hckrnws
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...
Thank you
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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. :)
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.
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
[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/solicitat...
Hey JavaScript has been to space!
Can’t wait for SpaceScript!
Ada
> existential terror has entered the room
Yes but what did you work on yesterday, what will you work on today, and are there any blockers?
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. :)
>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. :)
Ditto. I felt so very cold watching that video.
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. ;)
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?
Yes
It could really be much larger beyond the observable horizon though? But I guess we will never know.
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.
Unless faster-than-light travel becomes possible.
'Fundamentals' by Frank Wilczek explores this: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554034/fundamentals...
And a currently unknown number of OOMs (possibly infinite) beyond the observable horizon.
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.
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.
This is short-sighted. Maybe not in our lifetimes. If it were 1902, you'd probably be mocking the Wright brothers.
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.
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.
IF you believe the whistleblowers, all the tech already exists.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-house-overs...
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.
Once we have fusion reactors, it won't be.
Your fusion reactor will still take a while to travel 420 million light-years.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
Or maybe it's due to the Dark Forest theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis#:~:text....)
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes, none of that meaning is apparent to Bob, which is my point.
It has a meaning to Bob because the joke exists for a reason he can comprehend even he doesn't like it.
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.
That's only true if he's aware of it.
But we try to not talk about Cincinnati.
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.
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.'"
>> 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.
Or it might be the necessary logical consequence of having anything at all.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
I take it you're also a smoker?
... What? No.
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.
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"?
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
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.
> 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?"...
52! even has its own website:
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.
> 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.
My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.
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.
The Cosmic Deep State went to great lengths to make all of this very.... big.
Big Universe has it out for the little guy. It's trying to make it very hard to make sense of its master plan.
Too big to fail?
Entropy never sleeps
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.
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.)
Unbelievable
Yeah, that’s what I meant to type. 300 billion.
Billions and Billions —Sagan
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…
Perhaps that's what's required to have intelligent life spontaneously appear and evolve to our level.
There's plenty of space out in space!
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.
Wondering is the what.
Yeah and the smallest thing that got zoomed in in the video was a galaxy. Like our milky way galaxy, so still fucking huge.
“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."
someone made a larger universe a few blocks down the road, and so we made a larger one just to one-up him
No Man's Sky
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.
Yeah. Do you want to donate your liver?
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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.
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
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
Absolutely mind blowing - I've not thought of this and will be reading about it
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".
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...
Or go for the gravitational lens provided by our sun (580 AU out).
Ohh I love the idea of a massive telescope that's just compromised of thousands of individual satellites!
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.
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.
From chainsaws to ICMP echo packets (and more)
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...
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.
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).
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Well that sounds like a good premise for a scifi book or movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Light-Year_Diary
By Greg Egan, so highly recommended.
You should check out Three Body Problem (the book, not the mediocre netflix adaptation).
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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))
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.
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.
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?
I'm also a materialist, and the lack of p-zombies here cannot preclude their existence elsewhere.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
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!”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I do know one thing: fairy tales are not real.
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.
Small and so brief too.
we're literally nothing compared to it
Yet, here we are, made of it.
>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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes!! Thank you for the quote. My memory was clearly a bit off, but I got the gist of it right.
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.
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."
So many solar systems out there, life evolved in many planets for sure. No proof but no doubt.
"But where is everybody?" [0]
They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never notice each other.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
You can't know that there's only one named sol by the locals.
One day we'll be sued by aliens for trademark infringement.
We live in what's known as a planetary system. Star systems involve only stars.
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? ;)
Do people actually call the Sun "Sol"? I thought that was more of a video game thing.
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.
And in Germanic mythology the personification of the sun is Sól.
In PIE it's sunnōn. 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
If you speak Portuguese or Spanish, yes.
Latins and medieval scientists did. In Italian we call it "Sole".
It's Солнце (Solntse) in Russian.
I can't think of any English-speaking places that do... but you see it used in "solar", for example.
We have proof. Us.
The posit was "life evolved in many planets for sure" but your evidence is "us"?
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.
>> No proof but no doubt.
There's still doubt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_result...
ISn't the doubt simply the 'when' rather than the 'if'?
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'.
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.
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).
"No proof but no doubt" is such a great way to put it.
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.
Life? Probably. Something that has thinking capabilities? Much more doubtful.
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
You are basing the chance of intelligent life number on what? Reality is we have no clue what this number is.
Exactly, so we shouldn't say things like "no doubt" when it comes to the question of extra terrestrial life.
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.
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.
I'm talking about the chance of intelligent life, not life emerging at all, in response to the comment above.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
One proof is that we are thinking, and so are dogs, cats and monkeys to a lesser extent.
That's Earth. There is no model to say that life always goes on that way. We just have no clue.
"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.
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?
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"?
It's not even clear that the ants haven't won.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The Drake equation has maximum smarts of a human predicting something when they can’t physically reach past their moon yet.
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.
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”.
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.
FOH with that solipsistic nonsense
Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Douglas Adams keeps coming up in this thread, but this sounds a lot like the Total Perspective Vortex.
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.
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.
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.
That was said when we first orbited the Earth. Right now many things - space travel in particular - seems correlated with vastly increased ego.
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.
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.
How big approximately is this L2 for practical purposes? Sounds like it will be valuable space-estate one day.
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.
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.
It is not clear to me that the conditions of the universe at that point of increased entropy would be able to support life
Eventually there won’t be any life given no stellar body will be in range of a star to support life I guess?
I’m assuming gravity will keep solar systems together? But admittedly know little about it.
It depends, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
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.)
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.
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?
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
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.
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…
I'm confused by how much matter there is. Are those dots entire galaxies? It's just nuts. Thank you team Euclid.
It is more puzzling how much emptiness there is. Everything we see in these images is absurdly far from each other.
Truly amazing what a gift to humanity. Inspiring to see such a wonderful zoom on a deep filed like image. Bravo to the ESA.
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...
You would enjoy the short story "The Last Question" by Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exponential slowdowns at each level ruin this hypothesis.
The documents I copied are not as sharp as the original, so the photocopier must not exist.
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.
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.
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?
It's fun to think for the sake of thinking.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
>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.
There is zero way to optically resolve an exoplanet’s surface without something like a gravitational lens.
Can't we build a giant optical interferometer in space by sending multiple telescopes out there?
Possibly, but the challenges to do so are immense. Using the sun as a giant gravitational lens seems much more tractable.
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.
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.
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.
> 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=WWNdR1PESYzD0d4X
If light is hitting it, can you explain why not?
The naïve 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.
You’d need a 90km aperture to get a one pixel image of an Earth-sized exoplanet at 100ly.
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.
This is just so incredibly beautiful
I know next to nothing about “space” but pfeeeew that zoom-out at the end…wow.
Very impressive collage of images! Just one doubt - what are the pitch black patches?
Aliens, but it's classified, so they redacted those parts.
The geometric, sharp, shapes suggest these aliens are "stealth" ones. :)
usually a star in the foreground, or, aliens
They've gone and created Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex
I’m still loooking for intelligent life on this planet!
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.
Those blacked out areas are totally aliens.
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...
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.
Well, there's the Vera Rubin Observatory with the LSST which will provide us with an exciting dynamic map of the sky.
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.
You're not going to see like galaxies moving, only very very close stars.
But you would spot transient phenomena like supernovae.
Do the captured elements move a lot during this snapshot? since it will take months? Is the difference significant?
It feels like stepping into the https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
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!
> 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
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).
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.
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.
Comment was deleted :(
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 lifeMan 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!).
Beautiful!
We're just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
Does anyone know what the music was in the background? Was it random for the video or a known piece?
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?
YouTube link for the same video:
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
I look at this and think "Huh, maybe I'm not the biggest deal there is."
If only we had a spore drive powered by tardigrades…
If we're alone in the universe, I'll eat my one and only hat.
What is that bright patch?
I dont know whats out there but holy fuck this is amazing
I couldn't have put it any better.
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.
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.
Thank you for reminding me! Just sent a couple of emails to my representatives!
Esa has social media accounts, pretty sure some intern will see if you ping them, I don't imagine they get much traffic
You used to be able to sign a guestbook
There is. It's called dwell-time
You might be staying there a long time because you're fuming, so: nope.
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.
I'm so excited for this!
That's quite a big existential crisis for so early on a Tuesday. Cool as heck though.
awesome. thanks for sharing
Damn it is an awful big place!
what is this 2002? Being immediately assailed by sound when clicking a link is not a pleasant experience.
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?
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code