some can get wiped out by disasters. Asteroids.
| It's happened on this planet a bunch of times.
|
| It's like the Birthday paradox. It's likely 2 people have the
| same birthday. It's not likely that someone else has YOUR
| birthday.
| bigiain wrote:
| > What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive
| to a galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
|
| Sadly, that's looking less and less likely as time goes on.
| deanCommie wrote:
| See even here there's no reason to be this doomery.
|
| Yes, climate change is a massive problem, and humanity is
| ignoring it to our own peril.
|
| But peril here means the unnecessary deaths and
| displacement of hundreds of millions of people - a
| civilization-defining tragedy no doubt, but ultimately
| nothing so serious as to cause our extinction.
|
| We have the technology and knowledge to adapt, change
| course, finally get of fossil fuels, and enter into a new
| age of sustainable renewable energy.
|
| We're gonna do it too late, and whole ecosystems,
| species, and far too many humans are all going to perish.
| Sea life may become extinct.
|
| But at no point is our survival as a SPECIES in question.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| What is the probability that two raindrops land at the same
| time?
|
| It is pitch dark. Could one raindrop survive long enough to
| at least hear the sound of another landing before it
| disintegrates?
|
| Is the time between the drop striking the plane and the drop
| smashing apart so short that no drop ever hears another, or
| even sees evidence that any drop other than itself ever
| existed?
| rvnx wrote:
| It depends what you call Life.
|
| If it is a machine that can reproduce itself, growth, collect
| energy, use energy, do actions based on events, etc, then
| animals match this profile (perhaps even plants), and also,
| at some point computer will probably reach that goal.
|
| Despite that, computers won't have a "soul", so where this
| soul comes from is a big mystery.
|
| I'm not even sure that two humans can prove with certainty
| that the other ones has a soul, this is still an unsolved
| problem.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Unless the "soul" or the feeling of self is a property of
| the universe itself and could apply to computers given
| enough computer power and "free will".
| colordrops wrote:
| Trying not to be negative, but statements like this
| completely disregard the degree of thought and evidence that
| needs to be accounted for to make a reasonable statement that
| isn't just pulling an ungrounded opinion out of the air. I
| mean why exactly is it doubtful? It doesn't seem doubtful to
| many other very intelligent people, so perhaps you should
| back it up with a bit of reasoning or evidence.
| bigiain wrote:
| > Something that has thinking capabilities?
|
| Something that involves "thinking capabilities" in a form we
| would recognise?
|
| That's always what I consider when someone mentions the Fermi
| Paradox.
|
| Humans tend to barely recognise "thinking capabilities" in
| other mammals. There is intriguing evidence that plants
| "communicate" and "remember", and have been doing so around
| us for at least as long as mammals have existed with humans
| barely noticing and usually ignoring or criticising
| researchers who suggest that perhaps plants may be
| "thinking".
|
| https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/plant-
| sentience-a-...
|
| If we don't even recognise "thinking capabilities" in the
| plants that have been around us for as long as we've been
| around as a species, what're the chances that we would notice
| and recognise "conclusive evidence of advanced
| extraterrestrial life" when we saw it?
| 6stringronin wrote:
| So you're saying out of the trillions upon trillions of stars
| that the chances are no life can think but us?
|
| I think the odds are that at least one of them does.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| There may be countless other planets with intelligent life
| right now, but... if it took them millions of years to
| evolve... and they're millions of lightyears away... we
| might have to wait millions of years for signals to reach
| Earth from the eldest civilizations in the closest
| galaxies.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| Why would we have to wait? Why would you assume that
| they're only sending signals now? Why would you not
| assume that they had a head start on sending signals
| before us?
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| My guess would be that there are millions of other
| intelligent species out there.
|
| Maybe these species are distributed evenly throughout our
| 90-billion-lightyear-in-diameter universe.
|
| Maybe half evolved to our current level of sophistication
| in less time than it took us.
|
| So... what is the minimum duration of time, after the big
| bang, that some lineage of creatures might take to evolve
| from sludge into a life form capable of emitting data via
| radio waves? It cannot happen instantaneously... first
| conditions need to cool down enough to be amenable.
| Beyond that, it seems to require a little time for
| evolution to get to human-like level, it took us 13+
| billion years.
|
| So given the lack of meaningful signals we have detected
| so far, Occam's Razor says the nearest intelligent life
| that currently exists out there is too young and far away
| for its transmissions to have yet reached Earth.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but the milky way is only
| 105 thousand light years across. So even if you assume an
| earth like planet couldn't have formed any earlier than
| ours, other intelligent life in the galaxy only has to go
| through the geological processes and evolve a tiny tiny
| fraction of a percent faster to have tons of time to send
| all the signals they ever want. Nearest other galaxy is
| only a couple million LYA which ain't too bad either.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| My guess, again based on the lack of cosmic signals we
| have detected, is that intelligent life is rare enough -
| at this age of the universe, at least - that we have no
| company yet in the Milky Way. That leaves a lot of room
| though - there might already be simpler forms of life.
|
| But I won't go to the mat arguing my impression; we only
| have evidence from one planet to go by, so any view here
| lacks empirical evidence.
| creativenolo wrote:
| Given the timescales involved and brevity planetary
| conditions perhaps life is unlikely to observed nearby a
| star system.
|
| Perhaps instead it is to be observed in energy preserving
| vessels (i.e. emit nothing) in transit to the next fuel
| stop (a planetary system). Perhaps dark matter can be
| explained by the congested highway of these unobservable
| vessels.
| mcmoor wrote:
| We're multiplying a very large number (number of planets)
| with a very small number (chance of intelligent life). The
| margin can make the answer go either way.
| colordrops wrote:
| Why do you think the chance of intelligent life is a very
| small number? Considering we know of several million
| species, the chances are that we are right in the middle
| of the curve, and can't recognize the vastly more
| intelligent species the way an ant can't recognize our
| intelligence.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| How is the number of known species correlated to the
| probability of life emerging? As far as we know, life
| emerged only once on earth, and all species evolved from
| a single common ancestor.
| colordrops wrote:
| I'm talking about the chance of _intelligent_ life, not
| life emerging at all, in response to the comment above.
| lnenad wrote:
| You are basing the chance of intelligent life number on
| what? Reality is we have no clue what this number is.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Exactly, so we shouldn't say things like "no doubt" when
| it comes to the question of extra terrestrial life.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I agree. There is a huge bias in our culture that we imagine
| a human supremacy. We are the top of the food chain we think.
| The masters of our world we argue, despite simple bacteria
| being superior in all environments compared to fragile sickly
| humans. We not only assume that aliens would think like us,
| we think they would even look like us with more or less the
| same body plan. We think they would have the same cultural
| sensibilites of exploration aboard a ship, of making treaties
| and even sharing technology. Even in this thread you get
| pushback from replies and downvotes from people who are
| almost offended that this would not be the case.
|
| If you ever study evolution on the other hand, you would
| realize how fantastical these assumptions all are. No, life
| elsewhere if anything is far more likely to look like how it
| did for most of the history of life on earth: unicellular.
| People forget that even multicellularity, let alone an
| organism with an entire bodyplan, emerged from pure chance,
| and could have easily been wiped out or outcompeted for
| resources as soon as it came if it didn't have sufficient
| fitness. How lucky it was for us that our ancient eukaryotic
| ancestors enveloped that first mitochondria. How different
| life would look today if that never happened and we never had
| such an energy source to actually support these later
| iterations, considering all life that exists today are
| directly descended from this single line. How supremely
| unlikely it all is to tread even close to the same path. How
| many potential paths are lost along the way and how many
| paths only emerged as a result of previous paths.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| "But where is everybody?" [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast
| that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never
| notice each other.
| gwd wrote:
| How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize
| Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth
| and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure.
|
| If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it
| take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few
| places you can go and _not_ find evidence of humans around?
| Not more than a million years or so.
|
| So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-
| faring civilization -- is common, why is the galaxy not
| colonized already?
|
| Kursgesagt has a good video on this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-
| faring civilization -- is common
|
| Maybe it doesn't have to be common; incredibly rare is
| totally fine when your multiplier is the entire universe.
| darkwater wrote:
| These ideas (just like the "dark forest" concept by Liu
| Cixin) are based on the fact that every intelligent
| specie out there is driven exactly by the same instincts
| as ours. It can be, but you cannot be certain until you
| meet them. Also, meeting other species might take
| millions of years, so at every effect we would be safe
| for a loooong time anyway.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy
|
| The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. So at least
| that long assuming we can ever attain near-light-speed
| travel (unlikely). And due to cosmic inflation, many
| other galaxies are receeding at faster than light speed,
| so we could never get there.
|
| There could be a lot of intelligent life (as intelligent
| as us, maybe more so) that can never realistically travel
| beyond their local star systems, and we'd never notice
| them.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Earth has had lifeforms for about 90% of its existence.
| Earth has existed for 33% of the age of the universe. The
| time it took organisms from Earth from the earliest
| lifeforms to discovering space travel amounts to 30% of
| all time was available in this universe.
|
| Sure, it's easy to imagine someone doing it a million
| years faster than us. But at the same time it's very
| likely we are just early to the party.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| No, there's only one solar system in the entire universe.
| There's countless _star systems_ though, but only one of those
| stars is named Sol.
|
| /pedant
| thfuran wrote:
| You can't know that there's only one named sol by the locals.
| Yeul wrote:
| One day we'll be sued by aliens for trademark infringement.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| If that's where we're going I'll try to pedant-raise you.
|
| Assuming the cosmological principle is true and the universe
| is infinite, wouldn't we be guaranteed an infinite number of
| Sols? ;)
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| Do people actually call the Sun "Sol"? I thought that was
| more of a video game thing.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| The Romance languages use that name (or something very
| closely related). English uses "Sun", but just as it
| borrows a ton of stuff from Latin/French/etc., it also
| borrows "Sol" for its word "solar".
|
| Also, Captain Archer in Enterprise used the name Sol when
| making contact with aliens.
| wongarsu wrote:
| And in Germanic mythology the personification of the sun
| is Sol.
|
| In PIE it's sunnon. In some languages that evolved to
| some variation of sun or son, in some to became sol
| (notably Latin). And many use both variations in some
| capacity
| Quekid5 wrote:
| I can't think of any English-speaking places that do... but
| you see it used in "solar", for example.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| If you speak Portuguese or Spanish, yes.
| sph wrote:
| Latins and medieval scientists did. In Italian we call it
| "Sole".
| konart wrote:
| It's Solntse (Solntse) in Russian.
| skibz wrote:
| We live in what's known as a _planetary system_. Star systems
| involve only stars.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| I mean there is a very non 0 chance that Europa (moon) itself
| has life in it, it might not be more than very basic life, but
| there is a non zero chance that it does have it.
| beAbU wrote:
| "No proof but no doubt" is such a great way to put it.
| alok-g wrote:
| >> No proof but no doubt.
|
| There's still doubt:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_result...
| slekker wrote:
| What we know about mathematics can't prove or disprove things
| we simply don't have any idea of. Think as if other beings
| would live in a different frequency plane (outside of our 3
| spacial + 1 time), our instruments and theorems can't detect
| that.
| alok-g wrote:
| That's right. But it does create doubt.
|
| To prove, we would need to find such life.
|
| To not have doubt, we need to have a reasonably high
| confidence that such life is there. However, the estimates
| are so wild and range from very unlikely to no-doubt. Thus,
| there is doubt (to the best we understand).
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| ISn't the doubt simply the 'when' rather than the 'if'?
| alok-g wrote:
| If you read through the link, the estimation
| for.probability of finding life elsewhere ranges from
| practically none to very high. When the former is also
| a.part of that range, could it not be that we actually do
| not have life anywhere else? I think it's not a question of
| when or a 'no doubt' case. We simply do not know enough.
|
| If the calculations were to say there's very high chances
| of the universe teeming with life at many places, but life
| is not 'found' yet, then I would say it like 'no proof but
| no doubt'.
| neom wrote:
| Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable.
| It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what
| this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)
| geenkeuse wrote:
| No Man's Sky
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| This is down voted as a joke yet it is curious that with each
| upgrade of resolution we get we just see more and more. I
| always ponder how if we looked at the universe in terms of
| approximate processing power for a simulation of it that
| distances and mass are not so relevant but information is.
| The complexity of quantum mechanical systems within a single
| living cell is probably much more complex processing than a
| star. Anyway No Man's Sky I understand to be a procedurally
| generated game and not much more than that.
| wayoverthecloud wrote:
| I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But
| sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe
| really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and
| that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big
| randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with
| nothing to make sense of.
| imchillyb wrote:
| So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be
| random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random.
|
| Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force
| is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around
| the globe of this.
|
| Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is
| damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-
| native species. That doesn't seem random does it?
|
| Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.
| Doesn't seem to though.
| frabjoused wrote:
| My money is on it just being a playing field for the game
| of life. A damn good one at that.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.
|
| Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but
| systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to
| ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to
| data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from
| pure randomness.
| felizuno wrote:
| I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive
| that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an
| anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but
| I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2,
| 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a
| shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think
| random implies balance though I understand that
| statistically this is the expected outcome of large set
| randomness such as ...the universe... (OP)
|
| Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David
| Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting
| read FWTW
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to
| wrap our heads around.
|
| A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly,
| it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history
| has ended up with the same order as you just did.
| grvbck wrote:
| > A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly,
| it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history
| has ended up with the same order as you just did.
|
| That fact still messes me up every time! Like, I know
| very well that 52! is a ridiculously huge number. And
| still, it feels like "but it's just 52 cards, give me an
| afternoon and I'll do it, how many combinations can there
| be?"...
| fsagx wrote:
| 52! even has its own website:
|
| https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html
| samus wrote:
| Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not
| like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't
| ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.
| phito wrote:
| Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our
| ridiculously small life span.
|
| That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as
| "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We
| won't.
| caf wrote:
| You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if
| you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually
| disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| "The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and
| silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's
| important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and
| the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special.
| Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us:
| it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt
| fast enough.
| conductr wrote:
| It's happened before, life will prevail and eventually
| thrive again in some other format. I think fully
| eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even
| if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or
| some similar event.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come
| remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even
| eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on
| the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable
| catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled
| organisms and extremophiles.
|
| But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk.
| Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about
| things like various bird or mammal species than I am some
| bacteria.
| conductr wrote:
| It's definitely sad and especially so that humans are
| causing/contributing to it. It's mostly because of our
| timescale being only witness to a decline and what's lost
| is tangible and known. What's unknown is how on an
| evolutionary timescale the field is being reset for the
| next round of species to emerge. From that perspective,
| it's a bit interesting to think what could happen.
| Particularly in the mammal world as humans have or will
| have eradicated most large predators. Prey populations
| will swell/collapse and cause adaptation. Some current
| herbivores/omnivores may convert to carnivore due to the
| availability of resources. A lot will happen. If you
| freeze time to protect existing species too much, it's
| mostly just for sentimental reasons. Some species do a
| great service to current ecosystems and are vital to
| human life as we know it, protecting those is a little
| different IMO (bees come to mind.)
| sourcepluck wrote:
| > Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come
| remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even
| eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on
| the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable
| catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled
| organisms and extremophiles.
|
| I have heard intelligent people claim a good few times
| now, and feel like it's obviously unscientific. It seems
| faith-based. Sure, life on Earth has proven to be
| resilient and adaptable, but we've no way to be sure how
| the planet will develop in the coming thousands and
| millions of years.
|
| Climates and ecosystems and geology change. Life on Earth
| has persisted through some wild misadventures and
| atmospheric changes, but it's a very complex system.
| Surely it's theoretically feasible that some surprising
| thing could set us off on a course towards ending up with
| an atmosphere similar to Venus or Mars one day? How can
| we know with certainty this won't happen?
|
| To me it seems like "life-ism" rather than species-ism at
| that point. The idea that "life will go on, no matter
| what" seems so obviously intuitive to a member of the
| Life class. I fear it is a misguided - though romantic,
| and somewhat touching - sentiment.
| lazide wrote:
| Co2 has had spikes up to > 5000 ppm in the atmosphere in
| the past.
|
| Is anything possible? Sure.
|
| Is anything currently proposed as possible likely to
| sterilize the planet? No.
|
| We could get hit by a mini-moon sized asteroid tomorrow
| though that liquifies the crust, of course.
| phito wrote:
| Sure but you know very well that when people say "the
| planet" they mean "the ecosystem". It doesn't change what
| I meant. There's been mass extinctions before, way worse
| than what will happen with human-made climate change.
| Life has proven to be very resilient and ecosystems re-
| emerge.
|
| I think people are attached to the current state of life
| on earth, not realizing that it is transient. Life itself
| and the many forms it can embody is amazing, the exact
| form it currently takes is not _that_ special.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I take it you're also a smoker?
| phito wrote:
| ... What? No.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Life doesn 't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is
| damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-
| native species._
|
| Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native"
| are human terms referring to categories we invented to make
| sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken,
| slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always
| in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some
| timescales, unbalanced in others.
|
| Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's
| hardly a case an ecosystem was _destroyed_. Adding non-
| native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes
| transforming them into something dissimilar to what came
| before - but it 's not like life _disappears_. The
| ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to
| be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo".
|
| > _That doesn 't seem random does it?_
|
| Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us
| anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you
| zoom out enough and smooth over details.
| ordu wrote:
| If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be
| able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because
| there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd
| struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would
| be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot
| truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it
| can look at it directly.
|
| But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot
| of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you
| saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If
| evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a
| dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Every part of the ecosystem, at any point in history, has
| co-evolved to be the state it is in - it's an intricate
| network all balanced to co-exist. If you change any part of
| the this ecosystem then the rest will have to adapt to the
| change, but evolutionary timescales are relatively long,
| and it's not going to settle down to where it was before.
| Whether you regard a new balance as simply that, or as the
| old balance being destroyed is just your choice of
| description.
|
| Using the term "error correction" incorrectly assumes there
| is some "correct" state to return to, but nature is indeed
| random and continuously evolving, and there is no
| privileged "correct" state, just the ever-evolving current
| state.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Non-native species don't exist when you use long time
| scales and realize humans are species too.
|
| Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age
| of Extinction by Chris Thomas is an interesting book on
| this topic.
| feoren wrote:
| It's not a joke, because jokes have underlying meaning. It is
| somewhere between a "random accident" and the only way it
| could have possibly been given the constraints of fundamental
| physics. I suspect that everything that could possibly be,
| _is_ , but it's random that you are you and I am me and we
| find ourselves here in this corner of this galaxy in this
| part of the universe which might itself be the inside of a
| giant black hole. But even if our universe is random, that
| doesn't mean there's nothing to make sense of. There's lots
| to make sense of.
| kortilla wrote:
| Jokes don't always have meaning. "I want to play a joke on
| Bob" can very easily mean "I'm just going to torture Bob a
| bit for my amusement". The joke will not have meaning to
| Bob.
| alonsonic wrote:
| It has a meaning to Bob because the joke exists for a
| reason he can comprehend even he doesn't like it.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| That's only true if he's aware of it.
| lazide wrote:
| But we try to not talk about Cincinnati.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, bob doesn't know he's even being intentionally fucked
| with. There are many videos of this style of "prank"
| available on the internet.
| mmooss wrote:
| There is a lot of subtle meaning layered into that:
|
| Cleverness: I'm funny and I'm confident enough in it to
| risk doing it publicly
|
| Status: The statuses of you and Bob allow you to play a
| joke on them. Often such jokes are a public demonstration
| of status, like children do more explicitly and often
| unconsciously in the schoolyard.
|
| Empathy: 'I say suffering is funny'; it asserts a
| willingness to violate a taboo, be unempathetic, and
| therefore potentially dangerous
|
| Personal power: I'm powerful and independent enough to do
| something on a whim
|
| etc.
| kortilla wrote:
| Yes, none of that meaning is apparent to Bob, which is my
| point.
| alok-g wrote:
| >> I think it's a big randomness
|
| +1. A big randomness, following the laws of Physics that are
| themselves possibly rooted in something.
|
| With that big randomness, by some chance, intelligent life
| has happened that can wonder.
|
| Where's more to be uncovered are in the laws of Physics (and
| why are they what they are), and thereby better matching the
| probabilities of the said randomness.
| layer8 wrote:
| Or it might be the necessary logical consequence of having
| anything at all.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I've always thought of it more as the logical consequence
| of having nothing, the need for there to be a something to
| oppose it.
| codeulike wrote:
| _There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers
| exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
| instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
| bizarre and inexplicable.
|
| There is another theory which states that this has already
| happened._
|
| - Douglas Adams
| km144 wrote:
| I don't think the universe can have "meaning" in the human
| sense, because any potential "meaning" is outside of our
| field of observation or understanding. If something indeed
| created the universe or some definitive sequence of events
| spurred it into existence, I think that would constitute
| "meaning" enough for humans to be satisfied. But there is
| almost certainly not way to observe that fact because it is
| outside of the realm of our possible experiences.
|
| But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist,
| we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and
| wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think
| we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at
| the end of the day.
| smeej wrote:
| I think this is why Christians posit that the Creator
| actually entered into humanity, so we _could_ understand--
| or at least be as much less wrong in our speculations as we
| can handle, small as we are.
|
| They even got as far as describing God as "uncaused
| causality" centuries ago, which lined up pretty well with
| the translation of the name God reportedly gave one of
| their forbearers from a burning bush, "I am who am," or
| colloquially, "I'm the one who just _is._ I _am_ being-
| itself, not contingent in any way, outside your concepts of
| 'before' or 'contingent upon.'"
| renegade-otter wrote:
| The Cosmic Deep State went to great lengths to make all of this
| very.... big.
| ilt wrote:
| Too big to fail?
| kabdib wrote:
| Entropy never sleeps
| thenobsta wrote:
| Big Universe has it out for the little guy. It's trying to
| make it very hard to make sense of its master plan.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Wondering is the what.
| downboots wrote:
| To my limited knowledge it's not even clear what the edges are
| but I think it's probably safe to say that the bigger it is,
| the more complexity you can cram in there.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's ridiculous. That final zoomed in image that showed one
| galaxy has maybe 300 million stars in it. Just that one. The
| scope is... unbelievable silly.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Take a look at the Hubble ultra deep field image. It's a tiny
| part of the sky but it's hundreds of galaxies. It's hard to
| wrap your head around...
| Keysh wrote:
| Probably closer to 300 _billion_ stars. (It 's roughly the
| same size as the Milky Way, which is estimated to have ~ 100
| to 400 billion stars.)
| cubefox wrote:
| Unbelievable
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I meant to type. 300 billion.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| _Billions and Billions_ --Sagan
| yread wrote:
| Yeah. Do you want to donate your liver?
| Refusing23 wrote:
| someone made a larger universe a few blocks down the road, and
| so we made a larger one just to one-up him
| DrBazza wrote:
| "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers
| exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
| instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
| bizarre and inexplicable."
| layer8 wrote:
| It's even more "massive" down below. There are only 27 orders
| of magnitude between human size and the size of the observable
| universe, but 35 orders of magnitude between human size and the
| Planck length. ;)
| ThomasBHickey wrote:
| 'Fundamentals' by Frank Wilczek explores this: https://www.pe
| nguinrandomhouse.com/books/554034/fundamentals...
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It could really be much larger beyond the observable horizon
| though? But I guess we will never know.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Unless faster-than-light travel becomes possible.
| layer8 wrote:
| It might, and that's part of the reason why I put a smiley.
| On the other hand, the larger you go, the less relevant it
| becomes, because if the light cones don't touch then it
| might just as well be a separate universe.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| And a currently unknown number of OOMs (possibly infinite)
| beyond the observable horizon.
| lynguist wrote:
| So we are rather "large" beings and not small ones.
|
| Are these orders of magnitude scaled by 10 to go from one to
| the next?
| 0x5345414e wrote:
| Yes
| malodyets wrote:
| Powers of 10 is the classic presentation:
| https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
| elorant wrote:
| Perhaps that's what's required to have intelligent life
| spontaneously appear and evolve to our level.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The actual problem is that we were made early enough to begin
| to understand the full scale of it, but we're still not mature
| enough to go out there and explore it. Therefore, you can
| reason that now is the right time to get behind anything that
| pushes us beyond the Earth.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| These distances are well outside the scope of exploration.
| Getting to the next solar system is already a seemingly
| insurmountable challenge. Getting to the next galaxy? Forget
| it. Getting to _these_ galaxies we see in the picture?
| Absolutely no way. I know people like to be optimistic about
| these things but it 's honestly pure wishful thinking.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Once we have fusion reactors, it won't be.
| nojs wrote:
| Your fusion reactor will still take a while to travel 420
| million light-years.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Fusion reactors won't really help. Sure, you can
| accelerate indefinitely - but only at maybe 1G or a bit
| more if you don't want to kill the occupants. Then you
| have to flip and decelerate. Unless we find a way to
| freeze/stasis people, the limits are still shockingly
| small.
|
| We'd need to start cracking some kind of jumping/FTL/etc
| technology to have any hope of real exploration.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Well... you don't need to freeze people if you can travel
| at a substantial fraction of c, because of time dilation.
|
| Caveats:
|
| 1. It's really, _really_ hard to supply enough energy to
| go that fast, even with fusion power.
|
| 2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again,
| because by the time they get back everyone they've ever
| known will be long dead.
|
| 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit
| a speck of dust and disintegrate.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually
| hit a speck of dust and disintegrate.
|
| Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean if we clash with
| anything (even as small as a space dust) while traveling
| at a substantial fraction of c, it would disintegrate us?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It would cause damage. The faster you go, the worse is
| the damage. Even just the cosmic microwave background
| will eventually turn into dangerous gamma radiation, so
| you will need heavy lead shields in the front, which
| makes traveling even more expensive and difficult. At
| certain speeds, you should think of your spaceship as a
| drill penetrating the inter galactic medium. And even
| then the journey will take millions or billions of years
| (in the reference frame of those staying at home).
| adamredwoods wrote:
| F=ma
|
| At 1% the speed of light (approx 3000000 m/s) and a
| medium-mass dust (1x10-5 kg, stationary), not enough
| force or area to dent steel (350 N/mm^2), but over time,
| lots of dust could cause erosion (quick math/estimates).
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The relevant equation is for kinetic energy, which is
| 0.5mv^2. Using your numbers that's about 4.5E+7 Joules,
| or the energy of about 10kG of TNT exploding. That will
| certainly make a dent, and your space ship won't survive
| many of those.
|
| I was thinking v would be more like 10% of c, which would
| mean about 1000kG (1 kiloton) of TNT, or about 1/20 of
| the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. From a particle
| of dust weighing 10mG. You'd be toast.
| seanw444 wrote:
| This is short-sighted. Maybe not in _our_ lifetimes. If it
| were 1902, you 'd probably be mocking the Wright brothers.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| No, I wouldn't be. The speed of light is a much more
| fundamental limitation than anything we have ever seen
| before. It's probably the single most fundamental and
| most sure fact that we know of, besides perhaps the
| quantum nature of reality.
|
| And I have heard it all before: worm holes, warp drive,
| etc pp. A fun exercise, but not rooted in reality at all.
|
| All you can do is to appeal to completely unknown,
| unimaginable magical breakthroughs, which are inherently
| difficult to discuss, so I don't think this will be very
| fruitful.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| There are three levels of difficulty in innovation: New
| Engineering, New Science, and New Fundamentals.
|
| What the Wright Brothers did was the easiest of the
| three: New _engineering_. It didn 't contradict anything
| then known in accepted science.
|
| Fusion energy is being studied now, and it's
| substantially more difficult than what the Wright
| brothers did because it requires _New Science._ But it
| doesn 't violate any of the accepted fundamentals of the
| universe, so it will probably happen eventually.
|
| Now we come to the most difficult of the three: New
| Fundamentals. Traveling to other galaxies falls in this
| category. For it to work we would have to discover some
| brand new principle that makes the universe work, and
| that principle would need to be so radical that it makes
| what we now know about the laws of physics wrong.
|
| That's not likely to happen. By comparison, the Wright
| brothers' invention was for all practical purposes
| inevitable; people had been flying heavier-than-air craft
| like gliders and kites for hundreds of years. All that
| was needed was an energy-dense power plant.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| IF you believe the whistleblowers, all the tech already
| exists.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-house-
| overs...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| While the claims of the whistleblowers may or may not be
| true, your link is sworn Congressional testimony from
| credible sources.
|
| So, despite the stigma attached to all things UAP/UFO, I
| think it should be upvoted and not downvoted.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Well, fortunately, our rock-solid science has some major
| holes to be patched. There's no way to guess what
| consequences those will have to our understanding of what
| we're limited to exploring.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| There are three levels of difficulty in innovation:
| New Engineering, New Science, and New Fundamentals.
|
| Wow, I've never seen this put so succinctly before.
| vjk800 wrote:
| Since we don't observe any sign of anyone else explore it, or
| even broadcast themselves through it, it might be that it's
| not possible to explore it.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Or maybe it's due to the Dark Forest theory (https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis#:~:text....)
| bane wrote:
| There's plenty of space out in space!
| vjk800 wrote:
| Yeah and the smallest thing that got zoomed in in the video was
| a galaxy. Like our milky way galaxy, so still fucking huge.
| skybrian wrote:
| If you'd prefer not to watch a video, try this page [1] that has
| images.
|
| Hopefully there will be a zoomable image (like Google Maps)
| eventually.
|
| [1]
| https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...
| relistan wrote:
| Thank you
| lfmunoz4 wrote:
| 600x zoom didn't seem to help from the 150x zoom. Wonder if we
| will ever be able to see actual planet surfaces or we need some
| other technology to do that, i.e, we should have small satellites
| every 10 light years. but this map is amazing and a good step
| forward.
|
| Edit: Was just thinking that image does us tells us something
| i.e, there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere
| we can see. Maybe I watch too much sci-fi but honestly would have
| expected someone to build some huge structure around a star or
| planet, would be disappointing if no one does.
| stouset wrote:
| There is zero way to optically resolve an exoplanet's surface
| without something like a gravitational lens.
| xpl wrote:
| Can't we build a giant optical interferometer in space by
| sending multiple telescopes out there?
| mlyle wrote:
| Possibly, but the challenges to do so are immense. Using
| the sun as a giant gravitational lens seems much more
| tractable.
| cvoss wrote:
| Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive enough
| to do what would be required here. Stars visible near the
| edge of the Sun appear in slightly different spots from
| their actual locations. If there was a distant planet
| directly behind the Sun whose light were focused back to
| an image on our side of the Sun, you'd have to get really
| far back from the Sun to resolve the image, no? And
| furthermore, it's exceedingly difficult to orient such an
| apparatus to look in the desired direction; you are
| beholden to the orbital mechanics of your viewing
| satellite as it plods along.
|
| Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth
| have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology
| (recall the black hole images). It is well within our
| ability to set up a constellation of satellites, perhaps
| spanning a few of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
| stouset wrote:
| > Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive
| enough to do what would be required here.
|
| You "just" need to get far enough away (~600AU).
| Interferometry is extremely difficult to pull this off
| with and it's further complicated by the host star being
| so much brighter than the exoplanet.
|
| See this recent Fraser Cain interview with Dr. Slava
| Turyshev:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=WWNdR1PESYzD0
| d4X
| mlyle wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
|
| > you'd have to get really far back from the Sun to
| resolve the image, no?
|
| Yah, a few hundred AU.
|
| > you are beholden to the orbital mechanics of your
| viewing satellite as it plods along.
|
| Yah, any mission like this -- interferometry or
| gravitational lensing -- is going to be super long and
| hit very few targets.
|
| > Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth
| have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology
|
| Yah, at _radio_ frequency while pinned to a common rock.
| The wavelength of visible light is hundreds of nanometers
| and we 're talking across massive distances and
| significant gravity gradients and even relativistic
| corrections. The "big" space interferometers currently
| being considered are in the mid-infrared (e.g. longer
| wavelengths) across baselines of hundreds of meters.
|
| All of these ideas are really hard.
| skykooler wrote:
| Yes, you'd need to get quite far from the Sun to use it
| as a lens - about 650 AU is where it starts becoming
| practical. It would also not be re-orientable, so any
| "telescope" launched to that location would only be able
| to observe a single target. (But, notably, it is far
| easier to send a probe to a far point in our own solar
| system than it is to send it to another star entirely.)
| There's a paper that goes into much more detail at
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06351
|
| So why not use interferometry instead? Well, it has some
| significant drawbacks. For example: the Event Horizon
| Telescope used radio telescopes - and pretty much had to,
| due to how interferometry works: you need to be able to
| compare the phase shifts between the multiple telescopes,
| which means you need to be able to sample the signal
| faster than the radio frequency you're using and record
| it. The EHT records 64 gigabits per second for each
| telescope, and then all this data needs to be combined to
| compute the resolved image. This amount of data would be
| problematic for space-based telescopes - even on Earth,
| it was not practical to send multiple petabytes over the
| internet, so it was saved to hard drives which were
| shipped by truck instead. This isn't practical in space,
| so you would need to transmit the data by radio, which
| means you'd end up with some crazy ratio of thousands of
| hours of transmitting for every one hour you spend
| recording.
| restalis wrote:
| _" It would also not be re-orientable, so any "telescope"
| launched to that location would only be able to observe a
| single target."_
|
| I just presume that such observation spacecraft makes
| sense to be made as a rather long term investment than
| some one-time fly-by thing like New Horizons, so the
| sensible thing to do is to have it in an orbit around the
| Sun at that (>=650AU) distance and to take multiple
| observations. Of course, the easiest solution may be for
| the orbit to be elliptical one, with the useful position
| only around its aphelion, in which case it will be able
| to observe only a single target indeed. But, I also
| presume that past the first few such elliptical orbit
| experiments the aim will shift to have the spacecrafts
| set on distant (and most likely circular) orbits that
| make possible observations at any time and thus its
| target would be something akin to a horizon rather than a
| single point, wouldn't it?
| frabjoused wrote:
| If light is hitting it, can you explain why not?
| recursive wrote:
| I don't know much about it, but my guess is that 0* photons
| from that planet make their way into any given telescope
| lens in a given day.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| The naive optical instrument will be diffraction limited.
| The resolving power of a lens, basically how "sharp" the
| resulting image will be, goes down as you decrease the size
| of the aperture relative to the focal length (that is, as
| the f-stop number goes up).
|
| A telescope that could zoom into an exoplanet would have an
| f value of a kajillion or so.
| stouset wrote:
| You'd need a 90km aperture to get a one pixel image of an
| Earth-sized exoplanet at 100ly.
| zamadatix wrote:
| For comparison's sake, this is the best image we made of Pluto
| (~0.0006 light years away) prior to sending a spacecraft right
| past it
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Pluto_an...
| and this is an image of what we think might be a gas giant 4
| light years away
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Candidat...
| bigiain wrote:
| > there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere
| we can see.
|
| I half suspect the aliens who can construct structures large
| enough to see from lightyears away are by far most likely to be
| building Dyson Spheres around stars which make them
| significantly less likely to be seen rather than something we'd
| notice.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| >building Dyson Spheres around stars which make them
| significantly less likely to be seen rather than something
| we'd notice.
|
| There's no stealth in space; Dyson spheres would be
| anomalously infrared/lower frequencies.
| geenkeuse wrote:
| We still have a long way to go to beat this draw distance, but we
| are on our way. The day will come when we have "sentient" beings,
| living in a massive world created by us. And they will ponder the
| same things as we do now.
|
| And we will remain invisible and out of reach, but completely
| observant, and influential in their world. After all, we wrote
| the program.
|
| And they will study the code and discover their own "natural
| laws" and invent their own things.
|
| And they will progress until they create a completely simulated
| world of their own.
|
| I wonder at which level are we. How many sims down from the
| original program...
| turnsout wrote:
| What benefit do you get from this line of thought? You could
| also be a brain in a jar. What would you change about your life
| or behavior?
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| It's fun to think for the sake of thinking.
| geenkeuse wrote:
| But I'm not a brain in a jar. That is not my experience.
|
| The benefit I get is knowing that this is not all one "big
| bang"
|
| We are so quick to laud our own achievements, but fail to
| give credit where it is due.
|
| We build nuclear power plants, waste water treatment plants
| and the beginnings of quantum computers. And we congratulate
| ourselves for a job well done, after spending an unspeakable
| amount of resources on them. We maintain them with a constant
| labour force, regular maintenance shutdowns and a ton of
| money.
|
| Meanwhile the sun keeps shining, the clouds keep raining and
| your mind keeps minding.
|
| And they do it on zero budget. No off days. No staff.
| Automatically.
|
| And with all this engagement, the energy remains the same.
| smaddox wrote:
| Exponential slowdowns at each level ruin this hypothesis.
| geenkeuse wrote:
| The documents I copied are not as sharp as the original, so
| the photocopier must not exist.
| smaddox wrote:
| Photocopying has little to do with simulation of the
| physical world.
|
| First of all, Bits != Q-bits. You can clone bits. You can't
| clone Q-bits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-
| cloning_theorem
|
| Second, photocopies are static. The physical world is not
| static.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| Why would their be exponential slowdown? Time can be
| relative, but superbroadcasting can help explain the loss
| of fidelity as we scale down. So you can't "Clone" but
| you can superentangle multiple copies in a degraded
| state.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| The more I learn about physics the more I am convinced this is
| a simulation.
|
| In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where
| consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable. The
| smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to
| save computational work. The actual state of things is only
| computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of
| light puts limits on how far humanity can travel to extend the
| bounds of the simulation. Maybe the expansion of the universe
| is yet another hedge at limiting how far human can travel.
| Also, as things are red shifted due to expansion you can run
| the simulation of far away places slower due to time dilation.
|
| The speed of light and the plank length are both hard codes to
| bound computational work. The plank length to bound computation
| getting too complex in the micro scale and the speed of light
| to limit computation in the macro scale.
|
| It is also very convenient that the closer we look at things
| the more we see that under the hood things are discrete which
| is very convenient for simulating.
|
| Maybe every level of the sim increases the plank length and
| decreases the speed of light in order to deal with inefficiency
| of doing a sim within a sim? Maybe at the final level of the
| sim we end up with the truman show.
| ffwd wrote:
| This is an interesting idea but personally I think the
| opposite - the universe is not lazy and all details matter at
| all levels.
|
| Like imagine making a complete account of all world views of
| all people in all of history - all perspectives, and all the
| physical events of that history. There is almost infinite
| detail there. In a way, in the universe all the details of
| all the things matter, including at the physical level,
| otherwise you wouldn't get the diversity and complexity you
| get now.
| dnate wrote:
| There are a lot of ways the illusion of more detail than
| there actually is is given. Simulation cost saving measures
| so to say.
|
| E.g.: Detail in memory fades quite quickly. Vision is not
| as detailed as we think.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Or the universe is so massive that a human mind cannot ever
| comprehend the magnitude of it all, so in order to cope, a
| human mind must use a definition it feels comfortable with.
| sph wrote:
| You would enjoy the short story "The Last Question" by Asimov:
| https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I can never truly wrap my head around the time component here,
| this is 400+ million year old light! in earth terms, that's when
| most life was still ocean-bound
| salesynerd wrote:
| Very impressive collage of images! Just one doubt - what are the
| pitch black patches?
| meowster wrote:
| Aliens, but it's classified, so they redacted those parts.
| salesynerd wrote:
| The geometric, sharp, shapes suggest these aliens are
| "stealth" ones. :)
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| usually a star in the foreground, or, aliens
| irjustin wrote:
| Man I REALLY hope we solve Dark Energy/Matter in my lifetime.
| That'd be so cool. I put it up there with long term habitation on
| another world (moon or mars is fine to me!).
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Fun to imagine someone or something out there mapping us as well.
| What a cool video. I think one of the best things about space
| travel will be the loss of ego we go through when we really
| understand how vast the world is.
| mmooss wrote:
| That was said when we first orbited the Earth. Right now many
| things - space travel in particular - seems correlated with
| vastly increased ego.
| vasco wrote:
| Humans are great at turning a new insight into a way to feel
| better about themselves compared to others that haven't had the
| insight. We are driven by our ego, so I find that very
| unlikely.
| gukov wrote:
| Apparently psychedelics can cause the so called ego death. I
| wonder if it's the same driving force: a realization of how
| vast and limitless the world is.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| That effect is temporary, but yeah you can get there. In my
| experience psychedelic users are some of the most egotistical
| people on earth. The cycle they live in is a nasty cage.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| Douglas Adams keeps coming up in this thread, but this sounds a
| lot like the Total Perspective Vortex.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this?
| biggestlou wrote:
| I'm still loooking for intelligent life on _this_ planet!
| ordu wrote:
| Can't you pass a mirror test and see yourself in the mirror? It
| is pretty good evidence for me, that intelligent life exists on
| this planet.
| ourmandave wrote:
| _The mosaic contains 260 observations made between 25 March and 8
| April 2024. In just two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees
| of the Southern Sky in pristine detail, more than 500 times the
| area of the full Moon.
|
| This mosaic accounts for 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will
| capture over six years. During this survey, the telescope
| observes the shapes, distances and motions of billions of
| galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. By doing this, it will
| create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made._
|
| So my question is, what comes after Euclid?
|
| Will the next one capture better details further out (if further
| is possible)?
|
| Kind of like James Webb compared to Hubble.
| amatecha wrote:
| Since it's apparently a 3d map (?) I'd be curious if they will
| re-run the scan and compare between the scans? Pure speculation
| my part, but that would be pretty interesting, surely.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| You're not going to see like galaxies moving, only very very
| close stars.
|
| But you would spot transient phenomena like supernovae.
| Tepix wrote:
| Well, there's the Vera Rubin Observatory with the LSST which
| will provide us with an exciting dynamic map of the sky.
| 6stringronin wrote:
| Truly amazing what a gift to humanity. Inspiring to see such a
| wonderful zoom on a deep filed like image. Bravo to the ESA.
| ddingus wrote:
| Damn it is an awful big place!
| lefrenchy wrote:
| It's just so crazy to me to see a galaxy 420 million light years
| away. That is so much time for what we're seeing to have changed.
| I presume life can form within that window given the right
| conditions, so to some degree it just feels a bit sad that the
| distance is so great that we can't actually see what may exist in
| this moment that far away
| vasco wrote:
| In another way it's really cool to be able to "see the past"
| even if all we see is always the past. At this level it is like
| a super power. If only some aliens had put a mirror somewhere
| far so we could see ourselves too. Or multiple mirrors at
| different distances.
|
| With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the
| universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with
| different photons all around carrying "how this location looked
| X years ago". "All" you have to do to know what happened is
| find the right photon to see whatever it is you want to see.
| steveoscaro wrote:
| Well that sounds like a good premise for a scifi book or
| movie.
| IngoBlechschmid wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Light-Year_Diary
|
| By Greg Egan, so highly recommended.
| densh wrote:
| You should check out Three Body Problem (the book, not the
| mediocre netflix adaptation).
| grahamj wrote:
| You don't need mirrors, you just need to get in front of the
| photons. A time machine or warp drive will do :)
|
| Also the past is the only thing you can perceive, there
| effectively is no now.
| densh wrote:
| Is there a science fiction universe that explores a
| hypothetical warp drive that lets you travel very far
| relatively quickly, but the travel is only possible with
| simultaneous backwards time travel that's proportionate to
| the distance traversed? So you can hop across star systems
| but can't do a roundtrip A -> B -> A without significantly
| shifting time from the point of view of A backwards
| (irreversibly from the point of view of the traveler).
| ujikoluk wrote:
| For prior art in this field, see:
|
| https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
|
| "pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the
| Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from
| you to remote servers and back again."
|
| Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
|
| Storing data as acoustic waves gave a higher capacity in
| practice, as propagation is slower thus fitting a larger
| number of symbol per time unit.
| lloeki wrote:
| From chainsaws to ICMP echo packets (and more)
|
| http://tom7.org/harder/
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| In theory, couldn't we focus on a perfect spot near a black
| hole where the light has been warped 180 degrees around it...
| i.e. if the black hole is 100 light years away, you'd see (
| with perfect zoom, of course ) a picture of the earth 200
| years ago...?
|
| I understand that we'd have to account for the movement of
| objects, of course, but with computers, seems like a small
| hurdle...
| gary_0 wrote:
| Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality,
| technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past" in
| any meaningful sense. The present is relative, not universal.
| The collected light we see in our telescopes is a lie about a
| particular universe that will never be, at least in any
| tangible way. On a cosmic scale, every spot in the universe
| sees its own unique sequence of events going on around it, all
| of it rendered virtually immutable by the relative slowness of
| _c_.
|
| It's a beautiful nightmare, isn't it?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
| nullwriter wrote:
| Absolutely mind blowing - I've not thought of this and will
| be reading about it
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Don't think about it too much. It's wrong. Relativity of
| simultaneity only kicks in when you have reference frames
| moving at noticeably different velocities. Which is... not
| entirely wrong in this case due to the expansion of the
| universe, but would be equally true of a nearby reference
| frame moving away equally fast. It's nothing to do with
| light travel time.
|
| Ed: I've slipped into the fallacy a bit. Reference frames
| don't have locations, so they can't be "nearby". Just
| pretend I said "reference frame of a nearby object".
| conductr wrote:
| I'll admit I'm severely undereducated in this stuff, probably
| less than an average high schooler these day but nevertheless
| I feel like I've considered this before and never knew it had
| a name. Which makes me feel not completely stupid.
|
| > whether two spatially separated events occur at the same
| time - is not absolute, but depends on the observer's
| reference frame.
|
| But What I don't understand about this is why is "time"
| framed as observer based? In my mind, the events do happen at
| the same time and just are unable to be observed as such. I
| feel like time is a figment of our imagination, it's just a
| measurement. In my pea brain time makes sense more as a
| constant and the other things are something else that impacts
| the latency of observance
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If not for observation, what does "happen" mean? Keep in
| mind observation in the physics sense doesn't mean
| conscious observation but rather that anything experiences
| something at all.
| alok-g wrote:
| >> In my mind, the events do happen at the same time and
| just are unable to be observed as such.
|
| Not so, I would say.
|
| Space and time are inherently linked under special (and
| General) relativity. For two observers who have relative
| motion between them, the space (distance between two
| 'events') and time (between the said events) are both
| different.
|
| When some poem or a song talks about the universe being
| frozen at a given instant of time, that can be only in a
| given reference frame. There's no absolute time for the
| universe.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > But What I don't understand about this is why is "time"
| framed as observer based? In my mind, the events do happen
| at the same time and just are unable to be observed as
| such. I feel like time is a figment of our imagination,
| it's just a measurement. In my pea brain time makes sense
| more as a constant and the other things are something else
| that impacts the latency of observance
|
| Its a logical consequence of the speed of light being
| constant in all inertial reference frames, regardless of
| the velocity.
|
| This is an axiom of special relativity, but it has also
| been verified at (admittedly low) relative velocities.
|
| That in itself is somewhat absurd, but it leads to further
| absurdities when you do the math. In order for the speed of
| light to remain invariant, you can no longer speak of an
| absolute (preferred) frame of reference.
|
| You can of course, privilege certain reference frames e.g.
| Earth, but its rather arbitrary.
| codethief wrote:
| > Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality,
| technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past"
| in any meaningful sense.
|
| Yes, it is. It is 420 million years in the past in our frame
| of reference. The link you posted is about how frames of
| reference of _other_ observers might differ from ours.
| However, doesn 't make the notion "420 million years in the
| past [in our frame of reference]" any less well-defined.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| It might be possible to build a powerful telescope to see life
| on planets that are closer to us, though:
| https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its-time-to-build-th...
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| Ohh I love the idea of a massive telescope that's just
| compromised of thousands of individual satellites!
| Tepix wrote:
| Or go for the gravitational lens provided by our sun (580 AU
| out).
| zuminator wrote:
| To think that it's only been a touch over 100 years that we've
| even had confirmation that other galaxies besides our own exist.
|
| Prior to that it was thought that the entire visible universe was
| around 100,000 parsecs across (what we know now to be just the
| Milky Way.)
| FredPret wrote:
| I'm confused by how much matter there is. Are those dots entire
| galaxies? It's just nuts. Thank you team Euclid.
| Maken wrote:
| It is more puzzling how much _emptiness_ there is. Everything
| we see in these images is absurdly far from each other.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Watching this is ... hard to find the words to describe it. It's
| insane!
|
| It shows us how mind bogglingly vast the universe is and how
| we're literally nothing compared to it. Paradoxically, it also
| makes me feel incredibly potent and capable as a human being in
| that being this small we can know so much!
|
| Your size is to the distance of that distant spiral galaxy (420
| Mly - 10e24m) as a neutrino is to you (effective cross section of
| a 1MeV neutron = 10e-24m:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length))
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Small and so brief too.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| >in that being this small we can know so much!
|
| We only know what we think we know. We could just be grains of
| sand in someone else's world for all we know.
| udev4096 wrote:
| "Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total
| number of stars in the universe is greater than all the
| grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."
|
| - Carl Sagan
| kranner wrote:
| That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It
| could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures
| to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner
| experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving,
| cogitating, apprehending _beings._
| valval wrote:
| "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he
| created him; male and female he created them."
| elteto wrote:
| How arrogant and silly to look at these incredible pictures
| and think "Yep, this was all made for ME. I am the center
| of the universe!".
| protonbob wrote:
| Q1: What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to
| glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.
|
| The Christian belief is that creation was made for God
| and not the other way around. It's actually profoundly
| not focused on the self.
| bbor wrote:
| Well, creation was made for one god, which happens to
| look just like us and never once mentions other peoples.
| To be a Christian astronomer you have to believe one of
| these:
|
| 1. God is wasting the vast, vast, _vast_ majority of the
| universe on emptiness while he focuses on his fave
| planet.
|
| 2. The universe is full of humans, in which case Jesus is
| presumably getting re-crucified every few seconds to
| absolve new groups. Or I guess maybe he split up into a
| trillion copies that all got crucified at once? Or we're
| the 1-in-a-trillion lucky ones that everyone else just
| gets to hear about?
|
| 3. The rest of the universe has aliens because god got
| bored/wanted things for us to play with, as his super
| special favorite species. The aliens don't get to look
| like god, ofc.
|
| No offense intended to anyone, but I don't see how you
| could possibly accept Christian doctrine without
| necessarily thinking of earth as unfathomably special.
| protonbob wrote:
| Oh I do think it's special. But thinking of the universe
| as a waste because there are lots of uninhabited planets
| is pretty human focused. Why would it be a waste for an
| infinite god with infinite amount of attention to spend
| time creating a large universe?
| elteto wrote:
| It actually is incredibly human-centered, to the point
| that humans were made in _his_ image and the Sun is
| supposed to turn _around_ the Earth.
|
| But all this makes sense when you realize it's a
| primitive human myth made by primitive people with
| limited understanding of the universe and the world
| around them.
| protonbob wrote:
| Not to get to into the weeds but being made in the image
| of God does not necessarily involve physical appearance.
| Also, it has nothing to do with being heliocentric or
| geocentric.
|
| I don't really get the point that you're making.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| How arrogant for anyone to look at these incredible
| pictures and think they know ANYTHING at all. We may be
| the center of it all, we may not, this may be a massive
| simulation, or a massive random accident. The only
| correct answer is to admit we know nothing. Humans are so
| fixated on knowing everything.
| elteto wrote:
| I do know one thing: fairy tales are not real.
| valval wrote:
| To be fair, as a christian I don't believe in goblins and
| unicorns. I do believe in something though. I suppose you
| do too, and in the end our core beliefs might not even be
| that different.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I think this line of reasoning does a disservice to all
| the scientists and thinkers who contributed to a
| considerable amount of knowledge. We learned so much
| about the universe in the past 100 years, it's impudent
| to call this nothing just because it's not everything.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I'm talking about filling in the blanks in things that
| are not yet known, not discounting all scientific
| progress. The point was that the person I replied to held
| just as irrational a belief as the person they were
| criticizing. Neither of them knows the deeper nature of
| reality and whether humanity was created by something or
| is just an accident of nature, so both of their replies
| are absurd as one another's.
| namaria wrote:
| Our existence and the universe being knowable is all
| intertwined.
|
| A reverse entropy universe or a random one would preclude any
| meaningful learning, thus also the evolution of intelligence
| and technological civilization as well.
| bbor wrote:
| How could you possibly be an affective agent without
| knowledge? And how could anything ever use knowledge without
| perceiving it? Whenever anyone talks about philosophical
| zombies, I say "show me one, then" -- until then I'm sticking
| with (what I see as) the scientific consensus, which is that
| we're material like literally everything else is in the
| Actual, perceivable world.
|
| What would it be like to not be like anything?
| kranner wrote:
| I'm also a materialist, and the lack of p-zombies here
| cannot preclude their existence elsewhere.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _we 're literally nothing compared to it_
|
| Yet, here we are, made of it.
| hi_hi wrote:
| The other mind boggling part is, we've gone from having a
| limited, accurate, map of only our immediate solar system, to
| _this_ in ~270 years.
|
| What knowledge of our universe is hiding behind future technology
| evolutions?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| A fun thing I like to do every so often is to try to break away
| from the natural notion that space has a horizon and that instead
| force myself to feel that it continues equally in all directions.
|
| We're naturally inclined to be ok with giant distances on the
| horizon. It's natural to put more emphasis on that part of the
| world. Hold up your thumb to the horizon and notice how many
| things fit alongside it compared to your thumb help downwards
| against the ground.
|
| On the surface of our planet the up direction isn't usually
| interesting and the down direction isn't even there. It is
| therefore quite horrifying ("fun") to imagine space going _down_
| forever.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yes. I like to look at the moon and think of it as being "down"
| and I'm the one at an angle. Rather than "there's nothing under
| me, just the ground" it's "there's nothing under me, just
| _nothing forever_. "
| beAbU wrote:
| Many years ago I read some sci-fi novel, and in it was a sub-
| plot of a warring alien species that started destroying
| anything and everything they came across in their travels.
|
| The story went that their local system was in some sort of a
| dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At
| some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one
| of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it _hated
| everything_ it saw. So the race developed a space program to go
| out there and destroy it all.
|
| For some reason I think it was Adams' H2G2, but the tone of my
| recollection does not quite feel on-brand for those stories.
| Not sure.
| tirpen wrote:
| You are right, it is from h2g2.
|
| It's the planet Krikkit, which is a major part of _Life, The
| Universe and Everything_ , the third book in the series.
| murrayhenson wrote:
| The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe,
| and Everything.
|
| The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was
| the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find
| out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of
| the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come,
| another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this
| thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived
| beneath the sky of Krikkit.
|
| History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.
|
| Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing
| darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker,
| heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.
|
| They flew out of the cloud.
|
| They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite
| dust and their minds sang with fear.
|
| For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep
| of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep
| of the Universe. And then they turned around.
|
| "It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed
| back for home.
|
| On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective
| songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture,
| sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life
| forms.
| beAbU wrote:
| Yes!! Thank you for the quote. My memory was clearly a bit
| off, but I got the gist of it right.
| qingcharles wrote:
| YouTube link for the same video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ZCsUfgLRQ
| taylorius wrote:
| They've gone and created Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| We're so lucky to exist in a time where everything is so close
| together, as absurd as that sounds.
|
| There will come a time when a civilisation will look up and see
| only darkness, due to the expansion of the universe.
| sva_ wrote:
| It is not clear to me that the conditions of the universe at
| that point of increased entropy would be able to support life
| bilekas wrote:
| Eventually there won't be any life given no stellar body will
| be in range of a star to support life I guess?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| I'm assuming gravity will keep solar systems together? But
| admittedly know little about it.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| It depends, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
| mr_mitm wrote:
| This is very exciting. I was part of the Euclid collaboration
| roughly ten years ago as a grad student. Finally we can see the
| fruits of the labor of the many scientists involved. The images
| are of course very exciting, but I'll be even more excited about
| the scientific results that will be released in the coming years.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I work with a lot of space engineers and it blows my tiny mind
| when they explain that they've got decades of wait from
| production to operations. Space truly is a collaborative
| effort.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Absolutely astonishing. Thank you to everyone involved in this
| effort. It's completely mindboggling to think it's only 4 hundred
| years from Kepler deriving the equations of orbital motion to us
| being able to do this. Just stunning.
| theelous3 wrote:
| If we're alone in the universe, I'll eat my one and only hat.
| openrisk wrote:
| my God! it's full of stars! [1] I can't help but think that
| living and evolving under a starry sky has had a deep impact on
| our reptile brains and the process is still ongoing. First it was
| the simple act of looking up to a mysterious, clean and regular
| clockwork unfolding in the heavens. The fortuitous match of eye
| structure, atmospheric transparency to certain wavelengths etc.
| that created a permanent mental stimulus that was complex yet not
| beyond grasp. Astronomy and the development of Mathematics were
| closely intertwined in the dawn of civilization [2]. Then it was
| the invention of the telescope [3], one of our first sensory-
| extension devices, that marked the beginning of the modern
| science and technology era. Culminating into the satellite era
| (detached "eyes" lifted into low-Earth orbits) and the incredible
| ESA projects like Euclid (looking out at the furtherst reaches of
| space) and Copernicus [4] (looking back at us and our
| predicament). It does feel that the process of learning about the
| universe and our place within it is still in full swing. It is
| still a great time to be alive!
|
| Small quibble: Credits for the soundtrack are missing.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_2001%3A_A_S...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope
|
| [4] https://www.copernicus.eu/en/about-
| copernicus/infrastructure...
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| I look at this and think "Huh, maybe I'm not the biggest deal
| there is."
| 00000z wrote:
| I dont know whats out there but holy fuck this is amazing
| tobias_irmer wrote:
| I couldn't have put it any better.
| leokennis wrote:
| I know next to nothing about "space" but pfeeeew that zoom-out at
| the end...wow.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| That's quite a big existential crisis for so early on a Tuesday.
| Cool as heck though.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Does anyone know what the music was in the background? Was it
| random for the video or a known piece?
| netsharc wrote:
| It feels like stepping into the
| https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
| agomez314 wrote:
| Can somebody add some GenAI to this to smoothen things out when
| it zooms in as well as add in some "parallax" effect so that it
| looks like we go past the closer galaxies to the further ones?
| zzzbra wrote:
| what is this 2002? Being immediately assailed by sound when
| clicking a link is not a pleasant experience.
| k3vinw wrote:
| If only we had a spore drive powered by tardigrades...
| ramijames wrote:
| I'm so excited for this!
| blinding-streak wrote:
| Euclid is stationed at L2. I like to think it grabs a drink at
| the end of the day with other satellites out there like James
| Webb and Gaia. They discuss the day's discoveries.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| How big approximately is this L2 for practical purposes? Sounds
| like it will be valuable space-estate one day.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Euclid is in orbit around L2 with a radius of around 1.5
| million km (~1 million miles), so the spacecrafts are quite
| comfortable there.
| kibwen wrote:
| What proportion of the stars in this survey have been given names
| (even just gibberish identifiers)? Are there too many for even
| astronomers to care to bother cataloguing?
| DrBazza wrote:
| Most Milky Way stars have been catalogued (to some
| luminosity/visibility). Wikipedia to the rescue (almost...):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue#Gaia_catalogues
| bbor wrote:
| As another comment says we have a naming system for the Milky
| Way, but I believe the point of looking above and below the
| Milky Way is to explicitly find galaxies (/intergalactic
| forms), not stars. There's commentary on stuff like
| supermassive black holes at the center of other galaxies, but
| AFAIK as an amateur, it's not feasible to study individual
| stars in other galaxies, so we have no need to name the vast
| majority of them.
|
| It's basically impossible to grasp what looking at a hundred
| thousand galaxies means, and that's just a small section. It's
| literally beyond human comprehension. In
| October 2016, deep-field images from the Hubble Space Telescope
| suggested that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the
| observable universe, or about 10 times more galaxies than
| previously suggested, according to the journal Nature. In an
| email with Live Science, lead author Christopher Conselice, a
| professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham in
| the United Kingdom, said there were about 100 million stars in
| the average galaxy.
|
| Which comes out around 10^24, and even that's "likely an
| underestimation". The earth's surface area is 10^8 km^2, so
| naming all the stars would be like naming every spot in an
| imaginary grid of 0.01mm^2 (!!!) squares covering the whole
| earth.
|
| Sorry for the rant, I don't get to do any dimensional analysis
| in my work and miss it from HS chemistry, lol. This kinda stuff
| makes me want to be a flat earther...
| roymurdock wrote:
| awesome. thanks for sharing
| dsmurrell wrote:
| What is that bright patch?
| ratedgene wrote:
| This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life.
| I'm just over here worried about small nothings and now I'm
| filled with an overwhelming feeling that I should be a part of
| something much larger. Truly inspiring, and a little bitter
| sweet. :)
| tsujamin wrote:
| > existential terror has entered the room
| glimshe wrote:
| When I look to the heavens in awe, thinking about humanity's
| future and our place in the Universe, I remember that we still
| have JavaScript and thus very far from space exploration.
| xenospn wrote:
| Can't wait for SpaceScript!
| lokimedes wrote:
| Ada
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Hey JavaScript has been to space!
| araes wrote:
| That's alright, Javascript already has space travel. [1] And
| quite a few other software languages [2]: Credit to Andrei
| Kashcha (Github anvaka) [3] previous post on Hacker News for
| "Software Galaxies" [2]
|
| Also, to @ratedgene if you feel left out, you should be part
| of something meaningful. Go join the exploration mission for
| space travel and astronomy. It's a resume submission away.
| [4]
|
| Having worked at NASA, the work environment, while critical
| and argumentative much of the time, is still very much sci-fi
| fans and the dream of galaxies far far away. If European,
| then ESA. [5] If Asiatic, possibly JAXA [6], China's space
| agency [7] is usually off limits to posters on HN.
|
| If not those, how about grants and research in related areas.
| There are many ways to contribute. [8] Checking, there's
| currently 18 of 3331 solicitations due in the next 30 days.
| [9]
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/gallery/dive-into-anything-ghost-js-
| bIYvFm...
|
| [2] https://anvaka.github.io/pm/#/?_k=4hdian
|
| [3] https://github.com/anvaka
|
| [4] https://www.nasa.gov/careers/
|
| [5] https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA
|
| [6] https://global.jaxa.jp/about/employ/index.html
|
| [7] https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/
|
| [8] https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/
|
| [9] https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/solici
| tat...
| uhtred wrote:
| Yes but what did you work on yesterday, what will you work on
| today, and are there any blockers?
| lpasselin wrote:
| Do the captured elements move a lot during this snapshot? since
| it will take months? Is the difference significant?
| blendertom wrote:
| Beautiful!
|
| We're just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
| apercu wrote:
| Those blacked out areas are totally aliens.
| 727564797069706 wrote:
| Holy mother of god, this is gorgeous!
|
| It is absolutely incomprehensible how _vast_ the Universe is.
|
| I can only hope one day I'll be reborn as a lifeform who can bend
| time and space to explore it all.
| Rugu16 wrote:
| This is just so incredibly beautiful
| standardUser wrote:
| Every speck of light that doesn't have the 'flare' of a nearby
| star is not a star, but another galaxy. Sure, the one
| particularly detailed galaxy they zoomed in on looks cool. But
| the way they present this is missing the forest for the trees.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I'm sure it's not a unique experience in any way, but thinking
| about space and the universe fills me with a weird and
| overwhelming... Dread? I don't know how to word it, but it feels
| _terrifying_ thinking about the scale of it all, the numbers
| involved. So many galaxies, stars, planets. It feels like we have
| no hope whatsoever of ever seeing anything other than our little
| comfy nook we have here in our little solar system, and even then
| the scale involved is just incomprehensible.
|
| I'm always speechless when I see these. Simply mind boggling
| rq1 wrote:
| What's the data link between the telescope and the ground ?
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